Conveying character description
Has anyone ever tried describing your character, and then found that you're just bullet pointing physical traits like something out of a character sheet? Oh they're tall, they're middle aged, they're bulky and muscley, they have blue eyes, blonde hair. It's tedious right? Tedious to write. Tedious to read. It's not even specific to your character? You've not listed anything that could be really used to identify them. What about their specific scars, their tattoos? It's like you've created.... wait for it... waaaait for it... a wooden plank! Complete with a drawn on smily face. Or to be honest, if you're going for the wooden plank look, the smily face is probably just a blank face.
When you're describing characters, you can't just rely solely on factual info. Yay it's accurate, but nay it's dull. You're not appealing to yourself when you write, you're trying to appeal to the people that read what you write! Granted physical descriptions can help a reader, and if they're an eight foot giant you should definitely mention it. But saying they've got blue eyes? At the very least call them sea foam blue? Anything to avoid just using a colour as a descriptive word alone. If you can make your descriptions more interesting with metaphors and similes you'll make your readers form associations and they'll attach themselves eeeeeever so slightly more to your character. Plus metaphors are pretty fun to write and have the potential to be fairly comedic.
Now, I've led us all into a trap. Frizzy hair, clean cut, chisseled chin. We've got a bunch of horrible little cliches that just make us into generic lazy writers. To get out of this trap there's only one option! Be unique. Be unique to your situation. Be unique to your character. Just be really damn unique and make sense with your uniqueness. "His beard's the colour of his belt buckle and plasters itself across his face just as the mud covers his boot." It's a bit of a basic example, but it should get across the idea that you need to thing beyond just simple colours and descriptive words.
Reinforce the strength of your descriptions. Appease to other senses and be more detailed. If you've got a poorly shaven brute, describe his beard then add on the end it's prickly to the touch? No one's gonna go around stroking it. Probably. But it's a nice thing to add right? If you are describing your clothes, you could give a few words of insight into how your ironed them to get them this way, or describe how they'd been ruffled up in a bar brawl the night before. Don't do this for all physical details. Actually you don't want to be even writing down all physical details! (except in character applications for yew roleplayers) Pick one or two physical traits and describe them only. Don't go into some paragraph of description, or copy and paste a bullet point list each time you meet a new character.
When you're describing characters, you can't just rely solely on factual info. Yay it's accurate, but nay it's dull. You're not appealing to yourself when you write, you're trying to appeal to the people that read what you write! Granted physical descriptions can help a reader, and if they're an eight foot giant you should definitely mention it. But saying they've got blue eyes? At the very least call them sea foam blue? Anything to avoid just using a colour as a descriptive word alone. If you can make your descriptions more interesting with metaphors and similes you'll make your readers form associations and they'll attach themselves eeeeeever so slightly more to your character. Plus metaphors are pretty fun to write and have the potential to be fairly comedic.
Now, I've led us all into a trap. Frizzy hair, clean cut, chisseled chin. We've got a bunch of horrible little cliches that just make us into generic lazy writers. To get out of this trap there's only one option! Be unique. Be unique to your situation. Be unique to your character. Just be really damn unique and make sense with your uniqueness. "His beard's the colour of his belt buckle and plasters itself across his face just as the mud covers his boot." It's a bit of a basic example, but it should get across the idea that you need to thing beyond just simple colours and descriptive words.
Reinforce the strength of your descriptions. Appease to other senses and be more detailed. If you've got a poorly shaven brute, describe his beard then add on the end it's prickly to the touch? No one's gonna go around stroking it. Probably. But it's a nice thing to add right? If you are describing your clothes, you could give a few words of insight into how your ironed them to get them this way, or describe how they'd been ruffled up in a bar brawl the night before. Don't do this for all physical details. Actually you don't want to be even writing down all physical details! (except in character applications for yew roleplayers) Pick one or two physical traits and describe them only. Don't go into some paragraph of description, or copy and paste a bullet point list each time you meet a new character.
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