Are Your Characters Faceless Blobs? (Or, How Exhaustively Do You Describe Your Characters?)

Writers tend to be of two minds when it comes to describing a character’s physical appearance. Either they like to a) introduce each character with a fully-fleshed description that gives the reader an instant picture in their mind, or b) sprinkle in details sparingly, when they come up organically in the story.

(Of course, there are some writers who prefer a third option, c) divulge nothing about the characters save, basically, their names. This tactic, I DO NOT recommend. The idea behind it is, I guess, noble: to let your readers form their own interpretation of a character’s physicality free from the author’s influence, and to avoid bogging down the prose with a clunky descriptive paragraph. I can see what these writers are trying to do, only most of the time … they don’t do it. They end up creating faceless blobs: featureless talking heads that leave little impression on the reader.)

So, when it comes to describing characters, how much detail is too much? Should we saturate our pages with description, or sprinkle them?

Maintaining a constant, forward momentum can be tricky when you’re writing a story. A great way to make sure your story is moving steadily ahead is to look at the action on a page-by-page basis:

Have something happen, change, or be revealed by the end of every page in your story.

When I go back over what I’ve written, I like to always make sure that, when I come to the end of every page, something has changed. Someone has asked a question, or answered one; a character has learned something new; seen something surprising; put on their jacket and gone somewhere else. A phone has rung, or a knock comes at the door; whatever happens, by the bottom of the page, we’re further along than we were at the top.

Making sure every single page has a specific point, needs to be there, has done something to move your plot towards its conclusion, is a quick and easy way to give your story forward momentum, and give the reader a reason to keep turning pages.

An earlier version of this post was originally shared on my old blog, Christina Writes.