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The Gigantic List of Character Descriptions (70+ examples)

The vast majority of character descriptions are simply lazy.

They recycle typical ideas about hair, eye color, and build, giving you more information about the character’s fitting for a dress or suit than the type of information you need to know them intimately.

The first thing you should do when describing a character is to pick a category that isn’t so overused. Such as trying to describe: 

Describing your character in an innovative way will help retain the reader’s interest. You want your reader to be asking questions about this character, to not only learn something about them but to create mystery. What made them like this? How long have they been this way? Is there someone currently after them or is this paranoia because of a past experience?  Questions like these are what keeps the reader reading. 

Not only physical descriptions are needed. Consider: “How is this person viewed by another character?” Do they seem dangerous, alluring, secretive, suspicious? The way another character views someone else gives insight about them as well. Are they attracted? Repulsed? Curious? 

Another thing to take notice of is the type of person they are, despite their appearance.

• How do they think?
• What do they feel?
• How do they view/react to certain situations compared to how others would?
• What is their mental state?

Here is a list of examples of brilliant character descriptions to give you an idea and help you come up with your own:

3 Categories: Modern Literary, Literature, Popular

Modern Literary

1. vladimir nabokov, lolita.

” … Her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever.”

2. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

” … in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.” 

3. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.”

4. China Miéville, This Census-Taker

“His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.”

5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“And then the hot air congealed in front of him, and out of it materialized a transparent man of most bizarre appearance. A small head with a jockey cap, a skimpy little checked jacket that was made out of air … The man was seven feet tall, but very narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin, and his face, please note, had a jeering look about it.”

6. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Mama BekwaTataba stood watching us—a little jet-black woman. Her elbows stuck out like wings, and a huge white enameled tub occupied the space above her head, somewhat miraculously holding steady while her head moved in quick jerks to the right and left.”

7. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.”

8. A.S. Byatt, Possession

“He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.”

9. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“He did not look like anything special at all.”

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10. Henry Lawson, The Bush Girl

“ Grey eyes that grow sadder than sunset or rain, f ond heart that is ever more true F irm faith that grows firmer for watching in vain —  She’ll wait by the sliprails for you.”

11. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I am an invisible man. 
No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: 
Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.
 I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -
- and I might even be said to possess a mind. 
I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”

12. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”

13. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“My brother Ben’s face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man’s scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long, pointed nose…his hair shines like that of a young boy—it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.”

14. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

“A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”

15. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“[Miss Havisham] had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker…”

16. John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“For such and extraordinary athlete—even as a Lower Middler Phineas had been the best athlete in the school—he was not spectacularly built. He was my height—five feet eight and a half inches…He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength.”

17. Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga

“-the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.”

18. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“…your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

19. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes – just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor – an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.”  

20. William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Inside the floating cloak he was tall, thin, and bony; and his hair was red beneath the black cap. His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness.”

21. Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, and at fifty-four was still a very fine man. . . .”

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22. Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book

“When the old king saw this he foamed with rage, stared wildly about, flung himself on the ground and died.”

23. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe… Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy — a smile — not a smile — I remember it, but I can’t explain.” 

24. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind.”

25. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad’s elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another’s neck and collar, half a crown from another’s hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers: “Well, this is rather queer!””

26. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say.”  

27. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Her skin was a rich black that would have peeled like a plum if snagged, but then no one would have thought of getting close enough to Mrs. Flowers to ruffle her dress, let alone snag her skin. She didn’t encourage familiarity. She wore gloves too.  I don’t think I ever saw Mrs. Flowers laugh, but she smiled often. A slow widening of her thin black lips to show even, small white teeth, then the slow effortless closing. When she chose to smile on me, I always wanted to thank her.”

28. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up…”

29. Henry James, The Aspern Papers

“Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ‘dressed,’ and long fine hands which were–possibly–not clean.”   

30. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni Book One: The Musician

“She is the spoiled sultana of the boards. To spoil her acting may be easy enough,—shall they spoil her nature? No, I think not. There, at home, she is still good and simple; and there, under the awning by the doorway,—there she still sits, divinely musing. How often, crook-trunked tree, she looks to thy green boughs; how often, like thee, in her dreams, and fancies, does she struggle for the light,—not the light of the stage-lamps.”

31. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Living among those white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crosses…” 

32. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and was changed, was still upon her.” 

33. Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

“He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

34. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.” 

35. Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle

“For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream.”

36. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

37. Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing.”

38. Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Oblivion

“Her long platinum blond hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders, with a few black peekaboo strands. She wore a black minidress and combat boots.”

39. N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“His long, long hair wafted around him like black smoke, its tendrils curling and moving of their own volition. His cloak — or perhaps that was his hair too — shifted as if in an unfelt wind.” 

40. M.L. LeGette, The Orphan and the Thief

“A creature–a frightfully, awful creature–was mere feet from her. Its eyes were enormous, the size of goose eggs and milky white. Its gray, slippery skin was stretched taut upon its face. Its mouth was wide and full of needle teeth. Its hands rested on the rock, hands that were webbed and huge with each finger ending in a sharp, curved nail. It was as tall as a human man, yet oddly shrunken and hunched.”  

 41. Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles.” 

 42. Julia Stuart, The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise

“His hair had been grown to counteract its unequivocal retreat from the top of his head, and was fashioned into a mean, frail ponytail that hung limply down his back. Blooms of acne highlighted his vampire-white skin.” 

43. James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain

“His khaki sleeves were rolled over his sunburned arms, and he had the flat green eyes and heavy facial features of north Louisiana hill people. He smelled faintly of dried sweat, Red Man, and talcum powder.” 

44. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

“I vividly remembered the flat black color of his eyes the last time he glared at me – the color was striking against the background of his pale skin and his auburn hair. Today, his eyes were a completely different color: a strange ocher, darker than butterscotch, but with the same golden tone.” 

45. Brian Malloy, Twelve Long Months 

“Whith her hair dyed bright red, she looks like Ronald McDonald’s post-menopausal sister. Who has let herself go.”     (This is one of my favorites, because I find it ridiculously funny)

46. Joan Johnston, No Longer A Stranger

“Actually, Reb had the same flawless complexion as her sister– except for the freckles. Her straight, boyishly cut hair fell onto her brow haphazardly and hid beautiful arched brows that framed her large, expressive eyes. She had a delicate, aquiline nose, but a stubborn mouth and chin.” 

47. Brian Morton, Breakable You

“Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal – a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.”

48. Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“I saw my Master had adorned himself in a thick tunic and beautiful dark blue doublet which I’d hardly noticed before. He wore soft sleek dark blue gloves over his hands, gloves which perfectly cleaved to his fingers, and legs were covered by thick soft cashmere stockings all the way to his beautiful pointed shoes.” 

49. Becca Fitzpatrick, Black Ice

“His brown hair was cropped, and it showed off the striking s ymmetry of his face. With the sun at his back, shadows marked the depressions beneath his cheekbones. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, but I hoped they were brown…The guy had straight, sculptured shoulders that made me think swimmer …” 

50. E.C. Sheedy, Killing Bliss

“He stood, which put him eye to eye with the dark-haired woman whose brilliant, burning gaze poured into his worthless soul like boiling tar, whose mouth frothed with fury–and whose hand now curled, knuckles white, around a steak knife.”  (The author gives a lot of details about the characters emotions, but there is not one specific detail about neither of their appearances. Use this as an example of how physical appearances aren’t always the most important thing.)

51. James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain

“His wiry gray and black hair was dripping with sweat, and his face was the color and texture of old paper. He looked up at me from where he was seated on his bunk, and his eyes were hot and bright and moisture was beaded across his upper lip. He held a Camel cigarette between his yellowed fingers, and the floor around his feet was covered with cigarette butts.”  

52. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“She has bright, dark eyes and satiny brown skin and stands tilted up on her toes with arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound.”

53. Becca Fitzpatrick, Hush, Hush

“He was abominable…and the most alluring, tortured soul I’d ever met.”   (This isn’t describing him physically, but it is giving insight to how the main character views him)

54. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“A giant of a man was standing in the doorway. His face was almost completely hidden by  a long, shaggy mane of hair and a wild, tangled beard, but you could make out his eyes,  glinting like black beetles under all the hair.” 

55. Anne Rice, Violin

“I deliberately thought of him, my violinist, point by point, that with his long narrow nose and such deep-set eyes he might have been less seductive to someone else–perhaps. But then perhaps to no one. What a well-formed mouth he had, and how the narrow eyes, the detailed deepened lids gave him such a range of expression, to open his gaze wide, or sink in cunning street.”

56. Kevin Brooks, Lucas

“As I’ve already said, the memory of Lucas’s walk brings a smile to my face. It’s an incredibly vivid memory, and if I close my eyes I can see it now. An easygoing lope. Nice and steady. Not too fast and not too slow, Fast enough to get somewhere, but not too fast to miss anything. Bouncy, alert, resolute, without any concern and without vanity. A walk that both belonged to and was remote from everything around it.” 

57. Anne Rice, Violin

“And she looked the way he had always hated her–dreamy and sloppy, and sweet, with glasses falling down, smoking a cigarette, with ashes on her coat, but full of love, her body heavy and shapeless with age.” 

58. Kevin Brooks, Lucas

“As we drew closer, the figure became clearer, It was a young man, or a boy, dressed loosely in a drab green T-shirt and baggy green trousers. He had a green army jacket tied around his waist and a green canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The only non-green thing about him was the pair of scruffy black walking boots on his feet. Although he was on the small side, he wasn’t as slight as I first thought. He wasn’t exactly muscular, but he wasn’t weedy-looking either…there was an air of hidden strength about him, a graceful strength that showed in his balance, the way he held himself, the way he walked….” 

59. Iris Johansen, The Face of Deception

“Kinky tousled curls, only a minimum of makeup, large brown eyes behind round wire-rimmed glasses. There was a world of character in that face, more than enough to make her fascinating-looking instead of just attractive.” 

60. Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“Brian Paulson was rake thin, with smooth hair the color of tin and a wet fleshy handshake…. His greeting was a nod and a blink, befitting someone who’d stepped out of the shadows only momentarily.” 

61. Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night

“Pale hair fell in waves to his shoulders, framing a face mortal females considered a sensual feast. They didn’t know the man was actually a devil in angel’s skin. They should have, though. He practically glowed with irreverence, and there was an unholy gleam in his green eyes that proclaimed he would laugh in your face while cutting out your heat. Or laugh in your face while you cut out his heart.”

62. Sam Byers, Idiopathy 

“Now here he was: sartorially, facially and interpersonally sharpened; every inch the beatific boffin.”

63. Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.” 

64. J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

“The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars.” 

65. Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”  

66. Frank Herbert, Dune

“…a girl-child who appeared to be about four years old. She wore a black aba, the hood thrown back to reveal the attachments of a stillsuit hanging free at her throat. Her eyes were Fremen blue, staring out of a soft, round face. She appeared completely unafraid and there was a look to her stare that made the Baron feel uneasy for no reason he could explain.” 

67. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Ender did not see Peter as the beautiful ten-year-old boy that grown-ups saw, with dark, tousled hair and a face that could have belonged to Alexander the Great. Ender looked at Peter only to detect anger or boredom, the dangerous moods that almost always led to pain.”

68. Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“He had his head in his hands, and his tie looked like it had been put on by an enemy, and was strangling him.”

69. Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Peter was a gentle, red-haired bear of a man. Standing at six-four in his socks, he moved everywhere with a slight and nautical sway, but even though he was broad across the chest there was something centered and reassuring about him, like an old ship’s mast cut from a single timber.”

70. Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“…in addition to being fun, smart, and quick-witted—in a feisty way that always kept me honest—she’s quite easy to look at, with never-ending legs, toned arms, curly brown hair, and eyes that tease and smile and glint all at the same time.” 

71. Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“Sterling Mulkern was a florid, beefy man, the kind who carried weight like a weapon, not a liability. He had a shock of stiff white hair you could land a DC-10 on and a handshake that stopped just short of inducing paralysis.”

72. Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“Lord Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. All his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a wild animal held in a cage too small for it.”

73. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“I thought she was so beautiful. I figured she was the kind of woman who could make buffalo walk on up to her and give up their lives. She wouldn’t have needed to hunt. Every time we went walking, birds would follow us around. Hell, tumbleweeds would follow us around.”

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26 comments

woowwwwwwwwie

Love the compilation. Thank you for doing this

This is a great compilation! My students are working on writing characters right now, so I’m having them look through your list to see examples of a job well done 🙂 Thanks!

Thanks I’m using these for students to make character drawings from

This is really helpful ! Love it !

Do you have a way, where you could put the characters physical traits in this website?

Thank you for the awesome list. You should add this one; it’s from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lightened by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.” There’s more after, but I thought this was a good description.

And this one: “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering, and somewhat broken voice: all these were points against him, but all of them together could not describe the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.”

The quote that stood out to me the most was the quote from ‘The Census Taker’. That quote captured the characters feelings so well. The author was able to compare in self worth by saying it was as dirt, so much so that the dirt was written in his skin. I have never seen self worth and failure described as part of a person’s face.

Thank you. I echo Chris’s comment Wowwwwww and add a few!!!!

Wonderful! Reading these enabled me to rewrite the descriptions for my two leading characters.

Thank you for this, very helpful! I don’t know if this is really related, but I’m writing a story including a mean girl who bullies the main character (also a girl). I’m struggling to write what the mean girl uses to bully the main character – what I end up coming up with is way too mean or unreal, etc.

Blinded by tears, she could hear the haze of pink shout, “See, poor baby cries. Great actress, dear. Why do you waste your talent on us, here?”

great great any book for description of physical appearance in narrative

Great list. And I have one to add. It’s from Michael Moorcock, riding the new wave of British sci-fi back in the 1960s. He’s been a favorite of mine for decades. The passage is from “Elric of Melniboné:”

“It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.”

Thanks for this – very useful compilation for teaching – makes life so much easier! And helps in my writing, to look at expressions and word arrangements… I notice how some writers seem so good in visual description, and some others seem to be much better at character expressions..

wowzers!!! this is so cool!

I planned to just read a few, but I couldn’t stop reading. These are awesome! Thank you.

“Character Description” on The John Fox’s blog is a treasure trove of valuable tips and techniques for crafting compelling characters. The blog explores the art of painting vivid and multi-dimensional personas, adding depth to storytelling. Aspiring writers will find this guide indispensable for creating memorable characters that resonate with readers.

holy MOLY, thank you!

I liked them

wow thanks you have really helped me but can you put something to describe a character that is a tyrant please? that would really help

Absolutely remarkable. So very helpful in every since of the word.

OH HELLL YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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Posted on Dec 21, 2018

Character Descriptions: How To Write Them (in 3 Steps)

Character descriptions — those key passages that describe what a character actually looks like — are almost as crucial to a written story as the characters themselves. If you’re writing a novel, you’ve probably created an awesome, vivid protagonist in your head: motivated , quirky , maybe even memorably named . But how do you convey all that to a reader without depleting the magic?

Writing strong character descriptions actually requires quite a bit of finesse. If you skimp on descriptive passages, you run the risk of leaving your readers with forgettable characters. But if you get too descriptive, you wind up leaving no room for the reader’s own imagination.

So what does it take to strike the right balance? We’ll tell you! Here are three cardinal rules on how to write character descriptions without falling off that tightrope.

1. Choose your words carefully

When writing character descriptions, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself. After all, this is the first time you’re introducing a character you’ve created from the ground up .

But just because you know everything about them, doesn’t mean the reader needs to. Character descriptions aren’t about doling out every detail in lavish language — they’re about succinct characterization. Here are a few tips on how to achieve just that.

Be descriptive in your language

We’re talking about character descriptions, after all — it’s quite literally in the name. When describing a character that you see clearly in your mind, it’s easy to simply give a laundry list of attributes: she had black hair, brown eyes, and freckles. But that tells us nothing about the character and is frankly a waste of words.

Sure, your protagonist might have brown eyes. But so does half the world’s population! And characterization is all about showing what makes a character unique.

Sometimes, this can be done through word choice alone. Take this example from Huckleberry Finn :

“There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.”

From this passage, we clearly understand how Huck’s father looks, as surely as if Twain had simply written, “He was white.” But through the use of figurative language and excellent word choice, another image sticks in our head: that of a sickly, grotesque drunk. Bonus points for the use of “tree-toad” and “fish-belly” — descriptors that match the tone of the adventure novel.

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Use adjectives sparingly

Another problem with a sentence like “She had brown eyes” is that brown simply isn’t a very interesting word. When it comes to describing something, the same is true for many adjectives; which are to descriptions as adverbs are to verbs . In other words, they may appear to be more descriptive, but they often just bog down your sentences.

Same goes for verbs. Much has been made about the banality of the verb “to be” in literature. Which would you prefer: “She had brown eyes,” or, “Her brown eyes pierced through my own”? Use forceful verbs to illuminate more about your character. When it comes to character descriptions, every word counts.

However, keep in mind that overly descriptive words like these can easily turn cliché. Ultimately, a phrase like, “He had a prosaic, pedestrian face” may pale in comparison to a more simply but potent description, like this one from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated :

“He did not look like anything special at all.”

Use descriptions themselves sparingly

When introducing a character, it’s best not to dedicate three whole chapters to an exhaustive physical explanation and backstory. After all, this isn’t Moby-Dick .

So as you’re painting a picture of your character, do two important things: 1) focus on a few key characteristics at a time , and 2) make sure to spread your descriptions out across the book . If we’re told every detail of every character’s face all at once, they’ll all end up blending together. But if we’re distinctly told about the woman with ears like a rabbit or the man with a slightly larger left nostril? We’ll remember them for the whole novel.

Also keep in mind that word choice is important, but so are the things you’re describing with those words. Hair, skin, and eye color — these are all characteristics that, ironically, don’t really say anything about what characters are like. That’s why, next up, we’ll discuss what characteristics you should be covering in your character descriptions.

2. Be specific

Remember, we don’t need to know every single physical detail of every person in a book. In fact, since reading is a non-visual medium, many readers prefer to fill in the blanks themselves.

Good descriptions tend to be brief but evocative. So choose two or three distinct, specific attributes to describe and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination. Here are some ideas on what those attributes might be.

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Facial expressions

Facial attributes are one thing: anyone can have a big nose, so that tells us nothing substantial about a character. On the other hand, facial expressions speak volumes. Like this example from Lord of the Flies :

“His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness.”

The way they carry themselves

Body language is key to understanding other people, so it stands to reason that it’s key to understanding characters, too. Take this description from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible , which describes a character through posture and mannerisms alone:

“Mama BekwaTataba stood watching us — a little jet-black woman. Her elbows stuck out like wings, and a huge white enameled tub occupied the space above her head, somewhat miraculously holding steady while her head moved in quick jerks to the right and left.”

Their stuff

In his popular novel American Psycho , Bret Eaton Ellis showcases Patrick Bateman's vapidity and narcissism through descriptions of the titular character's designer clothing. You can tell a lot about a person from their possessions — whether it’s clothing, cars, houses, or merely the contents of their purse. “He was a superficial sociopath” succinctly describes the extent of Patrick Bateman’s character development in the novel, but a passage like this shows it so much better:

“But there are also things that the average person would think are nice that I've done to celebrate the holiday, items I've bought Jean and had delivered to her apartment this morning: Castellini cotton napkins from Bendel's, a wicker chair from Jenny B. Goode, a taffeta table throw from Barney's, a vintage chain-mail-vent purse and a vintage sterling silver dresser set from Macy's, a white pine whatnot from Conran's, an Edwardian nine-carat-gold "gate" bracelet from Bergdorfs and hundreds upon hundreds of pink and white roses.”

Just be sure extensive descriptions of clothing don’t fall into the bad fanfiction category . (Although, there is good fanfiction too.)

Their actions

You know how actions speak louder than words? That’s truer than ever when it comes to describing your novel’s cast.

In one sense, actions can illustrate physical characteristics in a pretty basic way: “She ran her hand through her hair, accidentally revealing the mole on her forehead she’d always kept hidden behind her bangs.”

But you can also learn as much about fictional characters from their actions as you can about real people. Toni Morrison displays clear knowledge of this in her novel Jazz , introducing the character Violet by recounting a story about her, rather than simply telling what she looks like.

“I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, ‘I love you.’”

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3. Don’t always be specific

Yeah, okay — the irony here isn’t lost on us . But while giving distinct details is important to character descriptions, so is knowing when concrete descriptions aren’t needed. Words, after all, are not limited to describing physical things. So don’t limit your prose, either.

Be abstract

Feel free to stretch the boundaries of what you’re describing and how you’re describing it. Rather than simply pointing out concrete characteristics or actions, feel free to describe abstractions, like this passage from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere :

“Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing alike.”

Or, describe physical characteristics in an abstract way — that is, use similes and metaphors. In Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol , Dickens does not describe Scrooge as a Christmas-hating miser. Instead, Scrooge in this Christmas book is:

“Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

Whether you’re describing yourself to a friend or a friend is describing you to someone else, it’s very unlikely either of you would give a painstaking, perfectly objective account. Biases exist in every aspect of life, so it’s okay to be biased in character descriptions, too.

If a first person narrator is describing themselves, they might comment on their own attractiveness, like Humbert Humbert in Lolita :

“I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor.”

Or you could have one character describe another, which illuminates the attributes of the latter and the perception of the former. Take, for example, this particularly scathing description of one person by another from Jodi Taylor’s The Nothing Girl :

“The only talents he possessed were delusions of adequacy.”

This sentence succinctly describes a not-quite-self-aware underachiever. But it also illustrates a narrator with a not-so-objective opinion of him.

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Show, don’t tell

Yup. The golden rule of writing applies here as well. At the end of the day, no matter what you decide to reveal to your audience, the most important aspect of character descriptions is how you reveal it. Regardless of how special, unique, or honest-to-god awesome your protagonist is, a reader forced to trudge through page after page of intensive description will find any character boring.

Instead, think of how we learn things about other people in real life. Very rarely does the color of our eyes or the shape of our nose describe who we are. We don’t tell everything there is to know about each other — we show it, through our expressions, perceptions, actions, preferences, and even our stuff. Apply that same rule to your character descriptions, and your characters (and readers) will thank you for it.

Are there any character descriptions that stand out to you? Leave any thoughts or questions in the comments below!

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How to Write Character Descriptions That Work [With Examples]

27 Feb 2017 | Fiction

If you’re writing fiction, at some point, you’ll probably want to describe the people populating your story.

(This isn’t absolutely essential, mind. I’ve just written a short story that consists entirely of dialogue – no dialogue tags, no action beats, nothing – and neither of the characters is described at all.)

When it comes to a description, you want to avoid doing anything remotely like this:

Julia gazed into the bathroom mirror, assessing how she looked. Her hair was neatly parted and just skimmed the top of her shoulders. Her blue eyes were perfectly spaced, and her nose had a smattering of freckles – just right, she felt. The new shade of lipstick, a reddish-pink, went well with her top. But her cleavage was non-existent …

This might just work if you want to convey a character who’s particularly self-absorbed and who frets a lot about their appearance, but, otherwise, it’s a boring and – often – annoying way to introduce your character to your readers.

So what can you do instead? Firstly…

Keep Descriptions Fairly Minimal

Some authors don’t describe much about their characters. Maybe we get a few key characteristics, especially if those are relevant to how the characters behave and interact with others (e.g. they’re unusually tall / short / skinny / fat / hairy / bald …) but we don’t have long descriptions of exactly how they look.

I think this is a good way forward. Personally, as a reader, I don’t really care what characters look like – I care who they are underneath the surface. Sometimes, their physical characteristics are important because they tell us more about who the characters are, or they’re significant because of how other characters relate to them.

Madeline’s expression changed. She beamed and waved. “Oh! She’s here at last! Celeste! Over here! Come and see what I’ve done!” Jane looked up and her heart sank. It shouldn’t matter. She knew it shouldn’t matter. But the fact was that some people were so unacceptably, hurtfully beautiful, it made you feel ashamed. Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see. This was what a woman was meant to look like. Exactly this. She was right, and Jane was wrong.

What to Do (and What to Avoid) When Describing Characters

When you’re describing characters:

• Don’t give us a huge chunk of description all at once. This is a bad idea not only because it halts the forward momentum of your narrative but also because the reader’s unlikely to remember most of it anyway!
• Try describing one character through another character’s eyes. This can help reveal a lot about the person looking at them as well as the one who’s being observed, and it works very well if you’re using a third-person limited perspective.
• If you’re writing a first person narrative, avoid having the viewpoint character describe themselves in painstaking detail. Instead, bring in key characteristics that are relevant to who they are (e.g. they’re overweight and trying to shed excess pounds – or they’re unusually tall / short and it bothers them).
• Choose two or three key characteristics to focus on, especially unusual ones (e.g. eye colour probably isn’t worth mentioning unless it’s fairly striking, or unless one character is staring into another’s eyes…)
• With any kind of description, word choices matter a lot. There’s a huge tonal difference between “long yellow hair” and “flowing blond hair” and “long golden locks” … even though all of those could describe exactly the same thing.

Description in Practice

Example #1:

Kay sipped uncertainly at her hot chocolate. Seth was taller than she’d imagined him. His blond hair hung perfectly, parted in the middle to fall to his chin, just like his profile picture on Messenger. She’d brushed her own hair into fierce plaits as usual, but the wind had whipped strands of it loose.

This is the very first paragraph of the novel. Kay’s the viewpoint character, and the reader hasn’t met her or Seth yet – so I’m trying to get in a bit of description of both of them, and hint at the backstory between them (e.g. “taller than she’d imagined him” – she knew Seth already but hadn’t met him in person before; she’s clearly spent at least a bit of time imagining what he looks like). There are some basic physical details (Seth is tall with longish blond hair; Kay has plaits).

Example #2:

A few paragraphs later, we’ve got:

She lifted her head, and met his eyes. They were a greyish blue, like stonewashed denim, like the pebbles on the beach back home.

I’m not generally interested in character’s eye colour. But I’m hinting here not only at Kay’s crush on Seth – she’s noticing his eyes – but also at her homesickness (by this point, we know she’s a first-year student at Oxford).

Example #3:

Later on, we get a description of Seth from a different perspective, 14-year-old Edwin:

Seth was pretty much how Edwin had imagined from his Messenger profile picture. He was tall, and his hair was cut longish and floppy without looking gay. He wore dark cords and a grey denim jacket over a shirt which, unlike Edwin’s sweater, didn’t seem to have spent the last few days in a heap on the floor.

“Hey,” Edwin said, and found himself suddenly nervous. Did he look sort of stupid, with collar-length hair and studded bracelets and head-to-toe black?

Again, Edwin knows Seth online, but this is the first time he meets him in real life. Unlike Kay, he did picture Seth as tall – he’s rather more in awe of Seth than Kay is. I’ve got comparison going on again: with Edwin’s rather less careful attitude to clothes, for instance. And just in case Edwin hasn’t reminded the reader recently enough that he is Properly Goth, we get a quick description of what he’s wearing (and how insecure he is about it).

You can probably tell that, for me at least, character description is generally a way to bring in all sorts of other things: to hint at and establish relationships between characters, for instance, and to tell us about the viewpoint character, who’s describing someone.

Have you come across any character descriptions that work particularly well (or that just didn’t do it for you)? Share them, and the books they come from, in the comments.

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I’m really interested in reading your short story without any dialogue tags etc…

“I’ve just written a short story that consists entirely of dialogue – no dialogue tags, no action beats, nothing – and neither of the characters is described at all.”

How on earth would you do that?

With difficulty! 😀 I can’t publish it here at present as I’ve submitted it for a competition — I’ll let you know how it goes!

Thank you so much for posting this! It helped me know that I’m kind of on the right track.

I like to describe my characters from the other characters’ points of view. Like you said, it gives insight into both of the characters and how they see the world. The MC in the book I’m trying to write at the moment (a bit conveniently) is very observant. She not only observes physical characteristics, but she watches body language and listens to every word the other characters may say. I’m hoping that this will give readers a good idea of hers and the others’ personalities.

I’m only sixteen but I LOVE writing. I’m hoping that sometime in the future I will be able to publish.

Thank you again for posting this! It really helped!

Yay! An observant MC definitely gives you an edge here. 🙂

There’s never been a better time (in my opinion, at least!) to be an up-and-coming young writer. Once you feel that your writing is of publishable standard, you’ve got so many options with publishing, from the big traditional publishing houses to quirky independent presses to striking out alone as an independent author, publishing via ebooks and print-on-demand. Best of luck with wherever writing takes you! 🙂

Let’s get into more depth about description. There are many ways to tackle description, but if you want potency, description isn’t enough. Look, the readers don’t care if the character is blonde, pretty, old, wearing a shawl–UNLESS their description has heavy emotional threads. So how do you mold your descriptions to soak up the essence of a character’s being–how do you write a character that you can FEEL? Look at Fahrenheit 451, when Guy’s foot finds his wife’s empty pill bottle.

” Two moonstones looked up at him in the light of his small hand-held fire; two pale moonstones buried in a creek of clear water over which the life of the world ran, not touching them.” ‘Mildred’! “Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall, but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadows. There was only the signing of the thimble-wasps in her tamped-shut ears, and her eyes all glass, and breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, or went or came.”

Profound. Absolutely profound. It was more than “she was lying on the floor, pale, hardly breathing, and half dead”–more than “Oh dear! Her eyes are glossy!”–no, he used scenery. I recommend challenging yourself to use the same technique. For example, if a character is being deemed guilty before a judge, what scenery would emulate the same dread? Drowning, perhaps? Okay, let’s try that.

“When he said it–the ‘G’ word–when those pink-ish mudcracks parted into words, became quenched with judgement, I knew he had peeled the flood gates open. But I hadn’t known the gushing power of his voice could swallow me whole, jab watery pins to my eardrums, force feed itching screams down my lungs. My fingers wanted to claw through the waves–but even if I tried, my wrists would be fastened to the wet chains wrapped around my body.” (note: Admittedly, my writing isn’t fantastic and this blurb reeks of my novice skills, but I think it was good to practice.) 🙂

Thanks for the fantastic examples, Charity! I really struggle with doing metaphor well, but I think this can be a great technique to try. 🙂

“He was tall, and his hair was cut longish and floppy without looking gay.”

I’m sorry, but I just can’t help but wonder what this means? It sounds a bit like an insult, or like it’s being used as a slur, is that what we’re supposed to get from that particular character’s description of Seth?

Probably rather unclear out of context, sorry! It’s from 14-year-old Edwin’s point of view, and to Edwin, yes, “gay” is seen as something of an insult. It got used like that a lot when I was at school here in the UK (“your bag is gay…” “ugh, we have extra maths, that’s so gay…” that kind of thing).

(Please don’t take the character’s views / language as representative of the author’s here!) 🙂

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The Ultimate Character Description Template

February 22, 2024

Discover the only Character Description Template you'll ever need! Dive into our detailed worksheet and explore diverse OC description examples for writers and artists!

Writing character descriptions can prove overwhelming sometimes, but our quick start templates can help you begin the process on the right foot and customize them to your needs and interests.

Making Great Character Descriptions

Character descriptions are challenging, and it can be easy to get lost in the minutia of the complex and lengthy sentences of overwriting. However, it is possible to write too sparsely and lack important details. Finding a balance is essential. Specific descriptive tools can give you a leg up in an original character description, no matter the purpose. For example, answering the five essential questions can help contextualize a character in a significant way. Addressing the who, what, where, why, and when surrounding a character can create an essential context for you as a creator and people wanting to learn more about your OC.

However, other techniques, such as writing descriptions with goals in mind, can be instrumental. For example, writing a description that gives the character an impactful presence can sell their role in a setting. Writing character descriptions around how others may see them is also helpful, as it can create mystery and contrast. For further suggestions on how to write great character descriptions, be sure to check our guide, which also features 101 examples of bold character descriptions .

Writing character descriptions can often be a goal-driven process. There is no universal formula for describing a character; the necessary elements can vary greatly depending on the description's purpose. For example, a character description for a specific story may differ significantly from a character description used in a roleplaying profile. Because of this, we’ve broken down three templates for different character descriptions.

Setting-Based Character Descriptions

Most often, when you are writing a character profile, it is associated with a larger story and setting. Most of the time, when an original character is formed, there is a narrative they are associated with, though that is not always the case. However, context is everything when a character profile is needed, and they are part of a realized or developing setting.

Beyond the essentials of characteristics you’d include in a description, you’ll likely spend a fair bit of time contextualizing the characters with their setting or narrative. For example, the character description of a heroic protagonist will vary from that of the villainous antagonist. Likewise, some more developed or plot-consequential characters may have more detailed descriptions than supporting characters.

Of course, this is also complicated by how much you want a reader to know about the character through the description. If it is for your use as their creator, you may reveal much more to keep track of essential narrative information. However, you'll need to be far more selective for publicly-facing profiles where you don’t wish to give away all your plot hooks.

Below is a template for a publicly-facing character description that ties them to their setting. We’ll also include some suggestions on how to take the description further if you’re compiling an OC’s information for yourself.

Setting-Based Character Description Template

This template has been designed to help you answer five essential questions about your OC and provide context to who they are in their setting. Simply treat it as a Q&A and use your answers as the foundation for your character description on a CharacterHub profile.

Character Detail Questions: Setting-Based

• Who is your character? Beyond their name, who are they in the context of the larger setting?
• What is your character’s role? Are they a protagonist or antagonist? Are they for or against society? How does their occupation or skill factor into this?
• Where in the setting does your character originate? Where do they currently exist? Where do they want to go in life?
• When has the character’s journey begun? Are they on the cusp of their adventure, or have they been on it? When are they with the events that define the setting?
• Why does the character exist in the grand scheme of things? Why are they undertaking their current goals?

Using the Template on CharacterHub

Answering these questions in paragraphs will give you a strong foundation of description for a character profile like you might find on CharacterHub. You can dive deeper when you’ve addressed these broader questions.

For example, if you are working on a private profile for your creative new character that requires more information, you can simply build on these responses with spoilerific detail. On the other hand, if you want to dive into more detail that presents flavor without stepping too far into spoilers, you can use the customizable “About” feature on your character hub profile to list specific details. That feature becomes even more critical for other character descriptions, such as meta-character descriptions.

Meta Character Descriptions

Casually browsing CharacterHub reveals a couple of things about OCs. First, a tremendous amount of talent is floating around the site, as seen in these OCs. Second, no two OCs are alike - every approach and focus differs. Third, however, is that some OCs are not necessarily associated with a story or projects - they just exist in the mind of their creator and are given form on the site. We might refer to these as Meta OCs, somewhere outside of a narrative and written in such a way that they exist outside of the traditional narrative as we know them.

For example, if an OC can appear in multiple AUs and fandoms while retaining core characteristics, we might look at them as meta. That means certain things need to remain consistent across all versions when developing their character description. These OCs are not locked into any specific story and are like players taking on roles. This is, of course, best exemplified by the iconic Tezuka Star System .

So, when it comes to meta-character descriptions, a lot comes down to how the character is used and how much of them might be “acting” in another setting. However, even actors known for transforming from role to role have consistent and bankable characteristics. After all, if I were to say a Robert Downey Jr. type, you would already get an idea of what sort of character would be, right? In that sense, that should be what guides your meta-character description.

Meta Character Description Template

Use these questions as a template for filling out the character description on their profile on CharacterHub. Consider approaching these details like filling out a casting or dating profile comprised of essential traits . This is an especially great template for roleplayers not tied to a gaming system and who like to float in and out of settings.

The key to these questions is that they are more about motivation than setting. Motivation might carry through, no matter their situation, hence the emphasis on really understanding and describing them from that angle.

Character Detail Questions: Meta

• Who is your character? Who do they want to be?
• What are your character’s particular talents? What are they known for?
• Where might we find your character when it comes to their free time? Where might they try to work?
• When does your character get involved with situations? Where are they in their timeline?
• Why do they do what they do? Why do they get up in the morning?

With these questions answered, you have a tremendous descriptive foundation for a meta character. But this is just a basic template; you can constantly tailor it to your needs or supplement it with other profile features.

For example, tagging profiles is an excellent technique for any OC. You can use the tags to slot your OC into specific favored roles. For example, is your character leading man material? Or are they particularly suited for darker, more challenging roles? Tagging them as such through CharacterHub allows you to mark them so that you can find other characters of that type and allow other creators to find your OC, which is perfect for RP purposes.

You also can take advantage of the creator’s notes feature of the profile, which can supplement your descriptive section to talk about the influences behind the creation of your OC. Were you a big fan of Spock from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ? Did it influence the type of character your OC became? Then, include that inspiration in the creator’s notes for valuable context.

Gaming Character Descriptions

Creating gaming characters has some commonalities with roleplaying. While there is often a lot of crossover between them, you are likely writing within a system and a setting when writing descriptions for a gaming character. Writing descriptions can still be a very open process, and it can be easy to get bogged down in details, but for the initial sessions of a game like Dungeons & Dragons , you’ll probably be a little more sparse, just to not overwhelm the narrative. 

Writing gaming character descriptions almost works like a combination of the previous two categories, where you’ll not only write about things within a setting but potentially include some meta details. Let’s see how our template can give us a strong foundation.

Gaming Character Description Template

This specialized template for describing gaming characters is only a partial step in the work required to create such characters. Remember that this series of questions is meant to serve as a good foundation and that you can and should expand on it based on your needs and interests.

Character Detail Questions: Gaming

• Who is your character? Who are they in the context of the setting? Who do they wish to be?
• What is their goal? What do they need? What role do they play in a group or setting?
• Where do they come from, and how does that influence their worldview?
• When did they become part of the events of the setting or storyline? When did they get swept into something larger?
• Why are they journeying? Why are they opening themselves up to new experiences?

With these questions in mind, you may wonder what other features of a CharacterHub profile can help you achieve even better gaming character profiles. One essential slot in the profile system is for the backstory. You can use this section to create the backstory you can share with potential gaming groups and play partners, so they have a good sense of how your character fits into a potential setting. Additionally, because a character profile is fully editable, you can easily make changes to ensure your backstory aligns with the setting created by the larger gaming group.

Of course, stats will likely come into play if we discuss gaming profiles. Thankfully, CharacterHub offers many options for filling in a stat block, allowing you to display character stats on a scale consistent with a gaming setting or even in a general sense. For example, while my character Dash Kameku is not currently used in a game, I still have some basic stats that help establish his character. However, if you play a dedicated system with specific scoring and modifiers, you can attach that to your character description, providing an updated record of their journey.

CharacterHub: A Repository for Great Characters

One of the best ways to figure out how to write great character descriptions is to see examples of them . You can see how other creators across CharacterHub “sell” their OCs by browsing through the latest entries or exploring tags to fine-tune your search based on your interests. If you like how a creator introduces a concept about their character through vivid description, let them know via a comment and try adapting their style to your work. Remember that these templates we’ve shared are only the beginning of the descriptive process. They will give you an excellent foundation, but you can constantly tailor them to your specific purpose.

David Davis

David Davis is a cartoonist with around twenty years of experience in comics, including independent work and established IPs such as SpongeBob Squarepants. He also works as a college composition instructor and records weekly podcasts. Find out more about him at his website!

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How to Write Great Character Descriptions (with Examples)

Most of our favorite movies also coincide with our favorite movie characters. but how many of us remember the way each of these characters is introduced.

Great character descriptions are a crucial part of any screenplay, and a meaningful way to get your leads to stick out.

How you introduce a character on the page will have a huge effect on how the reader experiences the script. It could be the difference between a sale or a pass. 

Today we’re going to go over what makes some character introductions better than others, and how you can write the best descriptions for your screenplay.

What is a Character Description?

When you first meet a character in a screenplay, a brief description tells the reader how they should picture that person in their mind.

What are they wearing?

Where are they going?

How do they carry themselves?

And what’s happening in the scene?

Film and television are visual mediums, but they always start on a blank screenplay page. Writers have to imagine who these characters are, and then actors and directors help those people come to life.

There are funny descriptions, sad ones, and even action-packed, amazing descriptions. But the best versions of this get the point across, without being too elaborate.

So.... how do you do this well, without wasting a lot of time?

What Do You Need to Cover?

Screenwriting is all about "economy on the page". So when describing your character you need to give us an accurate mental image of the person, while also not taking us out of the story.

Most of the time, you’re meeting your characters in act one , but it’s great to master character introductions so you can set the scene in any act.

Also, most formatting books will tell you that the first time we meet a character, we should CAPITALIZE their entire name.

That’s a delicate balance, so let’s look at some great examples.

Character Description Examples

Our first one comes from The Big Lebowski . 

INT. RALPH'S - NIGHT

It is late, the supermarket all but deserted. We are tracking in on a fortyish man in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses at the dairy case. He is THE DUDE. His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep.

What’s great about this character introduction is the economy shown on the page. We get a wonderful scene setting of the grocery store and then go right to the core of The Dude. We learn just enough to understand his demeanor, and introducing him by the dairy counter sets up his love of white Russians.

There are a lot of ways to communicate who The Dude is. But choosing to note that his "casualness runs deep" conjures a clear mental picture rather eloquently. 

And check out how this translated to the screen. These are all details that the various departments like costuming and props can utilize when they’re creating the world.

The Dude is a pretty chill guy, but what about character descriptions from someone a little more sinister?

Let’s learn how to write a character description by checking out Ted Tally’s screenplay for Silence Of The Lambs , which contains a nicely detailed take.

DR. LECTER'S CELL

is coming slowly INTO VIEW… Behind its barred front wall is a second barrier of stout nylon net… Sparse, bolted-down furniture, many soft cover books and papers. On the walls, extraordinarily detailed, skillful drawings, mostly European cityscapes, in charcoal or crayon.

DR. HANNIBAL LECTER is lounging on his bunk, in white pajamas, reading an Italian Vogue. He turns, considers her… A face so long out of the sun, it seems almost leached – except for the glittering eyes, and the wet red mouth. He rises smoothly, crossing to stand before her; the gracious host. His voice is cultured, soft.

This is a good character description, but it’s a bit long winded. Though it does a great job of setting a specific scene. Now, if you remember the movie, this was all changed. I can see Jonathan Demme wanting to show Lecter waiting for Clarice, and if you notice, a lot of these details are in the background.

Here's a funnier take. I love the entrance of Jack Sparrow.

EXT. PORT ROYAL – HARBOR – DAY

The skeletal remains of four pirates, still clad in buccaneer rags, hang from gallows erected on a rocky promontory. There is a fifth, unoccupied gallows, bearing a sign: PIRATES – YE BE WARNED.

The top of a billowing sail passes regally in front of them. On the landward face of the sail, apparently high in the rigging, is a man for whom the term 'swashbuckling rogue' was coined: Captain JACK SPARROW.  

He gazes keen-eyed at the display as they pass. Raises a tankard in salute. Suddenly, something below catches his attention. He jumps from the rigging —  — and that's when we see that his ship is not an imposing three-master, but just a small fishing dory with a single sail, plowing through the water — the Jolly Mon.

I love character descriptions that reveal new details about the character and begin on conflict. We learn right away that Jack has a sense of humor...and false grandeur. We see him react to the bodies of dead pirates. Not with fear, but a salute, so we know he is probably a pirate and respects other pirates. 

Now that we’ve seen a few male characters described when the first show up, let’s jump into some female examples and see how we can all be better and describing female characters.  

Female Character Description Examples

A hot-button issue inside Hollywood right now is how women are described on the page in screenplays. We’ve all read the words “broken but beautiful” and cringed.

There’s even a Twitter handle dedicated to exposing the worst versions of this.

When you’re writing, you want actors and actresses to WANT to be in your movie. And if the right ones want to be in your movie, then your movie might get made.

So these really matter. This is their first chance to see who they’re playing.

So when you’re crafting a female role, you want a great description that doesn’t rely on lazy or outdated stand-ins.

Let’s go over a few female character examples.

First, let’s look at the way Sarah Connor is described in the first two Terminator movies. The first Terminator falls into the mediocre category- it’s all about looks, and you cringe when you read it.

SARAH CONNOR is 19, small and delicate-featured. Pretty in a flawed, accessible way. She doesn’t stop the party when she walks in, but you’d like to get to know her. Her vulnerable quality masks a strength even she doesn’t know exists.

In Terminator , even though Sarah Connor is supposed to be a vulnerable target, the script goes out of its way to make it all about looks.

But James Cameron got it together for the next one.

Let’s examine at the way James Cameron describes Sarah Connor in the greatest sequel of all time, Terminator 2: Judgment Day .

SARAH CONNOR is not the same woman we remember from last time. Her eyes peer out through a wild tangle of hair like those of a cornered animal. Defiant and intense, but skittering around looking for escape at the same time. Fight or flight. Down one cheek is a long scar, from just below the eye to her upper lip. Her VOICE is a low and chilling monotone.

I love this one. It gives you the mood and tone of the movie. It’s harder, scarier, and so is Sarah. We immediately get to know the transformation and get to see someone with their back against the wall.

The scar tells us she’s seen some serious stuff since the first movie. It’s an immediate backstory and gets us interested.

So far, we’ve only looked at descriptions written by men. Let’s see how some female screenwriters describe their female characters.

First up, Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith take on 10 Things I Hate About You . Look at the way they tell us about Kat Stratford.

KAT STRATFORD, eighteen, pretty -- but trying hard not to be -- in a baggy granny dress and glasses, balances a cup of coffee and a backpack as she climbs out of her battered, baby blue '75 Dodge Dart.

Okay, I feel like the trolls are going to come out here and say that Kat is pretty and that I just said not to do that. But let’s really look at the story here. What we need to know about Kat is that she’s in control of her own body and looks. She’s not defined by what we think of her, she’s defined by what she thinks of herself.

Look at the other details we got. Not only does she not think about her own looks, she doesn’t care about her old beater car.

One of my favorite romantic comedy movies is It’s Complicated . I like reading Nancy Meyers scripts because you can see her imagination on the page, and see how she depicts it on the screen.

So let’s see how Nancy Meyers describes the lead character in this movie.

JANE is mid-fifties and has embraced that fact. She knows 50 is not the new 40 and because of that, she is still described by all who know her as beautiful. Everything about this woman's appearance screams "solid."

Here’s what we know about Jane: she’s got a hold on life. We know she still looks good, but it’s because she’s embraced who she is as a person.

What I love about this description is that the theme of the movie is how Jane goes from solid to spinning out of control and finds her real-life amidst the chaos. So it’s a great way for us to get to know her as the movie starts to kick into high gear.  

What's Next?

What are some of your favorite great descriptions?

Leave them in the comments and we can all discuss them!

We know the Acquisition Executives look at your character descriptions when they’re reading, so they matter.

Stuck on actually getting your story started? Check out our Story Map to get your treatment or outline in gear.

Already past the descriptions?

We also have some advice on how to write great dialogue .

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• The 'Law of Economy of Characters' ›

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Tricks for Describing a Character’s Appearance (With Examples)

Introducing a new character to your story can be difficult. There’s a lot that goes into it, and to make matters worse, you only have one chance to give readers a good (and memorable) first impression of that character. One of the ways you can do this is by giving them a distinct appearance, but many writers tend to fall short of describing appearance well. 

We’ve all heard the same cookie-cutter descriptions for characters a million times before. Golden hair, a heart-shaped face, a chiseled body, piercing eyes, yadda yadda… The problem with these descriptions is that they’re bland, they’re cliché, and they don’t really help your characters stand out. 

However, if you break from clichés, you can create uniquely vivid descriptions that will give your characters life. There are endless ways you can describe characters, and I’m not going to walk you through how I would describe every single possible human feature (or humanoid, animal, alien, etc). For one thing, that would take too long, but for another thing, descriptions are based on more than just the character’s physical appearance—their personality plays a part too. 

Tips for Describing a Character’s Appearance in a Story

There are a number of things to keep in mind when describing a character’s appearance. Here are just a few general tips before we dive into some more specific techniques for describing different parts of a character’s appearance. 

Don’t Make Everyone a Supermodel

This is probably one of the most (if not the most) important things to remember when describing a character. You should never objectively describe your characters as flawless. Humans aren’t perfect, so if you describe your characters like perfect little supermodels, they just won’t feel authentic. Worse still, they won’t stand out from the protagonists of every single young adult novel out there. You need to make them distinct, and to do that, you need to give your characters flaws . And I mean real flaws, not fake flaws that are actually just endearing traits packaged like flaws. 

Don’t Dump Everything Out at Once

Describing your characters is important, but you need to be able to keep it concise. No one wants to read a 7-page summary of every detail of a character’s appearance. You can go in-depth, sure, but don’t put your readers through a word-avalanche just for them to figure out what the character looks like. 

Remember, you can reveal more about the characters over time. When you introduce a character for the first time, you should focus on the things a person would naturally notice first, such as their face, hair, clothing, voice, and general energy. You can further elaborate on their appearance later when it is relevant, and describe their gait, posture, temperament, and more. 

There is one exception here I want to highlight. If you are telling a story from the first-person perspective, and you want to illustrate a character’s obsession with another person, hyper-fixating on the details can be a good way to show this. It can make the character seem creepy , and it can foreshadow the protagonist doing something bad to the person they are obsessing over. 

Don’t Sell Them Short

Opposite to the point above, you shouldn’t make your introductions too short. To some extent, it can be good to leave some parts of the character’s appearance up to the reader’s imagination. However, you should give them something to help them visualize the characters in the beginning. Otherwise, if you later reveal that the character has dark hair, all the readers that imagined them with light hair might have a difficult time accepting that. 

Descriptions are important, and they help to include a reader in the narrative. Like a well-described setting, vivid characters can help immerse readers into the world and make them part of the story. 

Use Their Personality

A character’s personality can have a large impact on how they are perceived, and therefore should alter the words you use to describe them. Two characters might have similar features, but based on their personality, you would describe them differently. 

For example, two characters might both be tall, but one would be described as “awkward and long” while the other is “towering.” In this case, the characters’ levels of confidence impact how they are perceived. For another example, think about two characters who both have light skin. You could describe one as looking like “porcelain” and describe the other one as “pasty,” depending on their other traits. Those two descriptions create very different perceptions from each other.   

Use the Point of View

If the character in question is being described from the first-person perspective of another character, then the protagonist’s opinions should sneak into the description. Your protagonist probably isn’t going to objectively evaluate the other person—they’re likely to rely on stereotypes, biases, and things they have heard from others about the character they’re looking at. Rely on that to make the description fit into the story more organically. 

Here are some examples: 

• She had no right to have such a disarming smile.
• His expression was empty—just like his head.
• His dark, tangled hair reminded me of a swamp.
• She didn’t even wear any makeup! But even more frustratingly, she didn’t really need it.
• They looked divine… like I wasn’t even worthy to look upon them. 
• He looked like the type of person to stare at his own reflection before getting in the shower. 
• They were short and stocky, but they could still probably beat me in a fight. 

Remember, your protagonist can make speculative judgments about the character they’re looking at. You’re telling the story as they experience it, so their judgments are part of the narrative!

“…he was greeted by the barista—a young teen who had not yet matured enough to be handsome. Once his soft cheeks hollowed and his jaw squared, and the childish optimism fled his eyes, then he would have the chance to smolder. That crooked smile would win over many hearts in the blink of an eye, but not just yet.”  – excerpt from a draft

Keep the Description Balanced

A good rule of thumb when describing characters (or anything else really) is to create a balance of concrete details and flowery imagery. You should alternate between those two, as well as general and more specific details, to make the description flow more naturally, and to make it more interesting to read. 

Imagine reading a description like: 

“His hair was red and curly. His eyes were large and green. He had freckles, but they weren’t that noticeable. He was tall but very thin.” 

That’s so dry, and it’s not fun to read. Compare that to a description that varies how the information is provided:

“His hair was like a massive red bush surrounding two wide, green eyes. Freckles faintly dotted his cheeks, but they were only really visible in the sunshine. His long, lanky body and large hair made him look a bit like a big red lollipop—which was only heightened by his tendency to blush often.”

Wasn’t that a lot more fun to read? Not only does it make the character description more interesting, but it also influences a reader’s perception of what the character is like. Certain words help readers to gauge what kind of person this character is. The first example gives no indication of personality, but the second one uses words like “sunshine” and “lollipop” to associate the character with lively, happy things. Additionally, using words like “lanky” and “blush” suggests that the character is awkward or shy, saving you the time of having to spell that out for readers. 

Give them Something Special

One helpful thing that I’ve learned over the years is that you should give your main character some distinctive feature that sets them apart from the other characters around them. Diverse descriptions are great, but it never hurts to make your main character a little more unique. This could be something like a distinctive scar, a tattoo, a weird eye color, a patch of silver or white hair, a missing or extra finger, a birthmark, or something else along those lines. That can make them stand out more, and it can be a really clear indicator that they are special. 

Although your story won’t suffer if you don’t give your main character a distinct feature like this, it is usually a good bet—especially if you think your story could ever conceivably be adapted into a visual medium, like a comic, animation, or film. That character could become iconic. People may just see your character somewhere and that alone could motivate them to read or watch the whole story. As another plus, it could give you a cool opportunity for your story’s cover. 

How to Describe a Character’s Face

When describing a character’s face, the easiest way to do that is to first break the face down into its essential parts: the eyes, the mouth, the nose, and the facial structure.

So let’s start with the eyes since they are the focal point of the face. Stay away from the descriptions you’ve heard a million times, like “piercing” or “doe-eyed.” The eyes are the window to the soul, and they can tell a reader a lot about a character. Instead of “piercing,” try “icy” or “sharp,” and instead of “doe-eyed,” try “wide,” “innocent,” or “full of wonder/awe.” The goal is to describe the character in a unique way to make it more interesting to read, while still creating a vivid image of that character. 

You can describe the shape, color, and depth of a character’s eyes, but you should be careful not to rely on insensitive generalizations. For example, instead of “Asian” eyes, use “almond-shaped” or “mono-lid.” Not all Asian people have mono-lids, so simply using the word “Asian” to describe the character’s eyes doesn’t actually narrow down what they look like. 

That goes for all the other features of the face, too. Though it is true that some features are more prominent in certain races, nothing is inherent. You shouldn’t rely on the character’s race or ethnic background alone to be the basis of your description. Saying that a character is Japanese or Jamaican without giving other details doesn’t do any more for the character’s description than saying they are European or white. Doing this only encourages your readers to stereotype your characters, even if that wasn’t your intention. 

With that said, don’t get too caught up in describing every detail of a character’s face. Give the most important information, such as the eyes, face shape, scars, and other notable details or imperfections, then move on. If a character has an exaggerated feature, such as a large nose or bushy eyebrows, then that’s important to mention too.

How to Describe a Character’s Hair

There are lots of different types of hair colors, textures, thicknesses, and shines, so try not to make all your characters have the same kind of hair—unless they’re related or part of a small, isolated community, of course. Hair can be curly and blond, sleek and black, coily and auburn, and even dyed wild colors. Making your characters’ hair more distinct will make them easier for readers to visualize, especially if you introduce many characters at one time. 

Beyond the basics, you can use words to describe a character’s hair that reflects who they are as a person. For example, describing a character’s hair as springy or bouncy could indicate the character is upbeat and moves excitedly. Slick, greasy, or wispy hair could suggest an untrustworthy or sneaky character. The words you use to describe the character’s hair will be subliminally applied to the character themself. 

How to Describe a Character’s Clothes

Clothing is an important element of self-expression, and what your character decides to wear can reflect a lot about them. However, unlike with the character’s face, you should not spend a lot of time describing their outfit. For one thing, they’re probably going to change their outfit at some point in the story—likely more than once. Secondly, readers just won’t care unless you give them a good reason to. 

If you want to describe what your character is wearing, make sure to keep it short. If it’s just a simple way of helping the reader visualize the character’s style, present the information objectively and in only a paragraph or two, such as: 

“She wore short-shorts and a denim jacket, and pink thigh-high socks that she had to keep pulling up because they always slipped down to her knees. Her tennis-shoes were white and bulky, as was the belt bag she wore off to one side. This free, laidback style was completed by the two messy buns her faded purple hair was pulled up into.”

However, there are a few times in which you can use clothing to explore more complex ideas in the story. For example:

• An article of clothing might have special significance to a character. It could have been handed down from a relative, it could be a favorite shirt, or it could be meaningful in other ways. That would merit drawing more attention to it. 
• An article of clothing might have special significance to the story. This could be a type of ceremonial outfit, a piece of magical armor, or something along those lines. That would require a more thorough in-depth description of the item. 
• An article of clothing may be unfamiliar to most of your readers, such as a specific cultural outfit or an unusual costume, in which case a descriptive explanation could help illustrate what it looks like. 
• A particular outfit could draw attention to a character, such as an attractive or surprising outfit, that could merit taking more time to describe it (and explain why it garners the character extra attention). 

How to Describe a Character’s Body

Describing a character’s body is fairly straightforward. Like with many other aspects of a character’s appearance, there are a few methods you can use to approach describing their body. You could take the objective approach, which would do just fine in most cases, or you could toy with your readers’ perceptions. 

I’ll start out with a word of caution. Too many times, I’ve seen unrealistic descriptions of characters’ bodies. Whether it’s a waist that’s impossibly thin or muscles like a bodybuilder on a teenager, people tend to push the boundaries of what the human body is even capable of. You need to keep your characters within the limits of what’s actually possible, unless you have a good reason for doing otherwise (genetically modified supersoldier, not actually human at all, etc). 

Now, as with some other aspects of the character’s appearance, you can get away with a simple, objective description, like “tall and muscular” or “short and curvy.” Honestly, that’s usually all you’ll need to do. However, bodies are commonly associated with physical attractiveness, and if attraction is the point of your description, you need to take a different approach. 

Writing about attraction is tough (which is why I go more in-depth about how to write about attraction in my other article, Romance 101: How to Write Characters Falling in Love ). You’ll want to highlight the positives of the character’s body—the elements of them that have caught your protagonist’s attention. Whether it’s biceps, legs, or a large chest, you’ll want to describe it in detail, as well as highlight what it is about them that has the protagonist so interested. Here’s an example:

“He was tall and sturdy, and even in this relaxed environment, his pose held power. The way his shirt stretched taut around his shoulders when he shifted snagged and held my attention—I couldn’t help but stare. Did he pick that shirt on purpose? He had to know the thin fabric clung close to his body, showing off every rippling muscle underneath…” 

How to Describe a Character’s Posture and Body Language

Body language is an often overlooked element of describing a character, but you should give it some thought even if you don’t intend to draw a lot of attention to it in the story. How does your character stand? How do they emote? Do they gesture when they speak? Do they fidget? Try to envision what they look like when they are waiting, actively engaged in a passionate conversation, and when they are uncomfortable. 

People move in different ways, even if they aren’t thinking about it. Come up with a list of movements and behaviors that are typical for the character, and utilize those movements to make dull scenes and conversations more interesting. Instead of just dialogue, you can give readers more to imagine as your character shifts their weight, runs their hand through their hair, or twists the hem of their shirt. This can also help to establish the tone of the conversation.  

A person’s body, personality, and mood will all influence how they move. If you establish a baseline for how the character stands and behaves when they are in a neutral mindset, this will help you keep them consistent over time by casually mentioning their body language throughout the story. As a bonus, it can also help you tip readers off if you want them to notice that something is bothering the character. If you have established that a character is pretty relaxed in most situations, readers will instantly notice if they exhibit anxious body language even if you don’t draw a lot of attention to it. 

How to Describe an Attractive Character

Describing an attractive character isn’t all that different from describing any other character. You still shouldn’t make them flawless, but you can put off mentioning their more negative qualities until later—especially if another character is looking at them through rose-colored glasses . 

One recommendation that I have for describing a character who is supposed to be extremely attractive is to keep their description vague. Beauty is subjective, so each reader is going to have a different idea of what “attractive” means. By all means, describe the basics of their appearance, such as hair color, eye color, skin tone, and whatnot, but don’t dive deep into the shape of their features. This will leave a little bit up to the reader’s imagination, and they will fill in the gaps in the character’s description with the traits that they find most attractive. 

Another helpful tip is to utilize the reactions of background characters to establish that the character is, in fact, attractive. Other people staring at the character or nudging and whispering to each other about them would help your reader understand that the character is good-looking, and alter their mental image of them accordingly. 

The Importance of Creating Vivid Visual Descriptions for your Characters

Creating vivid visual descriptions for your characters is incredibly important for a number of reasons. For one thing, being able to imagine the characters will help draw your readers into the story and immerse them in the world. Additionally, by giving your characters more distinct appearances, they will stand out more from each other, and from characters in other stories. The more complex and interesting the character, the more likely they are to stick in a reader’s mind for years after they finish reading the story. 

Good luck with writing your descriptions! I know you’ll write something great.

How do you write good character description? 5 techniques

In classic stories, characters often step off the page from their first introduction, fully realized. How do you write good character description that reveals enough to hook readers? Try these 5 techniques:

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1. Give character description via action

Writer’s who are still developing their craft often give ‘laundry list’ description. This is where a character’s physical attributes appear in a list, such as:

‘She had green eyes, long, tawny hair, a scruffy tracksuit that was stained, and a loud laugh.’

This may not be terrible, as far as descriptions go. Yet when you introduce every character using a list of what attributes they have, we start to see the author’s presence behind the story’s stage curtains.

One way to vary your character descriptions is to drop in descriptive details during actions . For example, for the same character above, we could write:

She looked up from dusting fallen lunch off her scruffy tracksuit, and gazed across the university cafeteria, towards where I was sitting, trying not to stand out. In that moment I noticed how piercing her green eyes were.

Here, a narrating character’s in-the-moment perception of another character’s actions drops in descriptive elements. It also, at the same time, reveals a little about the observer.

Framing description relevant to a person’s actions make us notice the writer’s device a little less. Actions sweep us up in the scene. Description becomes incidental to what’s going on. This makes it stick out as  a storytelling device a little less.

2. Use figurative language such as simile and metaphor

Figurative language such as simile (comparing objects using ‘like’ or ‘as though’) and metaphor (stating two unlike objects are the same) is effective for describing qualities and appearances . For example:

His dopey expression made him look as though he was always half-sedated.

Her thin, uptight mouth was a door on a latch, poised to shut fast at any sign of trouble or disagreement and stay that way ’til the coast was clear.

The first example (simile) conveys a character’s sleepy, befuddled appearance.

The second (a metaphor) gives us associations by stating one thing is another. The stand-in object (the latched door) tells us something about the first, the character’s mouth (in this case, the image suggests a mistrustful and conflict-averse person).

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3. Use physical details for personality, not only visuals

A common feature of amateur writing is to over-rely on describing eye and hair colour .

Using these physical details doesn’t tell us much about a person, beyond personality elements revealed by details such as what sort of haircut the person has. (For example, a quirky, avant-garde hairstyle could suggest a creative, edgy or bohemian personality.)

Examples of facial description with personality

Consider these character description examples:

Her peroxide job has gone wrong, so that her hair has turned a strange yellow colour, standing out in angry spikes from her head. But more than this, something has changed inside her, which you can see from a long way off. She seems to burn with a luminous white light. Her face is knotted and anxious, bunched in on itself, and it takes her a long time to notice him. Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room  (2010), p. 149

Two of the boys wore glasses, curiously enough the same kind: tiny, old-fashioned, with round steel rims. The larger of the two – and he was quite large, well over six feet – was dark-haired, with a square jaw and coarse, pale skin. He might have been handsome had his features been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992), p. 18.

Each of these examples gives an idea of character, of who the people are.

Galgut’s example describes his narrator’s volatile friend whom he travels with in India. The description gives clues to her personality . Her changeable nature (frequent hair dyeing), the intensity of her emotions (‘angry spikes’ and her seeming ‘to burn’). Her face is ‘bunched in on itself’ and ‘knotted and anxious’. The overarching, immediate effect is of a troubled, vulnerable and scattered person.

Tartt’s character description conveys the world her characters inhabit. As classics students, they have a love of the old-fashioned. Tartt also uses shadowy suppositions (one ‘might have been handsome’) to layer personality over immediate appearance. Her descriptions show how mannerisms, facial expressions, and personal tics modify the raw physical facts of people’s appearances.

4. Combine physical descriptions with movement and gesture

A big part of how to write good character descriptions is understanding how physical appearance combines with movement, habits and tics . For example, a character may be beautiful, but roll theirs eyes constantly. This gives them a sullen, negative appearance that limits others’ awareness of their beauty.

In English, we have urban slang terms such as ‘resting bitch face’ (to describe someone whose neutral facial expression looks mean). These suggest how small details such as the faces we often make can shape our impressions of people. Sometimes accurately, sometimes misleadingly.

Movement and gesture in physical description can thus surprise readers. People aren’t always what they first appear. A very elderly lady seated at a restaurant table might surprise the reader when she stands up and strides across the room. We’re surprised by the strength and energy that gives her the aura of a person thirty years younger.

Think of what movement can suggest about characters. The example above could indicate, for example, that the lady was a professional ballet dancer for 30 years. Her description shows she has good posture and other physical benefits of years of dance with her. Her movement itself tells a story.

5. Use character description to reveal the observer, too

Good character description often tells us about more than the person described. It tells us something about the viewpoint narrator doing the describing, too. For example, it could tell us:

• Whether the narrator is judgmental, critical, or kind
• The nature of the observer’s interest (for example, whether they like or dislike the person they describe, or even have romantic interest)
• How observant they are and what their focus is (what do they pick up on, and what do they miss?)

Examples of character descriptions that describe observers

Consider these examples where one character’s description of another reveals a little about the describer:

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what that expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-61), pp. 7-8

The waitress had a black dress and a white cap and eyebrows plucked to thin curves, and a red mouth shiny as jam. She called my father Captain Chase and he called her Agnes. By this, and by the way he leaned his elbows on the table, I realized he must already be familiar with this place. Agnes said was this his little girl, and how sweet; she threw me a glance of dislike. She brought him his coffee almost immediately, wobbling a little on her high heels, and when she set it down she touched his hand briefly. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2001), p. 103

How character descriptions reveal the narrator

In the first example, the lead character of Dickens’ famous coming-of-age novel, Pip, describes his sister. The way Pip describes Mrs Joe reveals the retrospective insight he’s gained with age. It also reveals his wry, subtle sense of humour about the past.

Pip’s description reveals his younger self’s relative ignorance (he doesn’t understand the expression ‘to raise by hand’). It also reveals he is aware of how mean his sister was, letting everyone know raising him was such a chore.

Yet while Pip describes Mrs Joe’s tough, somewhat unloving character, he does so with characterful wry humour, too. For example, in how he jokes that Mrs Joe also ‘raised [her husband] by hand’ because she would hit both him and Pip. This mix of honest reflection and making light of the situation suggests the wisdom, forgiveness and perspective that may come with age.

Iris’s description of getting a soda with her father in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin conveys the perspective of a child in the process of losing her innocence. Her description of the waitress’s over-familiar gestures shows a child’s dawning realization of adults’ (mis)behaviours.

Atwood shows Iris at a moment when she is recognizing the double-ness of people’s words and actions (the waitress calling her ‘sweet’ to butter up her father, while covertly also looking at her with dislike). The scene is just as revealing of the process of Iris’s ‘growing up’ as it is of the characters she describes.

Develop detailed character profiles using the ‘Characters’ section of our story outlining tool .

Related Posts:

• How to write a plot outline: 7 plotting techniques
• Character description: 7 ways to avoid weak imagery
• Character description examples: Creating people not…
• Tags character description

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

7 replies on “How do you write good character description? 5 techniques”

This was help full but you could make ten instead of five parts to the help.

Thank you for the suggestion, Kian, we may do so soon. Thanks for reading our blog!

Thanks for the information.

It’s a pleasure, Pavani. Thank you for reading.

Oh my gosh, such fantastic advice and tips. At some point, I started to write just a description of the face of a main character . . . 6 pages later! . . . I’ve just written almost an entire chapter which had never even entered my mind when jotting down scenes and ideas within the story . . . I’m so glad I saw your blog! Thank you!

Hi Janet, that’s lovely to hear. I’m glad you’re finding our blog helpful. Happy writing ?

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• Writing Techniques

How to Describe a Character's Looks Well

Last Updated: May 30, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Grant Faulkner, MA and by wikiHow staff writer, Danielle Blinka, MA, MPA . Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story, a literary magazine. Grant has published two books on writing and has been published in The New York Times and Writer’s Digest. He co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing, and has a M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.  There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 1,018,102 times.

Dynamic, well-rounded characters hook readers and drive the plot of your story. However, describing your character well can be a challenge. With a little extra work, you can ensure your descriptions will engage your reader. Start by getting to know your character, then consider how their character traits might impact their description. Next, pull out the best details about your character to write your description.

Writing Help

Getting to Know Your Character

• You can create your own character sheet or use a template, which you can find online.
• Start with the basics, such as height, build, hair color, and eye color. Then, determine other physical details, such as how they stand or what unique features they have. Next, consider how their background, interests, and lifestyle impact their description. [1] X Research source
• For your main characters, provide as much detail as possible on your character sheet. Although you won’t include all of this information in your story, it’s important to know your characters well.

Grant Faulkner, MA

Consider their deeper motivations. As the author, you want to know what's driving your character. Your character really isn't just a compilation of character descriptions or physical descriptions; your character is a soul moving through the world. What does that character want and why can't he or she get it? Describe the obstacles blocking your character from reaching what they desire.

• This is a more freeform way to develop your character.
• It’s okay to use more than one technique. You might find it helpful to make a sketch of your character and then also create a character sheet.

• If you use reference photos, collect them in a file, either in digital or hard copy form.

• For example, your character might have a mole shaped like a heart, a large tooth gap, or a noticeable limp.
• Quirks help make your main characters more relatable, and you can also use quirks to quickly characterize side characters.

• A diamond tattoo below his lash line distracted from his aquamarine eyes.
• Her legs wobbled like stilts.
• When the wind blows, her hair engulfs her face like a flame.

• For instance, the most common cliche for introducing a character’s description is the “mirror technique,” which is when you have your character describe themself in a mirror.
• Examples of description cliches include “red as a rose,” “cold as ice,” or “blind as a bat.”

Incorporating Character Traits in Your Description

• For example, a character who shuffles will look and act differently from a character who saunters or strides.
• Maybe your character fidgets or texts a lot. Perhaps they pace around while they talk to people or walk with their head down so they aren’t noticed. Include these types of movement.

• For instance, a spiky pink mohawk might signify your character is a rebel, while a salon blowout might indicate your character is a queen bee type.
• You might also use hair style to show your character has different sides to their personality. For example, your main character might be a successful CEO with a sophisticated bob, but they might have a hidden purple streak dyed into their hair or a side undercut that lets them switch their style from board room to rebel.

• A serious character might wear business attire.
• An artist might wear paint-splattered clothes.
• Your rock star might wear a leather jacket.
• A side character who’s a jock might wear sports attire.

Writing Your Description

• For instance, literary writers usually give less description of their characters. They might tell the reader just enough information for them to get an idea about what the character looks like. For example, "A gruff voice sounded from somewhere inside the ragged beard."
• On the other hand, genre writers often include more details. For example, a fantasy or sci fi writer would likely give a full description of a character who is non-human, such as a cyborg or elf. You might write, "A metal plate covered half her head, exposing the wires beneath it whenever her jaw moved. A blue eye stared out from the right socket, but her left eye swarmed and zoomed like a camera lens. A long nose pointed down like an arrow over her thin, robotic lips."

• “Thick black roots contrasted with the platinum blond shade of her curls.” - This tells the reader that the character dyes her hair but hasn’t been able to keep up with the style.
• “He wore a sweatshirt advertising a pizza joint that closed three years back. It hung on his lanky frame like a coat hangs on a rack.” - This shows that the character is wearing outdated clothes that don’t fit him, probably because he can’t afford new clothes.

• For example, you don’t want to say, “Claire has long, brown hair and brown eyes.” Instead, you might write, “Dark curls fell over Claire’s face, masking her amber eyes.”
• Metaphors and similes both compare two seemingly unlike things, but similes use “like” or “as” to make the comparisons more obvious.
• Personification gives human characteristics to a non-human animal or thing. For example, “her eyes dodged his questions.”

• Use as few words as possible to get the job done.
• For example, it's okay to write, "She dyed her hair the color of ink because it made her feel like an artist." You don't need to over-explain like this: "Her inky hair shadowed her pale skin like an oil slick on water. Whenever she looked in the mirror, she saw a romantic poet caught in a different time, making her feel like the artist she always wanted to be."

• Synecdoche is especially useful for side characters!
• Think about the strong traits that easily identify your character, such as a pink mohawk, a pointy chin, a hunched back, a distinct walk, a unique smell, etc. This trait can be positive or negative, depending on the character. Use this trait when referring to the character.
• For example, "When I saw the pink mohawk glide past my window, I knew my neighbor was arriving home."

• Appeal to the sense of smell by mentioning how your character smells. For instance, “Mrs. Hamilton always smelled like fresh baked cookies.”
• Include the sense of touch by mentioning the texture of your character’s scar, or the silky softness of their skin.
• Activate the sense of sound by relating the sound of your character’s voice to a chirping bird or the growl of an engine.
• Appeal to their sense of sight by describing your character's clothing and hairstyle.
• Whenever you can, appeal to the reader's sense of taste. For example, when two characters kiss.

• For example, "The word that best describes Luna is long. She has a long face, long arms, and long legs that look like stilts."

• For example, you might describe your character over the course of a scene rather than all at once.

Community Q&A

• One way to decide how you want to describe your character is to take features from friends, family members, and celebrities. Simply find features that suggest traits to you and create an amalgamation. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• Consider sketching your character before describing him or her. This might help you figure out how to best describe the person. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 1
• Don’t over-describe your characters or do it all at once. It’s best to pepper your description across several paragraphs. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 1

• You might use a thesaurus to find a better word to say what you want to say. However, use your thesaurus sparingly. It’s best to give your descriptions using words you'd normally use. Thanks Helpful 5 Not Helpful 0
• Two notable exceptions to this rule is using the words "olive" and "peach".

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://writershelpingwriters.net/2010/04/the-writers-bane-describing-a-characters-physical-appearance/
• ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/20/how-to-write-premliminary-outline-day-one
• ↑ https://writingcooperative.com/the-right-way-to-write-character-appearance-6c43f4cf012b
• ↑ https://penandthepad.com/describe-way-character-looks-story-21613.html
• ↑ https://www.carvezine.com/from-the-editor/10-tips-for-writing-physical-descriptions-of-your-characters.html
• ↑ https://thewritepractice.com/purple-prose/
• ↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/beautiful-literary-terms/

About This Article

To describe a character's looks well, start by making a rough sketch of what the character looks like in your mind. Then, develop a list of a few important details that you want to include in your description. When you're ready to write about your character, focus on aspects that help to add detail about the character, like old, ratty clothes on a peasant, or battle scars on a knight. Utilize figurative language to help your description flow, and avoid giving too much detail by focusing on 3-4 main physical traits. For tips on using a synecdoche to describe a character, scroll down! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Home / Book Writing / 17 Character Development Exercises for Writers

17 Character Development Exercises for Writers

Character development exercises are short forms of deliberate practice to improve your writing skills and round out your characters.

They are typically not used in the final novel, but are little extras that help you understand the personalities that you are writing.

Because for some of us, nailing down that perfect character can be hard. And to help with that, we’ve assembled 17 different exercises to improve your characters.

• Why character exercises are important
• A list of 17 different exercises that you can implement today
• Examples and advice to improve your characters

Table of contents

• Why Are Character Development Exercises Important?
• Exercise #1: Write a FULL Description
• Exercise #2: Play Dress Up
• Exercise #3: Write a Description Scene Through the Character’s Eyes
• Exercise #4: Practice Showing Emotion
• Exercise #5: Write a “Slice of Life” Episode
• Exercise #6: Write Other People Gossiping About Your Character
• Exercise #7: Write a Progression Short Story
• Exercise #8: Draw the Character
• Exercise #9: Create a Character Profile
• Exercise #10: Conduct a Character Interview
• Exercise #11: Play the “Why” Game
• Exercise #12: Create a Character Based on Someone You Know
• Exercise #13: Imagine What Happens Before and After the Novel
• Exercise #14: Put Them in Horrible Situations (Muahahahahah)
• Exercise #15: Create a Timeline
• Exercise #16: Do a Little Fan-fiction
• Exercise #17: Use Character Writing Prompts

So why use a character development exercise in the first place?

This may be a valid question, especially for authors like myself, who just want to dive into the writing and let the characters unfold as I write.

But honestly, a little work up front can save you a load of headache afterward.

Running through a handful of these exercises will help you to:

• Understand your character’s emotions
• Give you practice writing in their voice and from their point of view
• Find out what sets them apart from other characters
• Flesh them out to create round and dynamic characters
• Establish the relationship between your characters and the setting, or other characters
• Deliberate practice of the process to create complex and well-written characters

In short, it’s a great way to deliberately practice writing and reduces the need to go back and do extensive revisions on your characters.

That said, this might not be the best thing to do if you’re a pantser and just want to dive in and discover your characters along the way. But it can be a great tool in your author tool belt.

Formatting Has Never Been Easier

Write and format professional books with ease.  Never before has creating formatted books been easier.

So without further ado, here are 17 of our best picks for character development exercises. 

Exercise #1 : Write a FULL Description

When it comes to writing characters, most of us focus on the facial features, things like hair color, eye color, etc.

A great way to begin getting to know your character is to do a full description of them. In a book, we might not do this to the extent you might in a creative writing exercise, which is why it’s good to practice here.

Here are some things to consider: 

• Skin/hair/eye color
• Do they have any warts or moles?
• What is their hair style?
• What is their build?
• Do they have any scars, tattoos, etc.
• What is their general complexion. Is their skin smooth and silky, rough and calloused, or even bruised and battered?
• What default facial expression do they have?
• What does he/she smell like?

Exercise #2 : Play Dress Up

What we choose to wear says a lot about a person. Someone wearing an extravagant French-style outfit from the 18th century will give you a completely different impression than a cut business suit from the 21st century.

The problem is that most authors, when they’re writing about their characters, often forget to add a lot of detail about the clothes they are wearing. It’s easy to see these things in your mind and forget that your readers don’t see what you see. They see what you write.

One way to help overcome this oversight is to continue the exercise above, but focus on clothing.

And don’t just focus on any one type, because your protagonist will most likely use several types of clothing throughout the course of your novel. Here are just some examples:

• Travel clothing
• Clothes for a night on the town
• Clothes for wilderness survival
• Combat wear

Exercise #3 : Write a Description Scene Through the Character’s Eyes

Ideally, every character should experience the same thing differently, depending on their background, their wants and desires, and their tastes.

Additionally, great prose is often written from the perspective of the character making the observation.

For example, let’s say you have two people, one who has grown up in a desert their whole life, where water is scarce, and the other who grew up in a place where water was plentiful. 

Imagine these two people on a hot day, observing a third person splashing water on their face. If you’re writing from the first character’s perspective, you could describe this as “and the man took a handful of water and wasted it on his face.” The second person might describe it this way, “I watched as the man poured the cool liquid and splashed it all over his face. I wish I were him right now.”

Do you see the difference there? In one, the character sees using water in one way as a waste, and for the other, it’s something to be sought after. 

Exercise #4 : Practice Showing Emotion

We’ve all heard the adage to “show, don’t tell,” but what does this really look like for most characters?

This is something that really only comes with practice. Once you’ve done it enough times, you’ll recognize instances where you’re saying things like “he felt hungry,” and can replace them with something like “He winced and put a hand to his stomach as it growled, and he swallowed hard.”

Character emotion is one of these areas where showing rather than telling can really enhance your novel.

Exercise #5 : Write a “Slice of Life” Episode

There are a lot of scenes in a book, and most of them have a purpose. That said, there are many scenes that probably occur in that character’s life, but that we don’t talk about because they’re not important for the story.

However, you as the author should have an idea of what happens in these less important moments.

Some examples of a “slice of life” episode might include:

• Having dinner with family
• Going to the bathroom
• The morning routine
• A conversation with a co-worker
• Late-night conversations with a spouse
• Cooking a meal
• Going on vacation
• Playing with their kids
• Coming home a little too drunk
• Visiting a museum

Exercise #6 : Write Other People Gossiping About Your Character

Very often, we learn more from others about ourselves that we might not have known on our own. Others can provide unique perspectives, and in some cases expose huge biases (on both sides).

For example, a proud character might not realize that he/she is proud, but it’s easy for an outside observer to spot this.

Exercise #7 : Write a Progression Short Story

In real life, people change a lot, and characters should change in stories too (most of the time). 

A great way to show this is to write a short story that examines the character at different parts of her/his life. You can focus on key moments in their life, but you could also just follow exercise #5 and focus on a few more everyday events.

The purpose of this exercise is to show how that person may have changed. Do they view the world differently as a working adult, vs as a teenager? A child? An elderly person?

What about before or after experiencing some kind of trauma?

Exercise #8 : Draw the Character

I’ll be honest, I’m not an artist. But I am a visual person, and getting some solid visuals of the character can be a huge boost in helping me understand them.

If you’re like me and really have no design skills , then finding a few photos is fine.

I’d recommend several photos though, since one might not be enough. You could have some for their face and general appearance, one for their clothes and how they look, etc.

If you know a program like Photoshop, you could even crop these together to get an even better sense of what you character looks like.

This is a great exercise for understanding the feel of a character, which is often harder to put into words.

Exercise #9 : Create a Character Profile

Imagine you work for the FBI, and you have to draft up a dossier about your character. What might that look like?

Fortunately, we’ve done a whole article about this topic, so you should definitely check that out, and also don’t forget to pick up our character profile template, which can easily help you through this process.

If you want a thorough process to identify the character’s appearance, personality, background, and more, this is the way to go. 

The best aspects to focus on are the flaws, motivations, and fears of your character. What prompts them to action? Understanding these things will help you get at the core of your character’s personality traits.

Exercise #10 : Conduct a Character Interview

Imagine you sat in a darkened room, across the table from you is your character. You can ask them anything, they won’t be offended, and they will understand the question.

What do you ask them about?

Writing a character interview is almost like writing yourself into a short story where you get to personally meet your character and ask them questions.

This is huge for helping you understand the character’s voice, but also a good strategy for building solid character backstory and character traits.

To help, we’ve already assembled over 200 character development questions that can aid you in this process.

Exercise #11 : Play the “Why” Game

This goes along with the idea of an interview, but sometimes in order to dig really deep into the motivations of your character, you’ve got to ask why.

Is your character aggressive? Ask them why. 

From there you might find out that his mother shouted at him as a kid, and he saw his parents fight a lot. Ask why.

You might learn that his father had a drinking problem and it meant that his mother took it out on him. Ask why.

From there, it might come out that his father had lost a lot of money in a business deal, leading him to turn to drink.

I hope you get the idea. The more you ask why, the more you’ll dig deeper into your character’s past, and the better you will understand them.

Exercise #12 : Create a Character Based on Someone You Know

This can be a little dangerous, because to be honest, most of the people we know are not that interesting. And we also want to avoid lawsuits for defamation if the comparison is too obvious.

That said, the people we know can be a huge inspiration to pick and choose ideas to incorporate into your characters.

For example, my own father and uncle have a really fun way of talking to each other. They’re always ribbing on each other and calling eachother weird, made-up names. You can tell that they love each other, but it’s an uncommon way of showing it.

This might make a good relationship between two people in a book.

Exercise #13 : Imagine What Happens Before and After the Novel

The writer is mostly concerned with what happens during the plot of her novel. But if written well, a character will feel like they exist long before and long after the pages of the book.

So it’s a good idea to try dreaming up what happens to these characters in that time. 

It can be dramatic, or it can be mundane. Impactful, or ordinary. It doesn’t matter much. All that matters is that you have a past and future in mind for that character (unless you plan to kill them off of course).

And who knows, you might even come up with some good ideas for other books involving those characters.

Exercise #14 : Put Them in Horrible Situations (Muahahahahah)

I’ve heard it said that you should basically put your characters through hell in a story, and never let up.

While this is good advice, it’s not always practical. That said, putting your characters through the meat-grinder is a great way to learn how they react to conflict.

These scenarios don’t have to be trials you will actually use in your novel. These are just different ways to put your character in pain and see how they react (I know I sound like a very unethical scientist, don't @ me).

Here are some possibilities:

• The loss of a loved one
• A diagnosis of cancer
• The loss of a limb
• Getting tortured
• Breaking up with the love of their life
• Losing everything they own
• Being betrayed by a friend

Exercise #15 : Create a Timeline

Sometimes it’s hard to keep every part of a character’s life straight. That’s where a timeline can be helpful.

A timeline is a simple list of events in the character’s life, though they can get more complex and interesting, and you can even put some design skills to work if you want.

But timelines only have to be a simple list of events. They can include events from before their birth to their death, or they can be focused on a specific period of their life.

It will depend on the character and the story you will want to tell.

Exercise #16 : Do a Little Fan-fiction

When we’re writing a story, we might not have a full grasp on it yet, and that’s where writing fan fiction can help.

Imagine your character interacting with characters from a story you already know? Imagine the ultimate crossover between your story and your favorite franchise.

For example, what Hogwarts house would your character belong in? What might it look like when he/she is sorted and interacts with other characters in that house or other characters from the Harry Potter books.

It’s a great way to lean on characters you already know, to help unveil more about the characters you’re trying to discover.

Exercise #17 : Use Character Writing Prompts

There are a bunch of character-related creative writing prompts out there, and many of them can be quite helpful in getting your brain to think outside of the box.

In theory, we could have a list much longer than 17 if we wanted to include more of these prompts, but that would end up being too much.

Instead, I recommend this post , or checking out our list of character questions to give you ideas.

Final Thoughts on Character Development Exercises

If you’ve made it far, first of all, well done.

Second of all, you might be a little overwhelmed, but don’t worry. This list is not meant to be a checklist for everything you should do to expand on your characters.

Instead, this is a handful of ideas that you can take (or leave) and use them to better understand your characters.

As you apply these exercises, I can pretty much guarantee that you will grow as a writer, become more familiar with your characters, and increase your chances of having a great dynamic character in your books.

Let us know how it goes!

Jason Hamilton

When I’m not sipping tea with princesses or lightsaber dueling with little Jedi, I’m a book marketing nut. Having consulted multiple publishing companies and NYT best-selling authors, I created Kindlepreneur to help authors sell more books. I’ve even been called “The Kindlepreneur” by Amazon publicly, and I’m here to help you with your author journey.

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Master List of Physical Description for Writers

I created this list of ways to describe people

because physical description, when done well, helps the readers see characters in their minds. But sometimes when you’re in the middle of writing, it can be hard to think of physical adjectives and distinguishing features for characters. I find that describing facial features can be especially tricky!

That’s why I created this long list of physical characteristics. It’s kind of like a character description generator, and it’ll help you when you’re trying to think of how to describe a character’s appearance.

Eyes – General

 For all the words about describing facial features, I’m focusing more on physical descriptions rather than emotional expressions, though there’s a little crossover! You can also check out my long list of facial expressions.

heavy-lidded

fringed with long lashes

with sweeping eyelashes

with thick eyelashes

By the way, this post on how to describe (and not describe) the eyes of an Asian character  is really great. Check it out.

Eyes – Color

Brown is the most common eye color by far. Green is quite rare.

chocolate brown

cocoa brown

coffee brown

sienna brown

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cornflower blue

Arctic blue

glacial blue

crystal blue

electric blue

slate blue / slate gray

storm blue / storm gray

silver / silver gray

concrete gray

gunmetal gray

Skin – Color

Josh Roby made a great chart of skin tones and descriptor words, and I got a lot of these words from him. You can get that here .

The quote from N.K. Jemisin interested me: “I get really tired of seeing African-descended characters described in terms of the goods that drove, and still drive, the slave trade—coffee, chocolate, brown sugar. There’s some weird psychosocial baggage attached to that.” 

cream / creamy

rose / rosy

Skin – General

Some of these are better for the face, and some are better for other parts of the body.

translucent

luminescent

with large pores

weather-beaten

Face – Structure

heart-shaped

high forehead

broad forehead

prominent brow ridge

protruding brow bone

sharp cheekbones

high cheekbones

angular cheekbones

hollow cheeks

jutting chin

pointed chin

receding chin

double chin

dimple in chin

visible Adam’s apple

People don’t write much about noses, but they can be distinguishing features for characters!

Cupid’s bow

straight teeth

gap between teeth

gleaming white teeth

Facial Hair (or lack thereof)

clean-shaven

smooth-shaven

mutton-chop sideburns

a few days’ growth of beard

five o’ clock shadow

Hair – General

I threw a few hairstyles in here, though not many.

shoulder-length

neatly combed

slicked down / slicked back

buzzed / buzz cut

widow’s peak

Hair – Color

There are some repeats here from the eye color section!

salt and pepper

charcoal gray

brown sugar

tawny brown

toffee brown

Titian-haired

strawberry blonde

butterscotch

sandy blond

fair-haired

Body Type – General

average height

barrel-chested

heavy / heavy-set

pot-bellied

full-figured

leggy / long-legged

broad-shouldered

sloping shoulders

stubby fingers

long fingers

ragged nails

grimy fingernails

ink-stained

This list and many more are in my book Master Lists for Writers: Thesauruses, Plot Ideas, Character Traits, Names, and More . Check it out if you’re interested!

And if you don’t want to miss future writing posts, follow the blog, if you aren’t already — there’s a place to sign up on the lefthand side of the blog. Thanks for stopping by, and happy writing!

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127 thoughts on “ master list of physical description for writers ”.

Thanks, Bryn! This list has sparked a spark in my brain. I haven’t seen one of those for a while. I was getting worried I’d lost my flint!

I’m so glad you like it!

I love this, do you mind if we share on our blog WritersLife.org ?

Thanks for the positive feedback! You can’t reproduce it on your blog, but you can share an excerpt of 200 words or less plus a link to my site.

As a new novel writer all I can say is thank very much for sharing with us this wonderful list.

Ah you’re welcome! Thanks for visiting!

This is amazing! Thank you very much!

Thanks for the kind words–glad it seems helpful!

Reblogged this on looselyjournalying.

Reblogged this on Of Fancy & Creativity .

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Aw thank you for this it helped so much! I’m 15 and I’m trying to write a novel and this was sooooo helpful so thank you a billion 🙂 Best wishes.

Ah you’re welcome! Thanks for stopping by. Good for you for working on a novel, and good luck–I bet it will go great!

Hi, Bryn Thank you for doing these lists. They helped me a lot. Can you make a list on how to describe emotions like sadness or anger.

It’s funny you should ask 🙂 There’s a list like that in my book MASTER LISTS FOR WRITERS coming out this fall! I haven’t officially announced it yet, but hey 🙂

You can get a free copy when it comes out if you agree to give it an honest review. SIgn up for my newsletter if you’re interested!

Reblogged this on Kalynn Bayron and commented: Yes! This is great!

Was just looking for this type of lists.Great work.

This is so helpful.

I love your blog, btw. Your posts are informative and/or inspirational.

Are you on any social medial where I can follow you?

Oh, thank you so much! I just checked out your blog — I love the dream casting post! http://sbhadleywilson.com/blog/pull-ideal-cast-2/

I’m @BrynDonovan on Twitter, just followed you!

VERY helpful. I need to get basic descriptions of people done and out of the way to move on with plot. This quickens any details that might have taken me a long time to think through, or strain a sentence. Yuck. I know my females characters would pay attention to lots of physical details. not so with the males. Thanks!

Oh, so glad it’s helpful! That’s always what I’m trying to do with my lists — speed things up. I hate getting stuck on a detail and losing my momentum 🙂 Thanks for stopping by!

godsent list! Bryn, I wish you more brains.

Reblogged this on Jessica Louis and commented: This list is beyond helpful. Who knew there were so many eye colors!?

Thanks Bryn your list was amazing. I’m an aspiring writer and it really helped me a lot. When I can I’m going to get a copy of your book. I think it would help me become a better writer. My genre of choice is erotic, but it is so hard to get out there, but I’m hopeful one day I will. It’s what I love to do and I’m going to keep trying.

Hi Beth! Thank you so much for the kind words. If you do get the book, I hope you like it! And good luck on writing erotica — I’m doing a “WIP Wednesday” this Wednesday where you can share a bit of your work in progress, if you like 🙂

That would be great. I have some short stories publish on a site called Literotica. I have some editing issues that I’m trying to work out, nothing a few classes wouldn’t help. How do I share my work.

I am so sorry! I missed this comment before. The next WIP Wednesday on the blog is Dec. 2… if you’re following the blog you’ll see the post! (The follow button is on the righthand side of this page.) Hope your writing’s going well 🙂

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Reblogged this on PRINCE CHARMING ISN'T HERE and commented: what an amazing list! I always have a hard time describing features! words sometimes fail me!

i loved this list! thank you so much for making it! 🙂

So glad it was helpful!

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Thank you! This is so helpful to have for reference. Occasionally I’ll have a particular word in mind and can’t think of it, and I can usually pop over here and find it right away!

I absolutely love your master lists. They have helped me so much in diversifying the words I use when I’m writing. 🙂

Ohhh thank you! That is so great to hear. 🙂 Hope your writing projects are going great!

Thank you, and they are. I’m just about to publish a works I’ve been working on for the past couple of months, which is so exciting. XD Hope all your writing projects are going great as well. 🙂

What a wonderful and thorough list Bryn. Thanks for sharing it! I will at some point ‘link back’ to this fabulous article (I’ll let you know when I do.) I’m new to your site, but will certainly be back for more! I’m fascinated to learn that you’re also a home-grown KC girl. =0) Although, I remarried and moved to California 9 years ago, KC still tugs my heart-strings.

Hey, so glad you like it! Yeah, Kansas City is a special place. Come visit anytime 🙂 And thanks for visiting my blog! — I LOVE your username, by the way. Made me smile.

thanks for following my blog!

Reblogged this on A Bundle of Cute.

Reblogged this on A Blissful Garden and commented: I find this very important!

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Reblogged this on Insideamoronsbrain and commented: Wow!!

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Thanks for sharing this list! It is amazing and so helpful !

I’m going to save this as a favorite. You always provide great information Bryn. Continue with your success.

Oh, thank you so much, Christopher! I really appreciate the kind words. So glad you like this!

This list is so complete! I haven’t worked on fiction in a long while, but lately I’ve been wanting to get back into it. I know this is going to be a great help when i sit down to create my characters!

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This is absolutely perfect for aspiring writers so that we don’t have to use Microsoft Word synonyms that tend to nit have what we’re searching for. Your introductory paragraph about readers falling in love with characters’ personalities and not theit physical attributes was spot on. Thank you thank you, thank you!

Chunny! Thank you so very much for the kind words. I’m so glad you found it helpful!!

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This is amazing! Thank you! I hope it’s alright if I use this as a reference in a blog post for character development.

Hi Jacquelyn! So glad you like it. That’s fine, just please link to the post!

I read this over and over, thank you for creating this! Can I just ask, when thinking of clothing and how to describe it, what are some things you would put? (I’m making a book draft and have never needed clothing described to me as much as now)

Thank you! It’s so important that we don’t reuse the same words too often, so this will help a lot with that problem.

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Thanks for helping me. It really made a big difference of helping me come up with something.

Hi Joseph! Sorry for the delayed reply! I’m so glad you liked it. Thanks for the kind words!

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Your book “Master Lists for Writers” has helped me incredibly. I’ve always wanted to be a romance writer but didn’t have the nerve until now. I am currently working on a short story about a college girl who is assaulted by a classmate. It was based on a dream I had a few nights ago. I haven’t developed how she gets her revenge on him. I know the story line seems dark but the dream stuck with me so much, I felt the urge to turn it into a story. Thank you again for your awesome book. What a great resource

Rhonda! Thank you so much for the kind words. I am so happy that the book is helpful, and even gladder that you’re going for it and writing! Sending you best wishes on your story!

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Great advice in this post, Bryn! Thank you.

Used this for school! It was really helpful!

Oh yay! So glad it was helpful!

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This is a great list! So comprehensive, and just what I was looking for. I struggle with physical descriptions of people and have a tendency to write the same kins of attributes. So this list is fab!

This is great!

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keep up the good work

Hey thanks 🙂

This is so helpful!!!!!

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Tiptoeing out there to publish my first book (I’ve been writing a long time). This post helped so much. Thanks!

oh my gosh, thank you! You have put a lot of effort in this list. I def appreciate it 🙂

Thank you I´m always using this when I´m creating new characters.

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Incredibly helpful! Thanks a lot :3

Thank you for sharing this!

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More extensive than my general list. My wizened goatee and elder Fu Manchu thank you for sharing your time and devotion to the craft.

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Very useful for ready reference. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mohan! So glad you liked it!

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I’ve been writing for a while, mostly for fun, but this was the one thing I could never get down, but this list is great! all around solid, and incredibly useful, I see myself using it every time I need to make a new character, good job!

You’re a legend! This is fantastic, thank you!

Hahaha, thanks for the kind words! 🙂 Glad it’s helpful!

I am following your prompts and valuable advice for writing a fantasy teen fiction novel. I think you are amazing. You might not know it but I was able to clear hundreds of my doubts through your help. Please keep up the good work and providing your valuable support to all of us upcoming writers.

Hey, thank you so much for the kind words—you made my day! It’s wonderful to hear that you’re working on YA fantasy. I’m so glad I could help, and I wish you every success!

I honestly would not recommend this as good writing advice. The focus is too much on describing someone’s physical features using analogies for food. That is not a good thing, it becomes trite and overdone. If used sparsely it’s okay but almost every word in this list is food related.

Hi, Larissa! Thanks for taking your valuable time to share your opinion.

You have done a great job preparing this Master List. Those who think such precise words for describing someone hurt their sensibilities, move on to another URL. I appreciate every bit of your effort.

Hi, Pradeep! I am so glad you like the list. Thanks so much for commenting!

Bryn, I love your master list book and use it all the time!

Ohh, thank you so much! I’m so glad it’s helpful!

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This is a godsend. I owe you my soul.

I work 20 hours per day, (regular business and writing the memoir). Just ordered the Master List–seems like having my own research assistant. I may be able to get 5 hours sleep now. Thanks

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No jaw descriptions? ;(

You saved my day with your wonderful, descriptive words! Now I’ve found the perfect features for my handsome male character. Thank you!

That is a lot of hours for books but I guess if you keep pushing it will happen.

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Hi Bryn, thanks so much for this information! I always appreciate your lists because I like comprehensive material all in one location as a reference (then if I decide to break the rules, at least I know what the rules are “supposed to be” first!). Have you considered making comprehensive lists of creative writing genre conventions (tropes, archetypes, settings, devices, etc.)?

Hello, and thank you for the valuable and useful information. I agree with Eleanore regarding the list of genre conventions. I’m more than pleased I found you website.

Thank u so much ❤️ that was so helpful

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