Character description tells the reader what a person looks like, sounds like and how they move, and the best of it tells the reader who the person is in the same sentences. Each of the 24 passages below, 12 classic and 12 original, comes with the detail to study and why the observer notices it.
Read them for the method, not the vocabulary. Almost every passage here does three things: it picks a few details instead of all of them, it lets those details carry a judgment, and it chooses whose eyes the reader looks through. For the words themselves, the descriptive words list has sections on faces, voices, builds and movement; for clothes and gestures in depth, see describing clothing in writing and the mannerisms list.
| Examples | What they show | Numbers |
|---|---|---|
| ExamplesClassics that reveal character | What they showMiss Havisham, Mr. Gradgrind, Tom Buchanan, Scrooge | Numbers1–4 |
| ExamplesClassics through someone's eyes | What they showMr. Brocklehurst, Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Darcy, Anne Shirley | Numbers5–8 |
| ExamplesClassics by contrast and motion | What they showDorothea Brooke, the March sisters, Gabriel Oak, Ichabod Crane | Numbers9–12 |
| ExamplesOriginals: detail and viewpoint | What they showOne detail, an observer, motion, two kinds of contrast, possessions | Numbers13–18 |
| ExamplesOriginals: voice, senses and change | What they showA voice, a walk-on, sound and smell, a second look, no mirror, dialogue | Numbers19–24 |
Classics that reveal character
In these four, how the person looks is the argument about who they are. Each detail was chosen because it says something about character, and the reader takes in both at once.
She was dressed in rich materials,—satins, and lace, and silks,—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. … She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her hand,—her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on … I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.
The detail to study is the shoe. In a room of white, Pip notices the one thing out of place: “she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her hand.” A child sees that someone stopped in the middle of dressing before he can say what that means. The repeated “white” sets up the turn in the last sentence, where the bride has “withered like the dress,” and the reader learns why time stopped only much later.
The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.
The repeated “The emphasis was helped by” makes the paragraph sound like the man: insistent, square, unable to vary. The images are all walls and storage (cellarage, warehouse-room), so his head becomes a building full of facts, and in the next sentence even his neckcloth grips him “like a stubborn fact.” By the end, the reader knows what this man thinks a child's mind is for.
Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
Nick moves from face to body, and each part ends in a verdict: arrogant eyes, “a cruel body.” On its own the judgment would sound like prejudice. The boots straining at the laces and the muscle shifting under the coat make it feel observed. The next paragraph does the same with his voice, “a gruff husky tenor” with “a touch of paternal contempt in it.”
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.
One sentence, and the face is caused by the character. The cold is “within him,” and it drives every verb: froze, nipped, shrivelled, stiffened. A description like this predicts the plot, because a man frozen from the inside can thaw, and by the last stave he does.
Classics through someone's eyes
A description always has an observer, and the best ones use it. In these four, what gets noticed tells the reader as much about the one looking as about the one seen.
I looked up at—a black pillar!—such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight, the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital.
The adult Jane keeps the child's first impression and flags it (“such, at least, appeared to me”). A child looking up sees architecture, not a man: a pillar with a mask for its capital. Cold, hard and inhuman is exactly what Lowood School turns out to be under his management.
His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments.
Watson reads Holmes the way Holmes reads clients, feature by feature, each tied to a trait: the nose means alertness, the chin determination. The hands are the best detail because they're evidence, the stains of what he does all day. “Sharp and piercing” has since become a cliché; the ink and chemicals haven't.
…his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report, which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.
Austen gives Darcy almost no face. She describes the room's opinion of him and how fast it turns: handsome for half the evening, “forbidding, disagreeable” for the rest. The joke is that his features haven't moved. Readers learn early that in this novel looks are a verdict, and verdicts are often wrong.
Montgomery describes the girl waiting at the station as anyone would see her: “A child of about eleven, garbed in a very short, very tight, very ugly dress,” with “two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair.” Then she turns: “So far, the ordinary observer; an extraordinary observer might have seen” more, a pointed chin, eyes full of spirit, a broad forehead. The paragraph ends on the verdict that “no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child.”
Montgomery splits the surface from the person and tells the reader which observer to be. The ordinary list is clothes and hair; the extraordinary one is all character. It's a neat way to describe a heroine honestly without pretending the dress is pretty.
Classics by contrast and motion
A person stands out against something: a sister, a crowd, their own Sunday clothes. Or they move, and the movement does the describing.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
Eliot describes Dorothea through what she refuses to wear, and the plainness turns out to be a belief. The comparison does the rest: among fashionable women she stands out like a Bible verse in a newspaper, serious, a little old-fashioned and impossible to ignore. Later in the same paragraph Eliot names the danger: she is “enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects.”
Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a flyaway look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it.
Alcott describes four sisters in one paragraph and keeps them apart by contrast: Meg is all softness plus one small vanity, Jo all angles. The colt is the key image, awkward and growing fast, and the last clause turns it into a conflict, a girl becoming a woman who “didn't like it.” Then the narrator stops: “What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.”
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun. His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella…
The novel opens on a smile in motion, not a face at rest, and the sunrise tells the reader he's warm before we know his first name. Then Hardy describes him twice, on working days and on Sundays. A contrast of clothes becomes a contrast of character: capable in his element, awkward out of it, which is Gabriel for the rest of the book.
He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
Comic description works by exaggeration, and Irving exaggerates with farm objects: shovels, a weather-cock, a scarecrow. That fits a schoolmaster in a farming valley and keeps the joke inside his world. The last sentence puts him in motion against the sky, which is how the reader will picture him on the night of his ride.
Originals: detail and viewpoint
These six were written for this page. Each uses one technique, so you can lift it straight into a draft.
Mrs. Adebayo ran the hospital's night pharmacy for twenty-two years, and in all that time nobody saw her without the gray cardigan with leather elbow patches, buttoned to the neck in July. In the breast pocket she kept a pencil, sharpened at both ends.
Study the pencil. The cardigan is what the whole hospital saw for twenty-two years; the pencil is what you'd notice only standing at her counter, and sharpening both ends is a small decision only she would make. No face, no age, no height, and the reader still has her: careful, unbothered by fashion, ready for anything.
My sister's new husband had the kind of handsome that needs a mirror nearby. In the four hours of the wedding I caught him checking his hair in the hotel's brass doors, the back of a spoon and the black screen of his phone. He was very kind to the waiters. I wanted to like him more than I did.
Study the reflections: the brass doors, the spoon, the phone. The narrator notices them because she's looking for a reason not to like him, and counting them is funny and unfair at once. The last two sentences turn the description back on her: she has noticed his kindness and resents having to. An observer with a stake is never neutral, and that's the point of using one.
Tomás came into the kitchen the way he came into every room, shoulder first, as if the door might fight him. He kissed his mother without stopping, took two oranges from the bowl, juggled them once, dropped one, and was out on the back step peeling the other before she had finished saying his name.
Study the dropped orange. It's what his mother would catch, since she's the one still saying his name, and it keeps him from being too cool. There isn't a word about his face, and the reader still knows his age, his energy and his place in the family: movement shows a habit and an attitude at once.
In the mayor's office everything was beige: the carpet, the blinds, the filing cabinets, the mayor. Councilwoman Rhee sat across from him in a red wool coat she didn't take off, and when she crossed her legs the room seemed to lean toward her.
Study the coat, and the fact that she keeps it on. In a room where everything is beige, the mayor included, it's the first thing anyone would see, and keeping it on says she isn't staying long. Contrast lets a single detail carry a character, as long as the background is built first.
The twins had the same face and used it differently. Paul's went politely blank whenever a stranger spoke to him. Marcus's couldn't keep still, and by thirty it had two deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth, worn in by laughing at things before they were funny.
Study the two lines on Marcus's face. With identical features, the only way to tell the twins apart is by what they do with them, so the eye goes to expression and habit, which is where character lives anyway. The lines are a history in one clause: years of a particular laugh.
Everything in Dr. Halloran's office had been repaired. The desk lamp was held together at the neck with black tape, the chair had a cushion from a different chair, and the diploma on the wall had new glass after what the receptionist called “the incident.” Nothing new had come into the room in thirty years, and that included the doctor.
Study the tape on the lamp. A visitor left waiting has time to look around, and repairs are what a waiting eye picks out. They say thrifty, stubborn and attached; “the incident” hints at a temper; the last clause turns the whole room into a joke about him. A room is a portrait of whoever keeps it, ready before they say a word.
Originals: voice, senses and change
Description isn't only visual. These six use a voice, a single line, sound and smell, a second look, the narrator's own life and someone else's mouth.
You heard Aunt Bea before you saw her. Her voice came up the stairwell ahead of her, a smoker's alto that had been loud in two languages for sixty years, and it arrived in the apartment complaining about the elevator, the weather and the Pope, in that order.
Study the order of the complaints: practical, then general, then cosmic. The family hears them while Aunt Bea is still on the stairs, so her voice introduces her before her face does, and the order is a personality. “Loud in two languages for sixty years” gives age and history in one phrase.
A boy in a hotel uniform two sizes too big held the door and looked at Sam's suitcase as if it might bite him.
Study the uniform two sizes too big. Sam takes the boy in during the second it takes to walk through a door, which is about what a walk-on deserves: the uniform gives his age and how new he is, and the look at the suitcase gives his nerves. The reader sees him and lets him go.
Even in the dark of the ward, Marta knew it was Ivan by the creak of his left boot and the smell of the stables he never quite washed off: hay, horse and the peppermints he kept for them.
Study the peppermints. Marta can't see in the dark ward, so she knows Ivan by sound and smell, and the peppermints are the part of the smell only someone who knows him would recognize. They turn a smell into a kindness. When the viewpoint character can't see, the other senses take over, and they're often more intimate than sight.
At the interview I took Ms. Okoro for forty: tailored shoulders, short nails, a voice that never rose. A month later I found her eating lunch on the loading dock with her shoes off, laughing at something on her phone, and saw that she couldn't be more than twenty-eight, and that the voice was something she put on in the morning with the jacket.
Study the shoes, off on the loading dock. The narrator sees them because this is the first glimpse of Ms. Okoro off duty, and one detail overturns the whole first impression. A second description that corrects the first is a small plot: the reader learns about the character and about the narrator's misjudgment at once. Save the second look for the moment the relationship changes.
I'm the tall one in every family photograph, the one at the back with her chin down, trying to fit in the frame. My mother says I have my grandfather's hands. She means it kindly. They're the hands of a man who loaded coal.
Study the hands. The narrator notices them because her mother keeps mentioning them, and her reply, a man who loaded coal, says what she hears behind the kindness. She describes herself through photographs, her mother and her grandfather, never a mirror: height, posture, hands and a whole family attitude toward her body arrive in four sentences.
“You'll know him,” the dispatcher said. “He's the one in the yellow raincoat who'll tell you the bus is late before you ask, and why, and whose fault it is.”
Study the second half of the line: late before you ask, and why, and whose fault it is. That's what the dispatcher has heard every day; the yellow raincoat is only how to find him. Letting another character describe someone gives two portraits for one: the man in the raincoat and the dispatcher who's tired of him. The reader also meets him with an expectation, which the scene can confirm or break.
Describe a narrator without a mirror
A first-person narrator stops in front of a mirror and describes herself for the reader: hair, eyes, height, freckles. It's one of the best-known clichés in fiction because it's so convenient, and editors and many readers spot it at once. The trouble is the inventory more than the glass: people rarely study their reflections from head to toe, or think of their own eye color as news.
Before. I looked in the mirror. A girl with long brown hair, green eyes and freckles stared back at me. I was sixteen, tall for my age and too thin.
After. Mrs. Feeney at the bakery still calls me “the long drink of water,” though I'm sixteen and she's been saying it since I was nine. I duck under the bell over the door out of habit. I'm not that tall. I just learned early to make myself smaller.
In one sentence, through someone else. “Mind the bell,” Mrs. Feeney says every morning, though I stopped hitting it when I was twelve.
The revision keeps her height and age, drops the eye color nobody needed, and adds what the mirror can't: how she feels about her body and how other people treat it. The one-sentence version hands the looking to Mrs. Feeney: her warning gives the height, and “every morning” says how long she has been watching. Other ways out of the mirror:
- Let someone else say it, as Mrs. Feeney does, or as the mother does in example 23.
- Compare the narrator with a sibling or a parent, which describes both.
- Describe what the body feels rather than how it looks: boots that pinch, a sunburned neck, sleeves too short since spring.
- Describe only what the narrator would think about in that moment. A girl dressing for a funeral notices different things than one dressing for a date.
- A mirror can still work when the moment is about something other than the inventory: a new bruise, a bad haircut, a dead mother's face looking back.
- Describe very little. Readers build a picture from a few details and rarely miss the rest.
Describe people without stereotypes
Description is where a writer's assumptions show most. These habits keep it fair to every character, whoever they are:
- Give everyone the same level of detail. If only some characters get a skin color or a hair texture, the rest become the default, and readers notice who the narration treats as normal.
- Skip the food. Coffee, mocha, caramel, chocolate, honey, cinnamon: food words for skin are among the most worn-out comparisons in this area, and they make a person sound like something to eat. Plain color words work (brown, deep brown, olive, pale, ruddy, freckled), and so does light: how skin looks in August sun or under office fluorescents.
- Retire the shorthand. “Almond-shaped eyes,” “exotic” and “ethnic features” describe a category, not a person. Name the specific thing instead: heavy lids, a gap between the front teeth, eyebrows that nearly meet.
- Get hair right. Coils, curls, waves, locs, box braids, a fade, a silk scarf at night. The precise word shows you know what you're describing, and the wrong one shows you don't.
- Let the viewpoint decide what's noticed. People rarely remark on features that are ordinary to them. What a narrator does notice, and how, tells the reader about the narrator.
- Don't make a body a moral verdict. A scar shouldn't mean villain, weight shouldn't mean lazy, and beauty shouldn't mean good. Let expression, posture, clothes and habit carry the judgment instead: those are things a character chooses.
- Ask readers who know. For a character from a background you don't share, a sensitivity reader from that community can catch what research misses.
Before. She had smooth mocha skin and exotic almond eyes.
After. By August her face had gone dark brown across the nose and cheeks, nearly the color of the river at the boat launch, and the freckles she'd had since she was a girl disappeared until October.
The second version is specific to her (the freckles, the boat launch) and to the season, and its comparison comes from the place she lives instead of a coffee menu.
How to write a description
- Decide whose eyes
The same man is “distinguished” to his daughter and “a gray suit” to a stranger. Pick the observer first, because what they notice is half the description. The guide to point of view covers how close to stay to them.
- Choose one to three details
Pick details that carry personality or history: the pencil sharpened at both ends, the boots straining at the laces. Leave out whatever any reader would assume.
- Put the person in motion
Attach the description to something the character is doing. Description in motion reads as story; description at rest reads as a pause.
- Describe at first sight
Give the core details when the character first appears. If you wait, readers build their own picture, and a red-haired heroine in chapter 6 can feel like a correction.
- Spread the rest
Add details when they start to matter: the scar when someone asks about it, the hands when she plays. A character described in layers grows; one described in a block stays a list.
- Write it down
Record each fixed detail and the chapter where it first appears. The character profile template has a section for looks, so chapter 30 agrees with chapter 2.
Character description mistakes
- The inventory. Hair, eyes, height, build, clothes, top to bottom. Readers forget lists; they remember one detail.
- Eye color as personality. Emerald eyes and piercing blue eyes say nothing about the person behind them.
- Stock features. Chiseled jaws, raven hair, cascading curls, a smile that didn't reach his eyes. If you've read it often, so has your reader.
- Describing too late. A main character who isn't described until chapter 5 may already have a face in the reader's head, and yours can feel wrong.
- The viewpoint slip. A first-person or close-third narrator can't see her own blush. She can feel her face get hot.
- Stacked adjectives. Three adjectives that mean the same thing are purple prose, and they bury the one detail that would have worked.
- Telling the character's nature outright. “She had a kind face” is a label. Show the kindness in what the face does, which is show, don't tell applied to looks.
- Contradictions. Gray eyes in chapter 2, brown in chapter 19. Keep a record.
To check one character across a draft, attach the chapters and ask the Strokes Assistant to list every physical detail given for that character, with the sentence it's in. Gray eyes in chapter 2 and brown ones in chapter 19 turn up side by side.
Frequently asked questions
What should a character description include?
Enough for the reader to picture the person and sense who they are: usually a physical detail or two, one thing about how they move, sound or dress, and a hint of attitude. Age and build help when they matter to the story. Eye and hair color are optional unless a scene uses them.
How long should a character description be?
For a main character, a few sentences at first appearance, with more detail spread across later scenes. For a minor character, one line is usually enough. A full paragraph works when the description does other work too, the way Dickens's portrait of Miss Havisham sets up a mystery. If readers would skim it, it's too long.
How do you describe skin color in writing?
Use plain color words such as brown, deep brown, olive, pale, ruddy or freckled, or describe how skin looks in a particular light or season. Avoid food comparisons like coffee, caramel or chocolate, which are worn out and make a person sound edible. Describe every character's skin at the same level of detail, so no one becomes the unmarked default.
