I know there is no hard and fast rule, but when does describing how your character looks become useless pandering.

I know there are certain leeways when the description of the character actually portrays their some of their personality, but I feel as though this line is very blurry.

The only rule I can tell for sure is to not go My Immortal and describe their every clothing change.

 

It completely depends on your style of writing.

Know what's more important? Weather.

 

It really depends on the position of the description (which is spelt wrong in this thread title, by the way) in the part of whatever form of prose you are writing. As others have said, it is all about the feel. An exposition to a story might be more detailed to illustrate some key character facet. However, Stephen King is famous for leaving most of the details out of his characters in his physical descriptions. By providing only the essential details, each character is pictured differently in the mind of each reader.

 

Like Jon said, the amount of time you devote to a character's description should coincide with that character's importance. If it's a throwaway, don't waste your breath. If it's a main character, you'll want typically want to stick to the features that stand out - the ones that make the character unique.

Some good advice I got was to go out and just people watch. Look for the one or two features that really stand out to you for each person. Those are the descriptors you should use.

 

Personally, I go by gut-feeling on character description. Depending on the type of story I'm writing, and the theme and setting, the descriptions vary.

Like King, I rarely give physical descriptions that have the potential to destroy your mental image of a character. For example, some dude might like redheads, some like blondes. Some like big boobs, some don't. Let your character's voice paint his/her own picture. Let who he/she is feature most prominent, and the reader's imagination should fill in the rest. You don't want to spoon-feed.

However, if you are not able to make your point strong enough about a certain character, throwing in a good adjective is okay, but choose wisely.

It's the difference between books and movies. We watch movies to see awesome shit. We read books to dream and be awesome shit. So don't turn your character from what people can dream and be into someone they see, someone who is the antithesis of what they imagine.

 

I'm honestly just guessing, but wouldn't the best thing to ask yourself be "What do they need to know?"

Say the character has a gun stashed somewhere, or not. You might want to hint at the possibility, or the lack thereof, when describing what he/she is wearing.

 

It's somewhat formulaic and I break it myself, but my general rule is:

Non-recurring passer-by: no description
Non-recurring character with screen time: one characteristic mentioned.
Recurring minor character: two characteristics.
Major character: three characteristics.

Characteristics would be hair colour, height, body type, eye colour, facial features, skin colour/tone, etc.

With non-recurring characters I'll choose a characteristic which somehow reflects their role in the story. So, for example, if there's a minor character who is going to be officious and obstructing the protagonist, I'll mention some non-complimentary characteristic to reinforce that this person is not to be liked: they'll be fat, or have a very big nose, or greasy hair, or spotty, or whatever.

 

I disagree with the general notion that smaller/non-recurring characters should be described any less. Particularly in first person fiction, the way a character refers to other and describes others is an extremely valuable insight into his own personality.

 

Readers subconsciously take note of how much a person is described and use it to ascribe importance to a character. If I go into great detail describing a character and then have him say just two lines, the reader is going to be waiting for him to pop up again later.

 

This.

How you proportion your story allows the reader to assign relevance to certain things. For instance, if you take a whole paragraph to describe a handgun that your main character keeps locked away in his apartment, you sure as hell better have a reason. If the story goes by and your main character never has to use that handgun, your readers are going to feel cheated.

Same goes for character description.

And while it's true that in first person, how your character describes others is an insight into his character, you also have to be realistic. When you meet someone that's not a recurring person in your life, do you actually mentally examine that person and note every insignificant detail about them? No. You notice one thing, maybe two things that stand out. Oh, this girl has red hair and freckles. Or, oh, she's kinda cute. Not, "hmmm... I probably won't ever meet this girl again, but it's interesting to note that she has flowing red hair, freckles, a button nose, green eyes, a sharp nose, all her fingers and toes..."

The people that are important to you are the people you see over and over again. Those are the people who you'll notice the small things in.

 

It's worth mentioning that I could not tell you the eye colour of a single person in my life.

 

I attempt to describe everything, which is exhausting. But I feel like... if people cannot picture the actors of the story clearly, then the events of the story are easy to misplace or bvecome of disinterest.

Actively describe characters. Avoid passive words like "was"/"is" and common words like "wear"/"worn". Always avoid vague words like "seem" -- except in circumstances where you want the character to be this murky being or undefined (like a burglar passing through a room). Most of the time, you want concrete, defined aesthetics, because anything less feels less engaging.

Since details are often hard to recall over long periods, I always also try to refresh definition by actively describing it from time to time - hair shifts, clothing wrinkles or is made out of place in a new situation - stuff like this helps to keep your readers centered on what things look like.

Bad:

She was fat, wearing a black dress. Her eyes were blue and her hair a dark gray.

Better:

A black dress winds tight around an engorged belly; a pig with tiny dim stones for eyes glares at her wirst. Hair like brillo pads clumps up around her scrunched, pudgy face.

You can spend barely thirty words on a throw-away character and still describe them perfectly well enough. If a passerby is going to interact at all with anybody, they deserve to have at least thirty descriptive words thrown there way - it's not going to interrupt the flow or overload a scene with information. Just because a character can be thrown away doesn't mean you should neglect on detail that helps root a scene in 'reality'. At least, that's my take.

I also think it helps to describe the features of a person in relation to their "inner" personality - contrasting or complimenting it. Call it pathetic fallacy, but if you're describing an important character, it's important to imbue their outward appearance with ideas that evoke something in the reader. Awful, gruesome people could have mercury for the color of their eyes or lips, their hair like a thorny brush, etc. It's generally less cliche to contrast appearance with personality, of course.

Sometimes, I find it a better read to drop words that feel repetitive. Like, in the above example:

A black dress winds tight around an engorged belly; a pig with tiny dim stones for eyes glares at the narrow of a bulging wirst. Hair like brillo pads clumps up around the scrunched pudgy wrinkles of a bloated face.

Here, I was conscious to remove every instance of "her" - sometimes I feel like this reads better because we already know who it belongs to and it tends to distract from the shapes or colors I'm trying to describe.

In the case of this specifically hideous woman, it may not matter what she looks like, but if our protagonist is the narrator here, then it characterizes him by how a nobody stranger is described. She could just be standing in line at a bank and that's all we'll ever see of her, but we learn that our character has little tolerance or love for fat people, by the way he labels and sees her as.

 

To be honest, I think most readers skim character descriptions anyway, so anything lengthy isn't worthy it. My sister spent 5 years thinking Hagrid was blond.

 

I've got to agree with this. I don't know if I'm different than most, but when I read I hardly ever know what the characters look like, no matter how much time was spent describing them. Same goes for the setting. Really skim that stuff.

I think it's part of the reason why that stuff is so hard for me to write...

 

It really, realllly depends on the writing. For example, Fitzgerald's character descriptions are incredible, I never skim them. I do, however, skip them quite often in fantasy type writing, for whatever reason.

 

JKR was sparse in her descriptions, so it's no surprise. I could see someone missing a detail like that, or making up their own idea of what Hagrid explicitly looks like. I don't think it's necessarily evidence that description is 'wasted effort'.

For me personally, I guess, fi I don't have a clear idea what everyone looks like... sometimes it drives me insane in a story, because I'll make up what they look like then be frustrated when an author finally decides to mention what's-her-face is actually six feet tall or blonde instead of short and red-headed in an important scene. Once I've gotten a mental image of someone, it's hard for me to change it to fit an author's later description. Same thing happens with character names with me - I'll pronounce it one way until someone else insists it's actually another.

If you're been writing fanfiction, describing characters is harder to learn too, because you often take for granted what everyone looks like.

 

Proportioning a story is very important. If it is a gargantuan novel, a thirty word description is like a drop in a bucket. But if you are paid per word and want to get a short story published, you better be damn sure each one of those thirty words is significant.

 

I guess my philosophy is, if a character is so insignificant you're not going to even describe them, why bother at all with their presence? If a passerby is so pivotal to your story - I don't know, maybe they bump into the protagonist and knock over his favorite wine glass and it kicks off the story - the least that can be done is give them a coat and a frumpy hat or a distinctive shape or a particular word from a particular tone of voice. If you can't afford thirty words on a character, then you're probably wasting thirty words on pointless exposition? I'd always favor character description over something else; find a way to afford it in your story if every word must count so direly. Again, that's my personal pricing of worth, but I think characters are important -- all characters.

 

That's absolutely right. I'm exactly of that mind myself.