descriptive essay on fictional characters

• Bookfox Academy (All Courses)
• Write Your Best Novel
• How to Write a Splendid Sentence
• Two Weeks to Your Best Children’s Book
• Revision Genius
• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Dialogue
• Your First Bestseller
• Master Your Writing Habits
• Writing Techniques to Transform Your Fiction
• Triangle Method of Character Development
• Children’s Book Editing
• Copy Editing
• Novel Editing
• Short Story Editing
• General Books
• Children’s Books

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.”

PAY ATTENTION:

If you’re looking for guidance on writing your novel, I’d suggest my post, “ 12 Steps to Write a Bestselling Novel in 6 Months .”

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. . . .”

For those of you who want to write a novel, visit this post: “ 12 Steps to Write a Bestselling Novel .”

You will not regret it.

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.”

Related posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

29 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

A killer set of fine examples! Thanks for compiling it!

Please, add sentences that can apply to more characters.

Love it but should be more single sentences

Every writer NEEDS this book.

It’s a guide to writing the pivotal moments of your novel.

Whether writing your book or revising it, this will be the most helpful book you’ll ever buy.

Learn how to:

• Nail chapter endings
• Surprise your reader with plot twists
• Describe a character for the first time
• Write a killer ending

How To Write A Character Description (101 Examples)

February 15, 2024

Learn what character description is and how to describe a character. Jump into OC description writing with one of the iconic character description examples from our list.

Developing a description of a character can be a challenge for OC creators. How much do you give away as someone who knows the character innately versus trying to generate interest and get an audience to invest in the character’s journey? We’re going to dive into writing character descriptions that stand out.

Why Character Descriptions Matter

Character descriptions, at heart, serve as a marker for the reader to determine if they wish to know more about the character. They are creators' attempts to signal that an individual they are writing about is worth becoming invested in. This is why a boring character description can be fatal to first impressions - why bother exploring a project if the character's description generates no spark?

Character descriptions are also influenced by purpose. A character description in a screenplay occupies a different purpose than a character description on a profile page. A description in a screenplay is lean, whereas a profile has more room to explore. These descriptions we’re talking about are too large for a character reference sheet .

While focusing on writing character descriptions for profiles, we will look at examples from literature, screenplays, and existing character profiles on CharacterHub. 

The Five Key Questions

When it comes to description in a general sense, there are five questions to consider: Who, What, Where, Why, and When? These questions are also beneficial in writing original character descriptions because you can use as many as you wish or even omit some to generate interest.

It is rather complicated to omit the who in a description, as a description is usually tied to an identifiable figure. Even if you may not want to give away a character’s identity, there is usually some marker that identifies them. For example, in the script for the horror classic Halloween (1978) by John Carpenter and Deborah Hill, the lurking presence of Michael Myers is simply referred to as “The Shape.” It is a name as evocative as it is practical. In most cases, a creator will probably just include the OC’s name.

The what in a character description can be interpreted as a marker for their identity. This could be their ethnicity, role, or species, for example. It is, again, reasonably complex to avoid this when developing a description, as a character without a perceived role may not feel like a character. A great example of “the what” in a character description comes from the character Tiberius Skärvas IV from the webcomic The Fourth . 

From the character's description on the cast page: “Ever since the First and his rather unethical business practices, the Tiberius Skärvas have been accursed by the gods. While technically still human, they possess the appearance and certain traits of sharks.” A cursed human with shark-like traits is undoubtedly a bold answer for “the what.”

When it comes to where , you are likely answering who the character is to their setting. It is less about a physical location and how that character connects to or runs counter to a location or society. Essentially, you are positioning them against civilization in whatever form that takes. A great example of this can be found in the codex entry of Agrippa Varus from the webcomic Terra Incognita . 

Case in point: “Agrippa Varus was raised in a well respected family in the Asurian capital of Sokai. His father Argo Varus, served as a consul and the main liaison between Asura and other sentient worlds. Due to his exposure to other species from a young age, Agrippa has an open mind and is much less prejudiced than the average Asurian citizen.” 

As we can see in this description, Agrippa is given a physical “where” regarding a space civilization while also being described of their societal “where” - as a figure that runs outside their culture.

The when of a character in their description is all about position. Whether the setting is based on natural history or set in an entirely fictional timeline, a character occupies temporal space, which can factor into how they are seen. Are they of their time, or do they feel apart from it? Descriptions that hint at such things are great at generating interest.

A great example of this can be found in the script of Warm Bodies (2013), in a description of the character R. “Blank face, sunken eyes. Blueish lips. If we didn’t know any better we’d think he was a junkie, a runaway from the set of My Own Private Idaho . Then we might notice a few thin gashes cutting across his cheeks. And then we might hear a soft groan humming from his frozen lips. And then we might start to wonder…

In this example, we see the deliberate usage of a contemporary reference to another film, positioning R and their relationship to a contemporary setting. The reference also does double duty, saying a lot about how R can be perceived by those familiar with the reference.

The why of a character description is most easily omitted to generate interest and intrigue. However, it can also be incredibly influential in generating interest in an original character. Knowing what drives a character can be a descriptive hook.

A great example of the “why” in a character description comes from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote in this rather brilliant moment: “In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant[...]”

Don Quixote’s mad notion of being a knight proves a compelling hook to the character, especially in how that motivation is presented. A reader can’t help but be intrigued by the description of the thin, elderly man who wants to be a knight.

Other Descriptive Traits and Tips

Much descriptive writing can come from things you probably already learned in school but are worth repeating. For example, utilizing sensory details in a character description can be particularly useful. Writing about how a character may smell like motor oil or freshly baked bread can suggest different things.

Contrast is another powerful tool in the character description, as when we are introduced to someone, we cannot help but size them up compared to people we know. This is especially true of original characters. How does one protagonist compare to another? How might you set a character apart from others? Using contrast is especially helpful here. For example, describing how a lead character differs from others in a similar position of their setting.

Of course, there are also things to avoid when developing character descriptions. Writing a description that is a laundry list of traits is something you may want to avoid. It can lack personality and feel a little boring. A solid character organizer can help you visually track if you rely on listing too often.

In any case, referring to some classic descriptive writing techniques can be helpful, especially when punching up a first draft of a character description.

Ways of Establishing Character Through Description

Well-written, informative descriptions greatly help establish interest in an original character. Consider them a teaser to what you hope to be a more significant journey you want to take readers on. Your goal is to connect an audience and a character through intrigue an interest - your aim can be to use description as a hook. Here are some different ways to use description to create that hook.

Using Description to Create a Presence

One of the most essential uses of description is to establish the presence of a character in their respective story. How about who is heroic or villainous? Who merits us following their story and becoming invested in them? This is particularly useful in writing an OC profile because you want to establish how we should feel about them without the burden of a ton of backstory to provide context.

Consider this like trying to convey everything about a person possible at a glance. How can you give us what we need about an OC in a descriptive passage? Well, let’s look at some examples.

In this sample from Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin , we see presence established by tying description to color and costuming details. Note that the presence established here is not a flattering one.

I could picture the smooth oval of Laura’s face, her neatly pinned chignon, the dress she would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour – navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours – less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in.

• Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000)

Another great way to establish a character’s presence through description is to tie it to a metaphor. Let’s look at an example of Arudhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, where we have a character consumed by quietude.

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms…sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue.

• Arudhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)

In these examples, we see how descriptive language can imply something about the character's presence, such as their authority or lack of authority. In the Atwood example, the character is effectively rendered blank or meek. Meanwhile, in the Roy example, the description paints a picture of a character consumed by their awkwardness and silence. Noting and working with such traits is key to building a good character profile.

Let’s look at how the presence of Gandalf is established through description in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring .

“Gandalf was shorter in stature than the other two; but his long white hair, his sweeping beard, and his broad shoulders, made him look like some wise king of ancient legend. In his aged face under great snowy brows his eyes were set like coals that could suddenly burst into fire.”

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

Gandalf’s physical presence is a fun juxtaposition with him appearing larger than life. He may be shorter, but he has an aura about him - something noticeably distinguished. I recommend reading Tolkien for character description, not just because I am a fan. 

Using a History to Create Significance

Character description that depicts an established history can go a long way to informing a reader about what makes the character tick. A character can sometimes be seen as a record of their experiences, and knowing those experiences can tell us a lot about a character, how they view the world, and how the author wishes for us to view them. There is no shortage of character ideas , but a character is more than an idea: they are a story.

In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times , the character of Bounderby is pernicious and self-centered, motivated by the pursuit of their wants and desires having come up from poverty. We can see Dickens establish much of that in his description of Bounderby by including history in the character’s description.

“A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him […] always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty.”

• Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

Let’s look at a character with an established history and how that history plays into their description in the present. If you are a fan of Star Trek , then the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan should be pretty familiar. The film was a culmination of a storyline that began in the 1960s featuring characters who have aged decades for the 1980s film. In particular, let’s look at a description of Captain Kirk from the script.

“Kirk reads the novel, trying to focus. His flat befits an Admiral and a loner with few possessions, except a collection of antiques.”

• Harve Bennett, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

In this example, we have a little bit of environmental storytelling that plays against what audiences would know of Captain James T. Kirk. Kirk, from the original series, was quite the heroic figure, not mainly seen as an elder statesman. However, the depiction of his apartment, filled with antiques belonging to a man who is alone, shows that much time has passed for the figure. He is different in many ways - almost startlingly so.

So, what can we draw from these examples when developing descriptions of our original characters? A character with a lot of history is undoubtedly colored by it, so if your description can evoke a journey, you’ve gone a long way to informing us about what makes them tick. This is seen in the example from Hard Times, where the character’s journey through the classes of 19th-century London colors how we see their outward-facing personality.

Further, if you are playing with time, descriptions of a character at different stages in their life or respective journey can highlight their growth, such as in the example from Star Trek . Contrast through history is a particularly effective strategy when writing a character description.

Using Perspective to Create Interpretation

In some cases, describing a character from another person's perspective can yield beautiful results. First impressions can say a lot, and stepping away from an omniscient narrator’s view of a character, filled with insight about them and their past, can be a valuable technique. It also can create a narrative journey for an OC later on, as our initial impressions, through a more limited outsider perspective, do not usually represent the whole character.

Here is an example of Virginia Woolf establishing a character’s description from another character's perspective.

“He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best – to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, saying who had won this, who had won that …”

• Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927)

Here is an example of a character description written from another character's perspective. In this case, we have Ripley from Aliens , who first encounters Burke as she recovers in a hospital room. Notice the usage of traits in the following passage. This is taken from the film's shooting script.

“The visitor sits beside the bed and Ripley finally notices him.  He is thirtyish and handsome, in a suit that looks executive or legal, the tie loosened with studied casualness.  A smile referred to as ‘winning.’”

• James Cameron, Aliens (1985)

Specifically, this is a friendly, somewhat charming face for a recovering from intensive trauma. However, we also get a sense of Burke's nature through the description, such as emphasizing the fakery of a “winning” smile.

If we want another great example of perspective coloring the description of a character, we can look toward another sci-fi franchise with Star Wars . In particular, the 4th draft script from A New Hope introduces Darth Vader in a fantastic way that tells us everything we need to know about the character from the perspective of the terrified Rebels.

“The awesome, seven-foot-tall Dark Lord of the Sith makes his way into the blinding light of the main passageway. This is Darth Vader, right hand of the Emperor. His face is obscured by his flowing black robes and grotesque breath mask, which stands out next to the fascist white armored suits of the Imperial stormtroopers. Everyone instinctively backs away from the imposing warrior and a deathly quiet sweeps through the Rebel troops. Several of the Rebel troops break and run in a frenzied panic.”

• George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope (1976)

That Darth Vader cuts an imposing presence in this description is an understatement. The key here is that we are seeing him through the eyes of those terrified Rebel troops.

Character Descriptions from Some Friends of Mine

There are many great examples of strong character descriptions out there. I turned to a few writer friends who are particularly good at creating characters, and I want to look at examples from two of them.

Robert Livingston: Tom n’ Artie and Kaiju Dayz

First up, we have my friend Robert Livingston, who was gracious enough to provide some examples from his in-depth pitch documents for two of his projects. First, look at some examples featuring the two leads of his comic Tom n’ Artie .

Tommy ‘Tom’ Sunshine Bliss

“Our stoic, disciplined Unicorn with the sparkly hair! Tom is the straight man of the duo usually doing the talking when they're with clients or when a deal needs to be made. Straight-laced with a dry sense of humor, he approaches situations with a strategic mindset preferring to have all the information before diving in. Due to his friendship with Artie, he commonly has to just 'wing it' with his little wildcard friend as he changes strategies on the fly.”

As we can see, Tom is the comedic straight man of the pair, but given the nature of the project, he still has his quirks. In particular, I want to note the contrast between his character and the description of his appearance. It does a lot to sell the inherent comedy of the character.

Artie Artillery

“The cartoon wildcard! Artie is zany and a rabbit/cat of action preferring to let his fists, teeth, legs, bats, guns, bombs and whatever he's got do the talking for him. He's spontaneous with a short fuse willing to crack jokes then skulls seconds apart from each other. Tom usually is the one who has to hold him back but during the events of the arc, he's more willing to let his little toon buddy cut loose more.”

Because the project revolves around a comedic pairing, we can see how essential contrasting the two leads can be in establishing their characters. There is some great description here, especially the emphasis on Artie’s improvised armory. Artie has enough of a hook from his description, but the depth is substantial when paired with his co-lead, Tom.

Next, we have an example from Robert’s other series, Kaiju Dayz . This project is like a sitcom set on an island of giant monsters. Let’s look at the series lead, Big Mama.

“A well-known Kaiju on Monster Island for her several successful attacks on human cities and other locations for many years. She’s gained a large reputation that gives her a lot of respect from others. It’s also forced her to put up a constant face of intimidation to keep that respect, she feels force is the only way to keep others in line. The only ones she’s softer on are her own children, Junior and Pestania, but now seeing that she’s growing estranged from them she’s trying to change that. She isn’t of this world (or possibly reality) and has no love for it but wants to keep anything she does love (her children and late husband) as close to her as possible.”

This character description does a great job of pitching the whole character. While I only used some segments for Tom and Artie earlier, I wanted to share the entire character description for Big Mama because it is so thorough without being overly long. This is an excellent example of a character description meant to sell the original character to an audience. This is what you’d want to see on a character profile .

Ben Paddon: Jump Leads

Ben Paddon sent me pitch documents for their audio drama, Jump Leads . You should give it a listen. Let’s look at the character descriptions for Meaney and Llewellyn, the dual protagonists of the story.

Thomas Meaney

The following is transcribed from the Jump Leads character breakdown about the character of Thomas Meaney.

• Meaney is excitable, enthusiastic, and young. She has wanted to be a Lead her entire life, and now she’s finally in training. This is her dream come true. Such a pity it’s about to be absolutely derailed by Misadventure.
• Meaney is a hopeful idealist. She always wants to see the best in people, and always tries to do good, even when the odds - and, indeed, her own skill set - are not in her favor. She’s also driven by a desire to get back home to complete her Lead training, though her adventurous, helpful nature, coupled with a desire to explore, often get the better of her.
• Meaney is excitable, in every sense of the word - her enthusiasm runs just as deeply as her fear, though she tries not to let being scared of a situation prevent the right decision from being made.
• Meaney is a brilliant problem-solver. She doesn't quite know this yet. She’ll discover that soon enough.

This is a wonderfully written character description that gives us everything we wish to know about a character while giving us the suggestion of a larger arc. When you think about this profile in terms of the questions who, what, where, why, and when, you’ll see they are all there.

Richard Llewellyn

• Llewellyn is in his mid-to-late 20s - still young enough to be bitter and cynical without having any of the real-world experience to justify it. He’s indifferent, snide, at times cruel, and he keeps people at an arm's length. Unfortunately, he’s been utterly unsuccessful in doing this with Meaney, in part because the alphabetical arrangement of the training classes has stuck them together.
• Llewellyn is smart, but lazy; brilliant, but apathetic. He joined the Lead Service because the alternative involved being in the real world, and that isn't something he's willing to do just yet. Of course, he'd never admit this.
• Underneath it all, there's something else. Maybe he's ready to let someone in. Or maybe he's hiding something else entirely…

Again, we have a dual protagonist situation; contrast is essential to define each. Each character can stand independently, but their descriptions are tailored to work best when read together. Yes, we get a fully rounded character in Llewellyn thanks to the description, but we also get a further hook because of the emphasis on personality clash. How might their journey go down, given their radically different perspectives?

Character Description from CharacterHub

While writing this article, I wanted to look at examples of character descriptions written by CharacterHub users. I’ve found some great examples to share, so why don’t we dive in and see what OC creators have been sharing with the community?

I’ve taken snippets from each profile of something I found to be particularly evocative or inspirational. Be sure to visit the complete profiles for even more great examples.

• Euronym by genderkiller - “driven to be the least evil thing around her, euronym chooses to use her manipulation and intelligence for what she believes is the betterment of others. but does it really know what's best for others, so blinded by its own trauma?”
• Valentine Adelaide by DEADRKGK - “Personality wise, Valentine is a man with many facets to him, and all are generally expressed and felt in extremes. To call him unpredictable would be both correct and incorrect. For those around him often, he can be much more easily predictable of a person. He’s open with his thoughts and feelings and expresses them freely with a poor social filter– good or bad, he’ll speak his mind regardless of if people want to hear it or not.”
• Tessa Verisey by LuminaLyric - “Standing at 5'8" with chestnut brown hair cascading in loose waves to her shoulders, her hazel eyes conceal a depth of intelligence and charisma.”
• Seth Salem by Paracosmic - “If looks could kill, Seth's would be the firing squad.”
• Aries by AFishWithAGun - “Aries is not a good person. At least, not anymore. Greif is a funny thing, pushed by a whirlwind of emotions. Anger, regret, betrayal. It spins its way into a palpable rage. His jagged psyche knows how best it can ruin a man.”
• Sidney Ignacio by soupysoupster - “Throughout his days, Sidney can’t seem to get past his own thoughts and anxieties. As a result, he comes off as withdrawn and uninterested to most. Despite what people may think though, Sidney is nothing short of a caring and compassionate person and will do anything he can do to help others. He’s a great listener, and will often catch onto things others don’t. ‘The devil is in the details’ as their father would say.”
• Adem Petrovic by lysesander - “Athletic enough to make a quick escape over a side wall if the situation calls for it. Face is unmemorable, and hard to spot in the crowd.”
• The Depths by celestrian - “A mysterious and enigmatic traveling merchant of the depths, a man whose past is shrouded in secrecy and his appearance completely hidden beneath a strange fox mask as well as a hooded cloak, wrapped in layers of cloth that cover his entire body. He claims to have knowledge of the entire kingdom and forbidden secrets, despite seeming quite young.”
• Clawfoot by Sunckeys - “Naivete is not a word known to poor Clawfoot, yet it may just be the best word to describe him. Unknown to him are the ways of man, of conversing with another and sharing pleasantries. No, for Clawfoot's expertise lies in savagry, ravaging, of ripping and tearing. Yet he hungers not for prey- though he much enjoys a meal or four- but for connection.”
• Soffice Pluvia by bunnymacaron - “Recently, he's found himself in an...unusual situation. Almost as soon as he entered the country he went through the Magical Girl transformation process. Immediately after, he got roped into the schemes of a sadistic Magical Girl and is stuck unraveling the tangled web of Kannazen City's Magical Girls to hopefully finally have some peace and quiet...or die trying.”
• Joshua Vox by ThaLizardWizard - “In terms of appearance, he is very skinny, pale, and sickly looking, with wild black hair that stands on end, and freckles all over his body and face. He has intense eye bags under enormous pale gray eyes, and to be completely honest, has frequently been mistaken for a ghost.”

Further fantastic examples of evocative character descriptions can be found all over CharacterHub . Browsing the thousands of existing character descriptions will inspire anyone to create character descriptions for their OCs. In particular, searching tags to find the kind of characters that inspire you most is super easy.

Further Examples of Character Descriptions

We’ll leave you here now with the following massive list. This list features different examples of character descriptions from various stories. Try to match the selections to some of our established principles. The descriptions here are very inspiring for any OC creator.

• Denis Lehane’s A Drink Before the War : “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.”
• Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa : “When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles.”
• Sherman Alexie’s 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.”
• Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women : “Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person,—in her own opinion at least. A regular snow-maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair, curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners.”
• Frank Herbert’s Dune : "Through the door came two Sardukar herding 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."
• Kury Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five : "He was a funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth — tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola."
• Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? : "Black-haired and slender, wearing the huge new dust-filtering glasses, she approached his car, her hands deep in the pockets of her brightly striped long coat. She had, on her sharply defined small face, an expression of sullen distaste."
• John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces : “Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.”
• Ralph Ellson’s Invisible Man : “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.”
• George Eliot’s Middlemarch : “The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, was generally in favour of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! Compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise.”
• Joseph Conrad’s 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…”
• Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books : “But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”
• Jane Austen’s 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.”
• Mark Twain’s 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.”
• Lindsay Faye’s Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson : “The door flew open, revealing a wrinkled, forward-thrusting face wreathed with a nimbus of wispy white hair, a face resembling nothing so much as a mole emerging from its burrow. Her spectacles were so dirty that I could hardly see the use of them.”
• Adlous Huxley’s Brave New World : "Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. 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."
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 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.”
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s 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."
• Stephenie Meyer’s 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.”
• Joan Johnston’s No Longer A Stranger : “Her straight, boyishly cut hair fell onto her brow haphazardly and hid beautiful arched brows that framed her large, expressive eyes.”
• Anne Rice’s 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.”
• 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.”
• Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : “He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.”
• N. K. Jemisin’s 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.”
• Maya Angelou’s 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.”
• China Miéville’s The 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.”
• Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women : “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.”
• 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.”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”: “The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not.”
• Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush : “He was abominable…and the most alluring, tortured soul I’d ever met.”
• William Golding’s 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.”
• Maggie Stiefvater’s 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.”
• John Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated : “He did not look like anything special at all.”
•  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring : “He wore a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf.  He had a long white beard and bushy  eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat.”
• Andrew Lang’s The Crimson Fairy Book : “When the old king saw this he foamed with rage, stared wildly about, flung himself on the ground and died.”
• Rudyard Kipling’s Many Inventions : “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula : “The Count smiled, and as his lips ran back over his gums, the long, sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely.”
• Hugh Lofting’s 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.”
• M.L Legette’s The Orphan and the Thief : “Its gray, slippery skin was stretched taut upon its face. Its mouth was wide and full of needle teeth.”
• Julia Stuart’s The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise : “Blooms of acne highlighted his vampire-white skin.
• James Lee Burke’s 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.”
• Becca Fitzpatrick’s Black Ice : “His brown hair was cropped, and it showed off the striking symmetry of his face. With the sun at his back, shadows marked the depressions beneath his cheekbones.”
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein : “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: “He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells.”
• E.C. Sheedy’s 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.”
• 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.”
• J.K. Rowling’s 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.”
• Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women : “Elizabeth—or Beth, as every one called her—was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression, which was seldom disturbed.”
• Anne Rice’s Violin : “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.”
• Kevin Brooks’ Lucas : “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.”
• Iris Johansen’s 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.”
• Herman Meilville’s Moby Dick : “There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.”
• Gena Showalter’s 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.”
• Orson Scott Card’s 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.”
• Caitlin Moran’s 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.”
• Philip Pullman’s 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.”
• J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey : “She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car.”
• L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz : “They wore round hats that rose to a small point a foot above their heads, with little bells around the brims that tinkled sweetly as they moved. The hats of the men were blue; the little woman’s hat was white, and she wore a white gown that hung in pleats from her shoulders. Over it were sprinkled little stars that glistened in the sun like diamonds.”
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula : “Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.”
• Algernon Blackwood’s Ten Minute Stories : “Then, by a green field that shone like a thought of daylight amid the darkness of the moor, he saw a figure lying in the grass. It was a blot upon the landscape, a mere huddled patch of dirty rags, yet with a certain horrid picturesqueness too; and his mind—though his German was of the schoolroom order—at once picked out the German equivalents as against the English. Lump and Lumpen flashed across his brain most oddly.”
• John Rhode’s The Murders in Praed Street : “He was tall and thin, with a pronounced stoop and a deep but not unpleasant voice. But it was his head that you looked at instinctively. Above the massive forehead and powerfully-chiselled features was a wealth of long, snow-white hair, balanced by a flowing beard of the same colour.”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart”: “He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold.”
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein : “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.”
• Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow : “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.”
• Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women : “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.”
• Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland : “It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came…”
• J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan : “He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth.”
• Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis : “He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.”
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper : “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.”
• L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz : “When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now.”
• Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment : “This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so.”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter : “The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes.”
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde : “This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner.”
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde : “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 not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.”
• Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol : “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
• Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace : “Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.”
• Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia”: “His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again.”
• J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan : “In person he was cadaverous and blackavized, and his hair was dressed in long curls, which at a little distance looked like black candles, and gave a singularly threatening expression to his handsome countenance. His eyes were of the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly.”

Looking for more tips and tricks regarding character creation? Check out the CharacterHub blog !

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!

Table of Contents

Share on social, unlock your character's full potential, join characterhub for exclusive access to revolutionary character-building tools and a like-minded community.

leg reference

What is an Imaginary Character and How To Write Them

What is a Kinsona?

Wait! Do you love creating characters?

On CharacterHub, you can create detailed character profiles, share their art and story, and organize all of your OCs! Join CharacterHub and bring your characters to life today!

VIDEO COURSE

Finish your draft in our 3-month master class. Sign up now to watch a free lesson!

Learn How to Write a Novel

Finish your draft in our 3-month master class. Enroll now for daily lessons, weekly critique, and live events. Your first lesson is free!

Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Dec 21, 2018

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

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery". 

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: complex , idiosyncratic , 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.

FREE COURSE

Show, Don't Tell

Master the golden rule of writing in 10 five-minute lessons.

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 (examples here ) 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.

FREE OUTLINING APP

Reedsy Studio

Use the Boards feature to plan, organize, or research anything.

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 Patrick Bateman’s  defining personality traits 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.’”

FREE RESOURCE

Reedsy’s Character Profile Template

A story is only as strong as its characters. Fill this out to develop yours.

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 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.

How to Develop Characters

In 10 days, learn to develop complex characters readers will love.

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!

Continue reading

Recommended posts from the Reedsy Blog

100+ Character Ideas (and How to Come Up With Your Own)

Character creation can be challenging. To help spark your creativity, here’s a list of 100+ character ideas, along with tips on how to come up with your own.

How to Introduce a Character: 8 Tips To Hook Readers In

Introducing characters is an art, and these eight tips and examples will help you master it.

450+ Powerful Adjectives to Describe a Person (With Examples)

Want a handy list to help you bring your characters to life? Discover words that describe physical attributes, dispositions, and emotions.

How to Plot a Novel Like a NYT Bestselling Author

Need to plot your novel? Follow these 7 steps from New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt.

How to Write an Autobiography: The Story of Your Life

Want to write your autobiography but aren’t sure where to start? This step-by-step guide will take you from opening lines to publishing it for everyone to read.

What is the Climax of a Story? Examples & Tips

The climax is perhaps a story's most crucial moment, but many writers struggle to stick the landing. Let's see what makes for a great story climax.

Join a community of over 1 million authors

Reedsy is more than just a blog. Become a member today to discover how we can help you publish a beautiful book.

We made a writing app for you

Yes, you! Write. Format. Export for ebook and print. 100% free, always.

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy. Come meet them.

Enter your email or get started with a social account:

Writing a Character Analysis Essay | Step-by-Step Guide

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

I’m also going to give you a ton of examples.

This post is split into four parts for easy navigation:

• What is a Character Analysis Essay?
• What is the best Format to Use?
• 11 Character Analysis Example Ideas
• Template, Checklist and Outline for Your own Piece

In this post, I’m going to explain to you clearly and in a step-by-step way how to conduct a character analysis.

1. What is a Character Analysis Essay?

Let’s get you started with some really simple details about what a character analysis is:

• A Quick Definition: A character analysis essay zooms-in on a character in a book, movie or even real life. It provides what we sometimes call a ‘sketch’ of a character.
• The Purpose of a Character Analysis: The purpose of a character analysis is to reveal interesting details about the character that might contain a broader moral message about the human condition. For example, Atticus Finch is not just a lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather, he provides us with a moral message about the importance of doing what you believe is right even though you know you will likely fail.

2. What is the best Character Analysis Essay Format?

Character analysis essays do not have just one format.

However, let me offer some advice that might act as a character analysis essay outline or ‘checklist’ of possible things you could discuss:

1. Start with the Simple Details.

You can start a character analysis by providing a simple, clear description of who your character is. Look at some basic identity traits such as:

• Race (if relevant)
• Social class (if relevant)
• Protagonist or Antagonist? A protagonist is the character who is our central character in the plot; the antagonist is often the protagonist’s opponent or challenger.
• Major or minor character?

2. What are the character’s distinctive personality features?

Your character might have some really clearly identifiable character traits. It’s best to highlight in your character analysis the exact traits that this character possesses. Some common character traits include:

I recommend you take a moment to write down what you think the top 3 to 5 words are that you’d use to explain your character’s personality traits. These will be important to discuss throughout your character analysis.

Sometimes a character may start out with some personality traits, but change over the course of the text. This is quite common; and one clear example of this is Lady Macbeth she deteriorates from a cutthroat power player to a guilt ridden shell of a person roaming the halls of the castle. This dramatic character change is something that makes her very interesting, and is worthy of discussion!

3. What are the character’s key relationships?

Does your character have a close relationship with a certain person in the storyline?

You might want to discuss the character’s relationships as a part of your character analysis. These relationships may reveal some key personality traits of your character.

For example, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Horatio is the loyal offsider to Hamlet. Through his actions in staying by Hamlet through thick and thin, we learn that he is a deeply loyal character.

Examining the character’s relationships with their friends and foes therefore is very useful for digging deeper into who this character actually is, and what personality traits they have when they are put to the test within the narrative.

4. What are the character’s motivations?

Another thing you might want to examine are the character’s motivations . What do they desire most in the world? Some common motivations for characters in stories are:

• A simple life
• To serve others

This list really could be endless, but I hope the above examples give you a bit of an idea of the sorts of traits to look out for. By mentioning and examining the motivations of the character, we will come closer and closer to learning exactly what moral message this character might be able to tell us.

5. What are the character’s key conflicts?

Stories tend to have a beginning, a complication, and a resolution.

The complication involves conflicts and challenges that need to be overcome. For Edmund in Narnia, it’s cowardice. For Romeo and Juliet, it’s the conflict between love and family loyalty. Here’s some other common conflicts for characters:

• Whether to stay loyal to a friend;
• To overcome obstacles to love;
• To seek a way out of a challenging situation;
• To escape war or poverty;
• To persevere through imprisonment;
• To overcome personal fear

Again, this list is endless.

Knowing the character’s core conflict gets us even closer to knowing the moral that the character is trying to teach us.

For example, in Romeo and Juliet, the challenge of Romeo and Juliet being together despite their families’ objections teaches us something. Personally, I believe it teaches us the importance of letting go of old grudges in order to let love bloom.

This moral lesson was taught to us through conflict: namely, the conflict that Romeo and Juliet were right in the center of.

6. What are the character’s epiphanies?

Sometimes a character has an epiphany. This often happens towards the end of the story and helps the character overcome the challenge or conflict that we discussed in the point above.

Here’s an example of an epiphany:

• In the Lion King, Simba runs away from his tribe to live in exile. After a chance encounter with his childhood friend Nala, he has an epiphany that he has a duty to his tribe. This leads him back home to fight Scar and return freedom to Pride Rock.

Not all characters have an epiphany. But, if they do, I strongly encourage you to write about it in your character analysis.

7. Examine the moral message the character teaches us.

Finally, conclude by examining the moral message behind the character. Nearly every character has something to teach the reader. Authors put a lot of thought into creating complex characters with whom we can relate. We relate to the character and say “wow, they taught me a lesson about something!”

The lesson might be something like:

• Money doesn’t buy happiness;
• Loyalty to family comes above all else;
• Love gives life meaning;
• Honesty is always the best policy

This is the core of your character analysis essay. If you can pick out exactly what moral message the character teaches you, you’ll be well on your way to writing a strong character analysis.

Below I’m going to give you some examples to help you out. I know it can be hard to really get your head around a character, so sometimes the best thing is to look at some samples!

3. Here’s 13 Example Character Analysis Essay Ideas.

Most times when we create a character analysis, we’re exploring the deeper moral stories / aspects of humanity. Here’s some example ideas. I’ve tried to outline in less than a paragraph exactly what your key point will be about each character:

• Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird: A character who teaches us a lesson about standing up for what’s right, even if you know you’re likely to lose.
• Huckleberry Finn from Huckleberry Finn: A character who reveals our inner desire for freedom from the elements of society that constrain us.
• Dudley from Harry Potter: A character whose personality tells us a cautionary tale of the perils of middle-class narcissism, parents’ desire to wrap their children in cotton wool, and the lack of discipline we perceive in contemporary childhoods.
• Jack from Lord of the Flies: A character who represents the innate desire for power that seems to lurk not too far from the surface of the human condition. When social structures are stripped away, he quickly reverts to violence and superstition to assert control over his peers.
• Lady Macbeth from Macbeth: Lady Macbeth teaches us a valuable lesson about the perils of contravening our own morality. She starts out a cutthroat killer but is increasingly consumed by the guilt of her own actions. While we may be able to escape full punishment from outside forces, it is the inner guilt that might eat us away to our last.
• The Boy who Cried Wolf: The boy who cried wolf is a character whose fatal flaw is his desire for attention and adulation. His repeated attempts at gaining the attention of others leads the townspeople to no longer take him seriously, which causes him harm when he actually needs the villagers to take him seriously to save his life. He teaches us the virtue of honest and humility.
• Nick Carraway from the Great Gatsby: Nick shows us all the inner conflict between the trappings of wealth, glamor and spectacle; and the desire for simplicity, honesty and community. He is drawn by the dazzling world of East Egg, New York, but by the end of the novel sees live in East Egg as shallow and lacking the moral depth of his former life in small town Minnesota.
• Alice from Alice in Wonderland: In many ways, Alice represents the child within all of us. She is a character of goodwill to all and who looks upon the world (or, rather, Wonderland) with awe. Travelling with a cadre of flawed characters, she learns with them the importance of seeking strength from within.
• The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet: Like many Shakespearian characters, the nurse’s role is both as loyal confidante to a central character and comic relief. Shakespeare uses minor characters to regale his crowd and sustain viewer interest between scenes.
• Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: Lucy represents a surprising character whose youthfulness and small stature make her an underrated character by all around her. Nonetheless, she possesses within the bravery and loyalty necessary to carry out the quest for Aslan. Lucy represents the goodness in children and, by extension, all of mankind.
• Anne in Anne of Green Gables: Anne occupies the typical literary role of young girls in many classical novels: she represents innocence and wonder, and her contraventions of rules are seen through a prism of childhood innocence. This frames Anne not as a deviant but as a precious soul.
• Simba from The Lion King: Simba’s story follows his struggle with growing up, embracing his destiny and duty to his family, or fleeing towards freedom and a ‘no worries’ lifestyle. Simba flees Pride Rock and goes through an existential crisis with his existentialist friends Timon and Pumba. When he runs into an old childhood friend, he realizes how shallow his new carefree life has become and reflects upon his obligation to his community back home.
• Woody from Toy Story: Woody starts out Andy’s favorite toy, but when Andy gets a new flashier toy, Woody’s status amongst the toys falls apart. Woody’s key character challenge is to learn to be humble and inclusive living within the group. By the end of the movie, Woody realizes his duty to love and serve Andy is more important than his own status within the group.

4. Here’s an Example Template for your own Character Analysis Essay

Feel free to use this brainstorming template to get you started with your character analysis essay. I recommend filling out as many of these key points as you can, but remember sometimes you might have to skip some of these points if they’re not relevant to your character.

Once you’ve brainstormed the ideas in Table 1, follow the character analysis essay outline in Table 2 to stay on track for your character analysis essay. Do remember though that each assignment will be different and you should adjust it based on your teacher’s requirements.

Here’s Table 1, which is a brainstorming template for your character analysis essay:

And here’s Table 2, which is an example character analysis essay outline. This is for a 1500 word character analysis essay. Change the word count according to how long your essay should be:

Read Also: 39 Better Ways to Write ‘In Conclusion’ in an Essay

Character analyses can be really tough. You need to know your character really well. You might even need to re-read (or watch) your book or movie a few times over to get to know the character really well.

I recommend when you re-read or re-watch the text before you write your character analysis, have the checklist I provided above handy and take notes. Then, use the essay outline I provided above to put all of those notes together into a clear and thorough final character analysis essay.

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 101 Hidden Talents Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Green Flags in a Relationship
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Signs you're Burnt Out, Not Lazy
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Toxic Things Parents Say to their Children

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Character description examples: Creating people not caricatures

Effective character description examples from a range of authors from Victorian to modern times show the many ways to convey characters’ personalities, desires, strengths and shortcomings.

• Post author By Jordan
• 10 Comments on Character description examples: Creating people not caricatures

Great character descriptions demonstrate how fiction has the power to make invented characters feel like old friends. Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature’. Read examples of character description that build character and persona, plus takeaways from each excerpt. These pointers will breathe life into your fictional characters. Before you start however, consider creating a character profile, and include tons of details about them in it. 

Character description examples and what they teach us

The character description examples below show how to:

Margaret Atwood shows how to use characters’ clothing to imply personality.

Virginia Woolf shows how multiple viewpoints can build a person’s many sides through an ensemble’s perspectives.

Arundhati Roy illustrates the way metaphor enriches characters and adds descriptive depth and specificity through comparison.

Charles Dickens shows how to combine broad information and specific detail to create a memorable character description.

Toni Morrison shows how describing past or present actions helps to suggest a person’s broader persona.

J.D. Salinger shows how what characters say (and mid-dialogue gesture) reveals a lot about personality and desire.

George Eliot shows how comparing and contrasting two characters can make each more real.

James Joyce’s narration shows how you can make your narrator’s voice reflect core changes in their arc such as growing older.

1. Describe characters using appearance

When you describe how a character looks , think about how appearances hint at personality.

In Margaret Atwood’s Booker-winning novel The Blind Assassin (2000), for example, Atwood’s narrator Iris opens the story remembering her sister Laura’s death.

Atwood creates a clear sense of Laura’s troubled personality by describing her clothing:

I could picture the smooth oval of Laura’s face, her neatly pinned chignon, the dress she would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour – navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours – less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000), p. 4.

Atwood’s description is specific in detail and there are clues to Laura’s depressive character in the ‘sober’ and ‘penitential’ (meaning expressing penance) colors in Atwood’s description.

When describing character, make use of other descriptions too, let the reader know what your characters look like. What facial expressions do they use? Do they have a tic? Include other details: what is their hair color, and eye color, do they have tattoos or scars? Do they have hair or a smooth dome? What is their age range? Consider how these descriptions can show something about your character for eg ‘warm brown eyes’ indicates a character that is is gentle and friendly, perhaps. While saying a character has long sleek black hair could show that this character is groomed, and pays attention to their appearance. Similarly, unkempt dark hair indicates a character who is down and out, perhaps, or is more of a tomboy. Blond hair with gray roots showing can indicate a character’s  age. The type of person they are can come through in these physical descriptions.

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.

Character development can also be indicated through appearance: a unkempt appearance can change within a story, showing a character’s passage from depression to mental health, for example. 

Always try to be specific in your description: saying a female character was attractive doesn’t say much — perhaps their sparkling blue eyes reveals something about their fun personality, for instance. 

Remember to describe main characters in detail; with minor characters you can get away with just a few lines. 

2. Describe characters through multiple POVs

One of the great benefits of a story with multiple viewpoint characters is you can create impressions of people through different facets of their personality .

For example, revealing a man from adult friends’ point of view versus children’s POV (as in the example below).

It adds depth and complexity to characters and their relationships when different facets surface depending on who they’re with (and on whose point of view you are reading).

Example of how to describe characters using multiple points of view

The modernist author Virginia Woolf is a master of combining multiple characters’ points of view (even within a single scene) to create a complex sense of ensemble and emotion. Here, Woolf describes a friend of Mrs Ramsay’s husband, Charles Tansley, who has come to stay for the summer, in To The Lighthouse :

[Mrs. Ramsay] looked at him. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best – to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, saying who had won this, who had won that … Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927), p. 11.

We see a clear sense of the children’s dislike, and sense of how Tansley looks through their eyes, as observed by their mother. Further on, Mrs. Ramsay notes Tansley’s pompous and academic way of speaking (his continual efforts to prove his intellect due to being from a working class background and his admiration of Mr Ramsay’s own accomplishment). Shortly after the above description, Woolf switches to Tansley’s point of view and we get a more romantic sense of Tansley and how he sees things (and how he views Mrs Ramsay herself):

… and all at once he realised that it was this: – she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets – what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Woolf, p. 18.

Woolf combines concise, clear physical description (‘all humps and hollows’) with a deeper sense of personality, revealed through how characters feel about one another.

We see ‘boring’, academic and non-sportsman Tansley but also Tansley’s romantic dreamer side through his own POV.

Woolf makes Tansley and other characters three-dimensional and full of human contradiction by combining external perspectives with their own.

3. Deepen character description using metaphor

Many character description examples reveal what a powerful tool comparison is – literary devices like metaphor and simile – for building vivid character.

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Roy’s character Estha retreats inwards and stops talking in the wake of a traumatic experience.

Roy’s use of metaphor in this character description example is much more effective than if she were to say Estha is ‘sad’ or ‘traumatized’:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms…sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. Arudhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997), pp. 11-12.

By describing Estha’s silence as a parasitic, living creature, Roy conveys Estha’s suffering while avoiding emptier, more abstract terms .

Master Character Description Basics

Get a detailed guide to character description with exercises and videos and create a memorable cast.

4. Make character introductions memorable

The Victorian author Charles Dickens was a master of characterization .

When Dickens introduces a character, he often uses an extended metaphor or comparison to humorous effect. Dickens includes physical appearance alongside tics and shortcomings, to make a character stay with us.

Here Dickens describes the boastful, self-important Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times :

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him […] always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) , p. 18

Dickens crafts a memorable character description in this example by:

• Using parallel sentences beginning, ‘A man…’ and ‘He was a [quality] man’. This element of repetition sticks in the memory.
• Switching from the broad detail of describing Bounderby’s profession to the particulars of his appearance and voice, back to the broad and abstract (poverty, humility – qualities Bounderby trumpets having while not actually having, showing that he is a hypocrite).

The details combined create a clear sense of persona and the fact that how a person sees themselves isn’t necessarily how others see them.

5. Describe characters using action

To avoid expository lumps in character description, show characters’ natures and backstories using action.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison does exactly this on the opening page of her novel, Jazz :

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.” Morrison, Jaz z (1992), p. 3

Morrison’s opening character description is excellent because it tells us plenty about Violet’s past.

It shows Violet’s grief using a very specific event (the funeral of her cheating husband’s murdered mistress).

Morrison doesn’t say, ‘Violet was driven crazy by grief, even to the point of disfiguring a dead girl, when her lover cheated on her.’ Instead, she shows Violet acting out her grief, in brief, on the very first page .

Develop characters further with the help of these 100 questions to deepen character arcs .

6. Describe personality through speech and dialogue

Describing characters through conversation is another way to make your characters feel like real people.

A great advantage of using dialogue to describe character is that you can juxtapose what characters say to each other with their hidden, unspoken feelings. Tweet This

J.D. Salinger does this in a scene between college couple Lane and Franny in his novella, Franny and Zooey :

He suddenly leaned forward, putting his arms on the table, as though to get this thing ironed out, by God, but Franny spoke up before he did. ‘I’m lousy today,’ she said. ‘I’m just way off today.’ She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car.   (p. 19) J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961), p. 19.

Salinger alternates the focal point of the narration in this dialogue between both characters. We see Lane’s gesture mid-dialogue, as he tries to ‘get this thing ironed out’.

Showing both what Zooey and Lane say to each other and the frustrations and feelings they put in actions rather than words creates a believable sense of both people having rich, complex inner lives.

Use figurative language when describing the characters talking: eg ‘he smiled knowingly ‘is a description that tells us something more about the character than just ‘he smiled’  This single adverb can introduce a slightly sinister note into the description. 

It’s also useful to describe interiority when writing characters. We show you how to get deep into your characters in this post on interiority .

7. Use comparison to highlight key differences between characters

Many writers struggle to make each character distinct. Each major character should have their own voice, appearance, world view and set of motivations .

One way to make characters distinctive is to compare them.

George Eliot clearly differentiates the two sisters who are introduced first in Middlemarch . We meet pious Dorothea and her younger sister, the more worldly, materialistic Celia:

The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, was generally in favour of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! Compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871), available via Project Gutenberg

Because Dorothea’s pious nature is crucial for Eliot’s plot, the foil of her ‘worldly-wise’ sister draws our attention to this important character trait from the start.

Traits such as piety are just some of the qualities that describe characters. Read a complete guide to description for character and setting description examples.

8. Change narrative voice over time

The style of a narrator’s delivery also may suggest a core aspect of their character.

If your entire story takes place over a week, it might not make much sense for a narrator’s voice or appearance to change in any significant way.

Yet what if your story is a bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, or your character changes in other significant ways?

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , he chooses the experimental route of making the narrative voice use the vocabulary of a child while his hero Stephen is a young child, and the voice progressively gets older:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo … James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 3.

The narration shortly flashes forwards to Stephen’s school days, and it is narrated in the sharp language of cheeky schoolboys:

Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink […] Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket. And one day he had asked: – What is your name? Stephen had answered: Stephen Dedalus. Then Nasty Roche had said: – What kind of a name is that? Joyce, Portrait , p. 4.

This shows how you can make the style of narration itself suggest changes in a character’s age, vocabulary, world view (this could be subtler than Joyce’s use of the device).

Which is your favorite of the above examples? Or who is your favorite author for strong character description ? Tell us in the comments below.

Create character sketches to make your characters vivid. Use Now Novel’s story planner for writers to brainstorm ideas fast.

Related Posts:

• How do you write good character description? 5 techniques
• Character description: 7 ways to avoid weak imagery
• Vivid story setting description: Examples and insights
• Tags character description examples , how to describe characters

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.

10 replies on “Character description examples: Creating people not caricatures”

Although unfamiliar with your choices, barring Dickens and George Eliot, I like the idea of stealing character traits from authors I do read. It would be a privilege if one of them read my work and complained. Possible as I don’t read work tagged, “award-winning.”

Hi Bob – any particular reason for this blanket ban? It’s true that whether or not a book has won an award isn’t always a reliable marker of the quality of its storytelling. Thanks for weighing in.

I have always been disappointed by the award winning novels and cannot fathom the reason for the choices, culminating in my absolute hatred of Mantel’s overblown ego trip, ” Bring up the bodies.”

It’s true that taste is a fairly subjective thing.

I like your blog more and more. It is very useful! I think pretty often I use comparison to describe my characters.

Thanks, Melissa. It is a useful means for drawing out differences and defining attributes.

Hi, just had a book beta read, and the reader suggested more character descriptions. I’ve always been weak with that, and in doing research came across this article. It’s interesting. I’m not for the narrative description of Dickens, makes me retch. The whole show don’t tell thing. I know it’s a fine line, but those examples of 1-4 are that to me. I’m glad you hit the many varieties. 5, 6 & 7 are more my style. Thanks for highlighting the different options. I’ve bookmarked this article for future reference.

That’s a pity, Dickens’ characterization is so vivid if you can look past his Victorian/fussy prose style. I’m glad you liked the latter more action-based examples. Thanks for reading and sharing your perspective 🙂

chicken nuggets are good.

Some characters even troll with comments about chicken nuggets on writing blogs 🙂 There’s room for every type.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Pin It on Pinterest

Kindlepreneur

Book Marketing for Self-Publishing Authors

Home / Book Writing / How to Write Amazing Character Descriptions (with Examples)

How to Write Amazing Character Descriptions (with Examples)

A good character description is walking a fine line between too much and too little information. Not only that, it's how you deliver the information to the reader that can make or break a good description. So whether you already have a vivid picture of your characters in mind or you don't know where to start, you've come to the right place. Read on to explore character description.

• What is a Good Character Description?
• Descriptions for Character Profiles
• Descriptions in Prose
• Character Description Examples
• Tips for Writing Character Descriptions for Profiles

Table of contents

• Description in Prose
• 1. Start With a List
• 2. Edit it Down
• 3. Get Creative With Surroundings and Movement
• 4. What Is and What Isn't
• 5. Adjectives Can Help or Hinder
• 6. Practice Makes Perfect
• 7. Description Can Help Reveal the Narrator

A good character description isn't just about describing how a given character looks. It's also about describing the character through the world around them and through their actions. When these factors come together, you can create a vivid description that not only tells the reader a lot about your character's personality but also sparks the reader's imagination. That, after all, is what reading is all about.

And while we'll mostly be discussing character description in prose, we'll also be discussing how character description is important when writing your character profiles. Since character profiles are best utilized before you write your novel, we'll start there.

Creating a character profile can help you when it comes time to write. It can ensure that you know your major characters intimately before you start writing. These profiles are about more than just character description, but for the purposes of this article, we'll focus on the physical attributes, as they're the building blocks for writing descriptive prose.

Think of a profile as a character sketch. You're not trying to get every single detail down, as it's always good to leave room for spontaneity when you're writing your novel . But when it comes to the basics of how the character looks, it can help to nail down the details.

This includes things like eye color, facial expression, height, weight, build, hair color, skin color, any disfigurements or scars, and things like tattoos or birthmarks. This should also include clothing and any other accessories, such as hats, watches, necklaces, and piercings.

You don't have to get fancy with the profile. Just get the information down so you can refer to it later. If you want to go the extra mile, you can write down some varying descriptions of your character as if you're writing the novel. It's often easiest to focus on one physical attribute at a time until you're comfortable. These practice descriptions can lend inspiration when you start writing in earnest.

Format Beautiful Professional Books

Easy to use, and and full of amazing features, you can quickly turn your book into a professional book.

Description in your book is a bit different than in your profile. A good description can give the reader a glimpse at the character's personality traits as well as their appearance. There are many different ways to write a great character description, but they all have one thing in common: they're creative and anything but boilerplate.

Many new writers opt for the list-style of description, thinking that less is more. They often look like this:

“He had piercing green eyes, sandy blond hair, and stood a stocky and solid six-foot-two. He had a slight limp and the musculature of a man who works hard for his living.”

While this may be fine for a minor character, it falls a little flat for a major character that you want the audience to know intimately. So for ideas on how to write character descriptions, let's look at some examples from some masters of the craft.

“His present dog was a huge white brute, a mountain dog from the South. He had named it Halina, after his second wife, with whom it shared some personality traits. . . It weighed almost as much as he did and its coat was matted and filthy; it lifted its massive head and watched him with lunatic eyes.”

This description, from Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn , is a great example of how to describe physical appearance. Neither the man nor his dog is a major character in the story, but the description tells you a little about the K9 and its owner in a few concise sentences.

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

This one-sentence description in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated is an excellent example of “less is more.”

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

This description is from Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn. It's a compelling use of simile to create a picture of a character's appearance in the reader's mind. Note that she doesn't use tired and worn-out similes such as “eyes as blue as the summer sky” or “hair as red as autumn leaves. Getting creative with figurative language can work out very well.

“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.”

This description, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on the character's actions to tell the reader about him. Or, rather, on a single action: a smile. At the same time, the writer is telling the reader something about the POV character, giving insights into how the narrator sees the character while describing him.

Tips for Writing Character Descriptions in Prose

Most writing teachers and authors will tell you that if you want to write, you need to read. And the descriptions above should be shining examples of why that is sage advice. Reading how the authors you love write character description is key. But I've included some tips you can use when it comes time to write your own masterpiece!

This is where the character profile comes in handy. Not only does it keep you on track (there's nothing worse than realizing you switched a character's eye color halfway through a book) but it also allows you to keep a picture of your character fresh in your mind's eye.

So keep a list handy. Even if it's just the basics, like “black hair” or “brown eyes” and the like, it helps.

One of the most oft-quoted pieces of advice from Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is “Omit needless words.” For writers old and new, this advice is sound indeed for writing character descriptions. We've all read a book where the description of a character goes on for pages and pages and we find ourselves asking, “When will we get back to the story?”

This is something to avoid at all costs. So edit your descriptions down as much as possible. Don't use flowery language for its own sake. Instead, try to get your point across to the reader in as concise a manner as possible. You don't have to get into a character's backstory with the description if it will interrupt the flow of the story.

Remember that you want to create a vivid character in the reader's mind, but that doesn't mean that you want to take all of their imagination out of it. Leave something for the reader to interpret, if at all possible.

Description isn't all about a character's physicality. It's also about how the character interacts with the world around them. The way a man sits on a couch or a woman drives a car or a child eats an ice cream cone can all add to the character's description. A sentence about what a couple does while waiting in line at the movies can tell the reader more than a paragraph of straight description.

The way a character walks, the way they gesture when they talk, the way they squint when they're thinking. These are all great ways to add to a character's vividness and depth through description.

Describing a person, fictional or otherwise, can be done by looking at what is there and what isn't there. In fact, sharing what isn't there — what's missing — can be a great way of describing a person. As a writer, this can also help you develop your craft and keep your prose fresh. Whether this is a missing limb, a shirt pocket that has been torn off, or the lack of seeming intelligence on a vacant face, the absence of things can say a lot about a character.

As a rule in fiction, it's best to limit your use of adverbs. And the use of adjectives in character descriptions is no exception. Like adverbs, adjectives can become a crutch that holds back more concise and creative writing. This is not to say that you shouldn't use them on occasion. Sometimes an adjective is just the right kind of word for character description. Just keep in mind that overusing them can lead to reader fatigue and overly flowery language.

This should go without saying, but practicing your description will go a long way to becoming a better writer. When you consciously sit down to write a compelling character description, you can really think about what you want to say and how best to say it.

To do this, choose a character archetype and flesh that archetype out into a full-fledged person through descriptive language. Try writing several descriptions of the same character type, focusing on a few different tributes each time. You can try writing one where you focus on appearance. One on movement. One on how she/he interacts with the world around them. One on clothing. And one on what's missing (if anything). These practices can help you get your head around how best to describe a character in any given situation.

Description can also tell the reader about the POV character or narrator. And if your narrator is also your protagonist, this can be very important. This is because, short of having your character stand in front of a mirror and describe herself, there aren't many easy ways to describe your POV character without taking the reader out of the story. So, a great way to enlighten the reader is to use the way your narrator sees other characters. This can often be in the form of physical comparisons that the narrator makes or insights that they glean from watching/interacting with another character.

Not only does this add to the main character's believability, but it also provides an opportunity for character development as the story progresses. Perhaps your POV character has a bad habit of comparing himself to others he learns to break. Or perhaps he focuses too much on physical attributes to the detriment of seeing who other characters really are.

Whether you're writing a short story , novella, or a 1,000-page tome, you'll want to get familiar with character descriptions. The best way to start this is with a character profile. This will help you with your character analysis, which is great for fleshing out your main character, villain, and even secondary characters that need brief but compelling descriptions.

Once you have the basics of your character down, you can start experimenting with description. By focusing on one major character trait at first, you can develop your own style of description. Then you can incorporate more attributes, sharing only a couple at a time as your novel progresses.

Be concise, creative, and don't forget to look for what is and what isn't there. Use movement, interactions, and gestures to make vivid and crisp character descriptions. 

Dave Chesson

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.

Related Posts

Best book writing software 2024 [writing, editing & focus], author vs writer: what’s the difference, how to write an adventure story, sell more books on amazon, amazon kindle rankings e-book.

Learn how to rank your Kindle book #1 on Amazon with our collection of time-tested tips and tricks.

Join the community

Join 111,585 other authors who receive weekly emails from us to help them make more money selling books.

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. 

For more tips and tricks on writing about body language, be sure to check out Writing Body Language: Bringing Your Characters to Life next!

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.

Writing Description in Fiction

by Melissa Donovan | Mar 16, 2023 | Story Writing | 8 comments

Tips for writing description in fiction.

Today’s post includes excerpts from What’s the Story? Building Blocks for Fiction Writing , chapter eight: “Description and Exposition.” Enjoy!

Without description, readers wouldn’t be able to visualize what’s happening in a story. We need to see the setting and the characters. Because there are no visuals in prose, writers must use words to describe a story’s visual elements in a way that helps readers see the story playing out in their minds.

Prior to film and photography, prose was packed with lengthy and detailed description. If a story was set on a tropical island, the narrative needed to describe it in great detail, because most readers had no idea what a tropical island looked like. Nowadays, most people have some idea of what a tropical island looks like, thanks to films and photos, and many people have traveled to a tropical island, thanks to advances in transportation. This lessens the need for elaborate descriptions. Modern writers can therefore write simpler and more concise descriptions, which allows them to place greater emphasis on action and dialogue. This is a good thing, because action and dialogue are where a story really happens.

Description is most essential when we’re describing characters, locations, and objects that readers have never seen or experienced. These can be some of the trickiest types of descriptions to craft. In a science-fiction story, it can be challenging to describe an alien to an audience that has never seen such a creature. We can use points of reference: maybe the alien is humanoid in shape, maybe it has some features that we can compare to plants and animals on Earth. But tying it all together in a tidy description that truly matches what the author is imagining might be a formidable task.

Let’s consider a description of a room:

There is a bookshelf in one corner and a chair in the opposite corner. There’s a couch and a coffee table in the center of the room. A piano sits in front of a large picture window. The walls are wood paneled and covered with paintings.

This description may give you a sense of the room, but it’s boring. Readers are likely to drift off if a description continues like this for too long.

What’s wrong with this description? Almost every sentence begins with “There is” or some variation of it, and most of the verbs are various forms of to be . Although it’s useful to draft descriptions in this manner, these sentences need to be reworked so that they hold the reader’s attention:

A massive oak desk sat below a large picture window, beside a shelf overflowing with books. Hardcovers, paperbacks, and binders were piled on the tiled floor in messy stacks.

Note the use of active verbs, such as overflowing , and descriptive adjectives, like messy . Good narrative description makes the setting more vivid by using language that engages the reader.

Effective description is often achieved not by inserting long and specific descriptions but by making thoughtful decisions about what to include and what to leave out. When a narrative brings readers into a room, it doesn’t need to cite every object in the room and explain in minute detail how the room is laid out. The goal is to give readers a sense of the room. That is best achieved by providing readers just enough description that they can see key details and trusting that their imaginations will fill in the rest.

Description also determines how immersed readers get in the story. We could describe the sand on a beach as white and sprawling in every direction as far as the eye could see. But if the character is walking on the sand, the reader will become more immersed when the sand is hot, grainy, and gritty against the character’s feet. When description is visceral—when we can feel it—it comes alive.

Description can be used to engage readers’ five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Average descriptions focus on sight, explaining what something looks like. But descriptions that include the other senses will arouse the readers’ senses. This is why dining scenes work remarkably well in prose. We can use description to set a scene in which characters are cooking a meal: the warmth from the oven; bright, fresh vegetables steaming on the stove; the sound of a sizzling skillet; the smell of spiced chicken frying; the sound of an ice-cold bottle of beer cracking open. The readers’ mouths will water as the characters enjoy their spicy, zesty fajitas.

The most important descriptions are those that are essential to the story. Have you ever read a story that offered detailed descriptions of mundane items and locations and then skimmed over the descriptive details of story elements that really mattered? This causes readers to struggle to imagine the story. For example, if a character has been in a terrible accident and is getting bandages removed for the first time, there should be some description of the wounds or scars as opposed to a description of the hospital room. This helps the readers focus on the character (and therefore the story) as opposed to a generic room. By adding description that references the smell of antiseptic and the slick, cold texture of the doctor’s latex gloves, the scene becomes sensory and visceral.

Want to learn more about writing description in fiction? Pick up a copy of What’s the Story? Building Blocks for Fiction Writing .

Thank you for that most helpful and insightful post. I will certainly look harder at my descriptions in the light of what you have said. Are they boring or do they invoke the senses and a sense of place?

Thanks, Vivienne. I’m glad you found this post helpful. Descriptions come naturally to some, but I like to review mine carefully to make them as interesting as possible.

Thank you for this piece. It’s an interesting read.

You’re welcome!

This is a great article on writing description. It’s flipped how I’ve been approaching description when writing. Thank you so much!

Thanks for your kind words!

Sitting on my veranda, overlooking the beautiful horizon where sunset was melting into dark blue velvet, I felt sleepy and bored. I turned to my laptop and discovered your fascinating article about descriptions in fiction writing. Finally, something interesting and stimulating in my email! Thank you for providing great insight!

What a lovely compliment, Linda. Thanks so much. I’m glad you found this interesting.

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Subscribe and get The Writer’s Creed graphic e-booklet, plus a weekly digest with the latest articles on writing, as well as special offers and exclusive content.

Recent Posts

• Writing Resources: Bird by Bird
• Punctuation Marks: The Serial Comma
• Getting Creative with Essay Writing
• Tips for Crafting Language
• The Writer’s Journey: A Must-Read for Storytellers

Write on, shine on!

Pin It on Pinterest

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• How to write a descriptive essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Descriptive Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

A descriptive essay gives a vivid, detailed description of something—generally a place or object, but possibly something more abstract like an emotion. This type of essay , like the narrative essay , is more creative than most academic writing .

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

Descriptive essay topics, tips for writing descriptively, descriptive essay example, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about descriptive essays.

When you are assigned a descriptive essay, you’ll normally be given a specific prompt or choice of prompts. They will often ask you to describe something from your own experience.

• Describe a place you love to spend time in.
• Describe an object that has sentimental value for you.

You might also be asked to describe something outside your own experience, in which case you’ll have to use your imagination.

• Describe the experience of a soldier in the trenches of World War I.
• Describe what it might be like to live on another planet.

Sometimes you’ll be asked to describe something more abstract, like an emotion.

If you’re not given a specific prompt, try to think of something you feel confident describing in detail. Think of objects and places you know well, that provoke specific feelings or sensations, and that you can describe in an interesting way.

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

The key to writing an effective descriptive essay is to find ways of bringing your subject to life for the reader. You’re not limited to providing a literal description as you would be in more formal essay types.

Make use of figurative language, sensory details, and strong word choices to create a memorable description.

Use figurative language

Figurative language consists of devices like metaphor and simile that use words in non-literal ways to create a memorable effect. This is essential in a descriptive essay; it’s what gives your writing its creative edge and makes your description unique.

Take the following description of a park.

This tells us something about the place, but it’s a bit too literal and not likely to be memorable.

If we want to make the description more likely to stick in the reader’s mind, we can use some figurative language.

Here we have used a simile to compare the park to a face and the trees to facial hair. This is memorable because it’s not what the reader expects; it makes them look at the park from a different angle.

You don’t have to fill every sentence with figurative language, but using these devices in an original way at various points throughout your essay will keep the reader engaged and convey your unique perspective on your subject.

Use your senses

Another key aspect of descriptive writing is the use of sensory details. This means referring not only to what something looks like, but also to smell, sound, touch, and taste.

Obviously not all senses will apply to every subject, but it’s always a good idea to explore what’s interesting about your subject beyond just what it looks like.

Even when your subject is more abstract, you might find a way to incorporate the senses more metaphorically, as in this descriptive essay about fear.

Choose the right words

Writing descriptively involves choosing your words carefully. The use of effective adjectives is important, but so is your choice of adverbs , verbs , and even nouns.

It’s easy to end up using clichéd phrases—“cold as ice,” “free as a bird”—but try to reflect further and make more precise, original word choices. Clichés provide conventional ways of describing things, but they don’t tell the reader anything about your unique perspective on what you’re describing.

Try looking over your sentences to find places where a different word would convey your impression more precisely or vividly. Using a thesaurus can help you find alternative word choices.

• My cat runs across the garden quickly and jumps onto the fence to watch it from above.
• My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above.

However, exercise care in your choices; don’t just look for the most impressive-looking synonym you can find for every word. Overuse of a thesaurus can result in ridiculous sentences like this one:

• My feline perambulates the allotment proficiently and capers atop the palisade to regard it from aloft.

An example of a short descriptive essay, written in response to the prompt “Describe a place you love to spend time in,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how a descriptive essay works.

On Sunday afternoons I like to spend my time in the garden behind my house. The garden is narrow but long, a corridor of green extending from the back of the house, and I sit on a lawn chair at the far end to read and relax. I am in my small peaceful paradise: the shade of the tree, the feel of the grass on my feet, the gentle activity of the fish in the pond beside me.

My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above. From his perch he can watch over his little kingdom and keep an eye on the neighbours. He does this until the barking of next door’s dog scares him from his post and he bolts for the cat flap to govern from the safety of the kitchen.

With that, I am left alone with the fish, whose whole world is the pond by my feet. The fish explore the pond every day as if for the first time, prodding and inspecting every stone. I sometimes feel the same about sitting here in the garden; I know the place better than anyone, but whenever I return I still feel compelled to pay attention to all its details and novelties—a new bird perched in the tree, the growth of the grass, and the movement of the insects it shelters…

Sitting out in the garden, I feel serene. I feel at home. And yet I always feel there is more to discover. The bounds of my garden may be small, but there is a whole world contained within it, and it is one I will never get tired of inhabiting.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

If you’re not given a specific prompt for your descriptive essay , think about places and objects you know well, that you can think of interesting ways to describe, or that have strong personal significance for you.

The best kind of object for a descriptive essay is one specific enough that you can describe its particular features in detail—don’t choose something too vague or general.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, August 14). How to Write a Descriptive Essay | Example & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved August 27, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/descriptive-essay/

Is this article helpful?

Jack Caulfield

Other students also liked, how to write a narrative essay | example & tips, how to write a literary analysis essay | a step-by-step guide, how to write an expository essay, get unlimited documents corrected.

✔ Free APA citation check included ✔ Unlimited document corrections ✔ Specialized in correcting academic texts

BRYN DONOVAN

tell your stories, love your life

• Writing Inspiration
• Semi-Charmed Life
• Reading & Research
• Works In Progress.

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!

This long list of physical characteristics is 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

Support My Site

If you like what I do, please support me on Ko-fi!

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!

Related Posts

Share this:

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 .

• Pingback: Bryn Donovan | Shadows Publishing

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 🙂

• Pingback: A Great Resource for Writers | I Read Encyclopedias for Fun
• Pingback: MASTER LIST: Physical Descriptions |

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!

• Pingback: Describing People « Chestnut ESL/EFL

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!

• Pingback: List of Physical Descriptions » Mary M Cushnie-Mansour
• Pingback: The Perfect Character | Simply frannie

Reblogged this on Insideamoronsbrain and commented: Wow!!

• Pingback: Writing Links Round Up 2/15-2/20 – B. Shaun Smith

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!

• Pingback: 25 Holy Grail Resources For Writers! - NATASHA SOLAE
• Pingback: How Do You Describe a Character’s Looks In His or Her Point of View? – Bryn Donovan

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!!

• Pingback: Sick of the same old descriptive words? | myislandofbooks
• Pingback: Character Details: Face – BUCK OFF BLOG

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.

• Pingback: Writing The Best Characters – LJBNovels

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!

• Pingback: Prepping for Camp NaNoWriMo [2 days left] – Cayleigh Stickler

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!

• Pingback: MASTER LIST of Physical Descriptions! | Written By Gigi

Great advice in this post, Bryn! Thank you.

Used this for school! It was really helpful!

Oh yay! So glad it was helpful!

• Pingback: Best Writing Websites of 2017 – lmnelsonscorner

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!

• Pingback: Character Descriptions – Queer Sci Fi

keep up the good work

Hey thanks 🙂

This is so helpful!!!!!

• Pingback: Thursday Thoughts: On Writing – Bookish Book Nerd

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.

• Pingback: Listing Characteristics for Character – Newcomers
• Pingback: Characteristics of Character – ESOL II

Incredibly helpful! Thanks a lot :3

Thank you for sharing this!

• Pingback: How do you introduce your character's appearance?
• Pingback: ? Writing Links Round Up 11/5-11/9 – B. Shaun Smith

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

• Pingback: NaNoWriMo Prep Resources – Quinn M. Nichols

Very useful for ready reference. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mohan! So glad you liked it!

• Pingback: Clear-Cut Advice For Latinbridesworld – Where To Go | Bart De Clercq
• Pingback: Vital Aspects Of Latinbrides World – The Options – Construtora Colombo
• Pingback: Clarifying Programs Of Latinbrides world — SunHouseDOO
• Pingback: Selecting Painless Products In Latin brides world site – Bie-Usha (WA) Limited

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!

• Pingback: The Latest On No-Hassle Methods For latin brides world - Delta Hijau Abadi
• Pingback: Deciding Upon Quick Systems In latin brides world – Rasa estampación
• Pingback: Word Lists – Skymark Streets

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

• Pingback: Character Bio Template: 200+ Character Development Questions - SEO News Media
• Pingback: Character creator | Doug Weller Writer

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.

Survêtement OM 2020, Survêtement PSG 2020 ou Survêtement France 2020, fais ton choix parmi la plus grande gamme de survêtement de football disponible sur internet et c’est seulement chez Foot Dealer, ta boutique 100% football !

writing cause and effect essays english language essay writing college essay requirements

• Pingback: 5 Mistakes Men Make Writing Women Characters - Richie Billing

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

• Pingback: Appearance in English – wygląd zewnętrzny po angielsku - kapitanenglish.com
• Pingback: Ukraina a nie Rosja powinna gościć Euro 2028 - kapitanenglish.com
• Pingback: How to create a memorable non-player character - Skull RPG
• Pingback: Master Lists of Character’s Physical Description – Verbum Amoris

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from BRYN DONOVAN

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar

EveryWriter

A New Community of Writers

100 Character-Driven Writing Prompts

March 19, 2024 by Richard 1 Comment

100 Character-Driven Writing Prompts: Character-driven stories are the heart and soul of great literature, captivating readers by delving deep into the minds, emotions, and motivations of the protagonists. These stories focus on the inner lives of characters, exploring their struggles, growth, and relationships as they navigate the challenges and triumphs of their journeys. By placing characters at the forefront, writers can create narratives that resonate with readers on a profound level, fostering empathy, understanding, and self-reflection.

Crafting compelling character-driven stories requires a keen understanding of human nature and the ability to create multi-dimensional, relatable characters. Writing prompts that focus on character development can be invaluable tools for writers seeking to hone their skills and explore new creative avenues. These prompts encourage writers to delve into the psyches of their characters, unearthing their fears, desires, and secrets, and bringing them to life on the page.

The following list of 100 character-driven writing prompts is designed to inspire writers of all levels, from novice to experienced. These prompts span a wide range of genres, from science fiction and fantasy to contemporary fiction and mystery, ensuring that there is something to spark the imagination of every writer. Each prompt presents a unique scenario or character archetype, inviting writers to explore the depths of human experience and craft stories that will resonate with readers long after the final page is turned.

By embracing the power of character-driven storytelling, writers can create works that not only entertain but also enlighten, challenge, and transform readers. These 100 writing prompts serve as a springboard for creativity, encouraging writers to push the boundaries of their imagination and craft stories that celebrate the complexities and beauty of the human experience. So, whether you’re a seasoned author or a budding writer, dive into these prompts and let your characters guide you on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery and storytelling magic.

• A retired spy is pulled back into the world of espionage for one last mission.
• A time traveler falls in love with someone from the past.
• A child discovers they have magical powers and must keep them hidden.
• A therapist begins to suspect their patient is a dangerous criminal.
• A robot learns to feel human emotions and questions its purpose.
• A ghost watches over their living family members, unable to communicate with them.
• A world-renowned surgeon loses the ability to operate and must find a new purpose.
• A politician leads a double life as a vigilante by night.
• A woman wakes up with no memory of her past and must piece together her identity.
• A chef inherits a mysterious cookbook with recipes that have strange effects on people.
• A homeless man discovers he has the ability to see the future.
• A successful businesswoman is forced to confront her humble beginnings.
• A soldier returns home from war and struggles to readjust to civilian life.
• An alien disguised as a human falls in love with an earthling.
• A parent’s worst fear comes true when their child goes missing.
• A writer’s characters come to life and demand a different ending to their story.
• A hitman falls in love with his target and must choose between love and duty.
• A scientist accidentally clones themselves and must deal with the consequences.
• A time traveler tries to change a historical event but makes things worse.
• A doctor discovers a cure for a deadly disease but realizes it has terrible side effects.
• A politician’s scandalous past catches up with them as they run for office.
• A famous actor is haunted by a ghost who claims to be their biggest fan.
• A detective falls in love with the main suspect in a murder investigation.
• A therapist becomes too emotionally invested in a patient’s problems.
• A con artist falls for their mark and must choose between love and money.
• A journalist uncovers a government conspiracy and becomes a target.
• A child befriends an AI and must keep it a secret from their parents.
• A time traveler meets their future self and learns a shocking truth.
• A spy falls in love with a fellow agent from a rival country.
• A doctor discovers they have a terminal illness and must come to terms with their mortality.
• A famous musician loses their hearing and must find a new way to create music.
• A chef opens a restaurant that only serves food from their childhood.
• A ghost helps a living person solve their own murder.
• A therapist is stalked by a former patient seeking revenge.
• A politician is blackmailed by a hacker who threatens to expose their secrets.
• A scientist creates a device that allows them to communicate with animals.
• A soldier is captured by the enemy and must rely on their training to survive.
• An alien falls in love with a human and must choose between their home planet and Earth.
• A parent’s child is switched at birth, and they must decide whether to keep the child they raised.
• A writer’s fictional world becomes real, and they must navigate it to find their way back.
• A hitman is hired to assassinate a public figure but begins to question the morality of their profession.
• A detective is framed for a crime they didn’t commit and must clear their name.
• A therapist is haunted by a patient who died by suicide.
• A con artist falls for a mark who is also a con artist, and they must outsmart each other.
• A journalist is embedded with a group of rebels fighting against a corrupt government.
• A child discovers a portal to another world in their backyard.
• A time traveler accidentally changes the course of history and must fix their mistake.
• A spy is betrayed by their own agency and must go on the run to survive.
• A doctor discovers a way to bring people back from the dead, but at a terrible cost.
• A famous actor is forced to confront their own mortality when diagnosed with a terminal illness.
• A musician’s songs start coming true, and they must find a way to stop it.
• A chef is kidnapped and forced to cook for a dangerous criminal organization.
• A ghost falls in love with a living person and must find a way to communicate with them.
• A therapist discovers their patient is a serial killer and must decide whether to turn them in.
• A politician is elected president and discovers a secret that could destroy the world.
• A scientist creates a machine that can read people’s thoughts and struggles with the ethical implications.
• A soldier is sent on a secret mission behind enemy lines and must rely on their wits to survive.
• An alien comes to Earth to study humans and falls in love with one of their subjects.
• A parent discovers their child has superpowers and must keep them safe from those who would exploit them.
• A writer’s characters come to life and take over their life, forcing them to live out their own story.
• A hitman is hired to kill a child and struggles with the moral implications of their job.
• A detective investigating a murder begins to suspect that the victim is still alive.
• A therapist becomes obsessed with a patient and begins to lose grip on reality.
• A con artist is conned by their own mentor and must find a way to get revenge.
• A journalist uncovers a secret society that controls the world from the shadows.
• A child befriends a monster living in their closet and must keep it a secret from their family.
• A time traveler falls in love with someone from the future and must choose between staying or going back.
• A spy must go undercover as their own twin to infiltrate a criminal organization.
• A doctor discovers a way to make people immortal but realizes the consequences too late.
• A famous actor is stalked by an obsessive fan who will stop at nothing to get close to them.
• A musician is cursed by a witch and must find a way to break the spell before it’s too late.
• A chef opens a restaurant that serves magical dishes, but the magic comes with a price.
• A ghost is tasked with helping a living person fulfill their destiny before they can move on to the afterlife.
• A therapist begins to suspect that their patient is possessed by a demon.
• A politician makes a deal with a powerful entity to win the election, but the entity has its own agenda.
• A scientist accidentally creates a black hole and must find a way to stop it from destroying the world.
• A soldier is sent to a war-torn country to rescue a group of civilians, but things don’t go as planned.
• An alien crash-lands on Earth and must blend in with humans to survive.
• A parent’s deepest fear comes true when their child is kidnapped by a supernatural entity.
• A writer’s fictional world begins to bleed into reality, and they must find a way to stop it.
• A hitman is hired to kill a wealthy businessman but discovers that the businessman is their long-lost father.
• A detective is brought in to investigate a series of bizarre murders that seem to defy explanation.
• A therapist’s patient claims to be from the future and warns of an impending apocalypse.
• A con artist falls for their mark and must choose between their love and their freedom.
• A journalist stumbles upon a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the government.
• A child discovers a magical amulet that grants wishes, but the wishes come with unintended consequences.
• A time traveler is tasked with preventing a major historical event from happening.
• A spy must go undercover as a member of the royal family to prevent an assassination attempt.
• A doctor discovers a way to communicate with the dead, but the dead have their own agenda.
• A famous actor is forced to confront their own ego when they are cast in a role that requires them to play a less attractive version of themselves.
• A musician is given a powerful instrument that can control people’s emotions, but it comes with a terrible price.
• A chef is tasked with creating a dish that can bring peace to warring nations, but the ingredients are nearly impossible to find.
• A ghost is given a second chance at life but must live in someone else’s body.
• A therapist begins to suspect that their patient is a werewolf and must find a way to help them control their transformations.
• A politician discovers that they are the chosen one destined to save the world from a great evil.
• A scientist creates a machine that can bring fictional characters to life, but the characters have minds of their own.
• A soldier is sent on a mission to infiltrate a group of rebels, but begins to sympathize with their cause.
• An alien falls in love with a human and must choose between their loyalty to their own species or their love for the human.
• A parent discovers that their child has been replaced by a changeling and must find a way to get their real child back.
• A writer is transported into the world of their own book and must find a way to change the ending to save the characters they love.

In conclusion, character-driven stories have the power to illuminate the human condition, fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. By placing characters at the heart of the narrative, writers can create stories that resonate on a profound level, touching readers’ lives and leaving a lasting impact. These 100 writing prompts serve as a catalyst for creativity, encouraging writers to explore the limitless possibilities of character-driven storytelling.

Crafting compelling characters is both an art and a skill, requiring writers to delve into the complexities of human nature and bring their creations to life on the page. Through the use of vivid description, authentic dialogue, and psychological depth, writers can create characters that feel as real as the people we encounter in our daily lives. By investing time and effort into character development, writers can elevate their stories from mere entertainment to works of art that inspire, challenge, and transform.

As you embark on your writing journey, remember that character-driven stories have the power to bridge the gap between writer and reader, creating a shared experience that transcends the boundaries of the page. By crafting characters that readers can relate to, empathize with, and root for, you have the opportunity to create stories that will be cherished for generations to come.

So, whether you’re a seasoned author or a novice writer, embrace the power of character-driven storytelling and let these writing prompts be your guide. Dive deep into the hearts and minds of your characters, and let their stories unfold with authenticity, vulnerability, and truth. Through your words, you have the ability to shape the world, one character at a time.

In the end, remember that writing is a journey of self-discovery and growth. As you explore the depths of your characters, you may just find yourself reflected in their struggles, triumphs, and transformations. Embrace the power of character-driven storytelling, and let your creativity flow freely. The world is waiting for the stories only you can tell.

If you enjoyed these writing prompts, we have many more on our site .

Related Posts:

About Richard

Richard Everywriter (pen name) has worked for literary magazines and literary websites for the last 25 years. He holds degrees in Writing, Journalism, Technology and Education. Richard has headed many writing workshops and courses, and he has taught writing and literature for the last 20 years.  

In writing and publishing he has worked with independent, small, medium and large publishers for years connecting publishers to authors. He has also worked as a journalist and editor in both magazine, newspaper and trade publications as well as in the medical publishing industry.   Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

Reader Interactions

pocketoption robot says

March 24, 2024 at 4:32 am

To maximize your crypto investments on Globitex.com, leverage strategic approaches tailored to your goals. Utilize the PocketOption robot to automate tasks and optimize trading efficiency. Stay informed, analyze market trends, and execute trades confidently for optimal returns.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Privacy Overview

Want a daily email of lesson plans that span all subjects and age groups?

How to write descriptively - nalo hopkinson.

5,077,738 Views

56,968 Questions Answered

Let’s Begin…

The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story. But as a writer, how do you suck your readers into your stories in this way? Nalo Hopkinson shares some tips for how to use language to make your fiction really come alive.

About TED-Ed Animations

TED-Ed Animations feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators. Are you an educator or animator interested in creating a TED-Ed Animation? Nominate yourself here »

Meet The Creators

• Educator Nalo Hopkinson
• Director Joyce Stenneke
• Composer Cem Misirlioglu
• Narrator Susan Zimmerman

More from The Writer's Workshop

How to make a sad story funny

Lesson duration 04:39

402,674 Views

First person vs. Second person vs. Third person

Lesson duration 05:20

1,096,181 Views

The 5 types of text structure

Lesson duration 03:50

3,160,715 Views

The importance of setting in a story

Lesson duration 03:14

1,180,308 Views

Descriptive Essay: Your Guide to Writing an Effective One

A descriptive essay is one of the four main types of essays, alongside narrative, argumentative, and expository essays. Among these, descriptive essays can be particularly challenging because they demand a keen eye for detail and an appreciation for aesthetics. By vividly describing scenes and details, you engage your reader’s senses, making your essay memorable and engaging. In this guide, our essay writers will break down the writing process for you, offering step-by-step instructions, practical examples, and clear definitions to help you excel in your next assignment.

What is a Descriptive Essay?

Descriptive writing aims to vividly portray something through essays, helping readers visualize and feel the scene or object being described. Such essays draw on detailed descriptions to create a clear and impactful image that not only presents the subject but also evokes emotions and memories.

There are three main techniques used in descriptive writing: naming, detailing, and comparing .

Naming identifies the subject and its characteristics, answering questions like 'What is it?' and 'What features does it have?'

Detailing elaborates on these features, providing answers to detailed questions such as 'How many are there?' and 'What is its value?' Techniques like synesthesia and comparisons enhance these descriptions.

Comparing uses similes and metaphors to make descriptions more vivid, linking the subject to familiar concepts.

What Is the Purpose of a Descriptive Essay?

The purpose of a descriptive essay is multifaceted. Primarily, it allows writers to give readers a vivid impression of a person, place, or event, making the subject come alive through words. By using detailed descriptions, writers can help readers visualize settings and characters as if they were seeing them firsthand.

Additionally, descriptive essays can serve to clarify abstract ideas. By describing these concepts with concrete images and examples, writers make complex ideas easier to understand and more relatable to the reader.

Descriptive essays also aim to make information more memorable. When details are vivid, they are more likely to stick in the reader's mind, enhancing recall and engagement with the text.

Lastly, it can bolster an argument by providing concrete, detailed evidence that supports a point of view. This helps persuade the reader by making the argument more tangible and credible.

Need Some Help?

You will get your written masterpiece delivered to you on time, with a smile on your face!

Today, you can request help with dissertation or any other written assignment, such as an essay, from competent writers with years of academic experience.

Descriptive Essay Topics

When you're tasked with writing a descriptive essay, you'll usually get a prompt that asks you to describe something. These descriptive essay prompts allow you to explore different settings, time periods, and imaginative scenarios in your essays. 

Personal Prompts:

• Describe a favorite childhood memory.
• Describe a treasured family heirloom.

Imaginative Prompts:

• Describe a day in the life of a pirate.
• Describe what it would be like to explore an underwater city.

Historical Prompts:

• Describe the atmosphere of a bustling ancient marketplace.
• Describe the experience of witnessing a significant moment in history, like the moon landing or the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Nature Prompts:

• Describe the sights and sounds of a peaceful forest at dawn.
• Describe the feeling of standing at the edge of a majestic waterfall.

Everyday Prompts:

• Describe the chaos of a busy morning commute in a big city.
• Describe the tranquility of a sunset picnic in the countryside.

If you need topic ideas for other essay genres, consult our guide on narrative essay topics .

How to Write a Descriptive Essay in 8 Steps

Now that you understand the essence and purpose of this type of essay let's explore some fundamental yet valuable tips for writing a descriptive essay. 

Step 1: Select Your Topic

The first step in creating a captivating descriptive essay is choosing the right topic. Start by paying close attention to your surroundings. 

• Consider describing a person you know well in your life, like a sibling, a close friend, or a teacher who has made a significant impact on you.
• Alternatively, you could focus on a specific place or object that holds sentimental value to you, such as a favorite vacation spot, a cherished childhood toy, or a meaningful piece of jewelry.
• Another option is to explore a strong emotion that you have experienced, like excitement, nostalgia, or determination. 

Avoid using overly technical or jargon-filled language in your topic selection. Instead, aim for simplicity and clarity to ensure that your chosen topic resonates with your audience and allows you to convey your unique perspective effectively.

Step 2: Gather Details

Once you've selected your topic for your descriptive essay, the next step is to gather details that will bring your chosen subject to life on the page. Start by closely observing your subject, whether it's a person, place, object, or emotion. Pay attention to its appearance, characteristics, and any unique features that stand out to you.

For example, if you've chosen to describe your childhood home, take note of its architectural style, color scheme, and any distinctive elements like a front porch or a cozy fireplace. Recall memories associated with the home, such as family gatherings or quiet moments spent reading in your favorite spot.

If your topic is a person, like a close friend or family member, observe their physical appearance, mannerisms, and personality traits. Consider the ways in which they interact with others and the impact they have on your life.

Step 3: Draft an Outline

When structuring your essay, you can organize your paragraphs from top to bottom or near to far, chronologically, or from general to specific. Here's a simple descriptive essay outline from our custom writers to guide you: 

Step 4: Develop a Thesis Statement

When developing your thesis statement, consider the main points or aspects of your subject that you want to highlight in your essay. Think about the emotions or impressions you want to evoke in the reader and tailor your thesis statement accordingly.

For example, if you're writing about your favorite childhood memory, your thesis statement could be: 'My summers spent at my grandparents' farm were filled with laughter, adventure, and a sense of belonging.'

Or, if you're describing a beautiful sunset, your thesis statement might be: 'The breathtaking colors and serene atmosphere of the sunset over the ocean evoke a sense of peace and wonder.'

Step 5: Craft the Introduction

Start your descriptive essay introduction by hooking the reader with an engaging opening sentence or anecdote related to your topic. This could be a vivid description, a thought-provoking question, or a surprising fact. For example:

• Growing up on my grandparents' farm, each summer brought new adventures and unforgettable memories that still warm my heart to this day.

After hooking the reader, provide some background information or context for your topic. This could include brief details about the setting, time period, or significance of your subject. For instance:

• Nestled in the rolling hills of the countryside, my grandparents' farm was a sanctuary of simple pleasures and cherished traditions.

Finally, end your introduction with your thesis statement, clearly stating the main point of your essay. This ties everything together and gives the reader a roadmap for what to expect in the rest of your essay. 

Step 6: Compose the Body Paragraphs

Once you've crafted your introduction, it's time to compose the body paragraphs, where you delve into the details and descriptions that bring your topic to life.

Each body paragraph should focus on a specific aspect or detail of your topic, expanding upon the ideas presented in your thesis statement. Use vivid language, sensory details, and descriptive devices to paint a clear picture for the reader.

For example, if you're writing about summers spent at your grandparents' farm, you could dedicate one body paragraph to describing the sights and sounds of the farm:

• The rolling fields stretched out before me, golden waves of wheat swaying gently in the breeze. The air was filled with the sweet scent of wildflowers, mingling with the earthy aroma of freshly turned soil.

In another body paragraph, you might explore the adventures and activities that filled your days:

• From sunrise to sunset, there was never a dull moment on the farm. Whether we were exploring the woods, splashing in the creek, or helping with chores, each day brought new excitement and adventure.

Continue with additional body paragraphs, each focusing on a different aspect of your topic and providing rich, detailed descriptions. Be sure to vary your language and sentence structure to keep the reader engaged and interested.

Step 7: Conclude the Essay

The conclusion should bring together all the ideas presented in your essay. Avoid introducing any new information in the conclusion. Instead, focus on evaluating your thoughts and reflections on the topic. End with a strong final sentence that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

For example, if you were writing about summers spent at your grandparents' farm, your conclusion might reflect on the significance of those memories:

• 'As I reminisce about the summers spent amid the rustic charm of my grandparents' farm, I am filled with a profound sense of gratitude for the simple pleasures and cherished moments that shaped my childhood. The laughter echoing through the fields, the adventures awaiting around every corner, and the sense of belonging that enveloped me there will forever hold a special place in my heart.'

Step 8: Refine Your Essay

Once you've finished writing your essay, it's time to refine it for clarity and impact. Start by reading your essay aloud to yourself. Listen for any sentences that sound awkward or unclear. Mark these sentences so you can revise them later.

You can also read your essay aloud to others and ask for their feedback. Invite friends, family members, teachers, or mentors to listen to your essay and share their thoughts. Ask them if there are any parts that are difficult to understand or if they have trouble picturing the subject you're describing.

Be receptive to constructive criticism and feedback. Use it as an opportunity to improve your essay and make it stronger. And if it sounds too demanding right now, you can buy cheap essay to sidestep the hassle and reclaim some much-needed free time.

Descriptive Essay Format

The standard format for a descriptive essay typically includes five paragraphs: an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. However, you can also organize your essay into sections, allowing for flexibility in the length of the body paragraphs.

Introductory Paragraph: This paragraph sets the scene by describing where, when, and to whom the experience occurred. It should include descriptive words to capture the reader's attention.

First Body Paragraph: Here, the writer provides details that allow the reader to visualize the situation. Descriptive language is key in painting a clear picture for the reader.

Second Body Paragraph: More details are provided, with a focus on using descriptive adjectives. Figurative language, such as metaphor (e.g., describing the city as a 'jungle of concrete'), can enhance the imagery.

Third Body Paragraph: The writer continues to appeal to the reader's senses with visually descriptive words. Figurative language, like personification (e.g., describing the wind as a playful dancer), adds depth to the description.

Conclusion: The conclusion alludes to another sense, such as touch or sound, and uses strong words to signify closure. It ends with a powerful concluding sentence to leave a lasting impression on the reader.

Descriptive Essay Examples

In this section, you'll discover essay examples that demonstrate how to captivate your readers' attention effectively. After exploring these examples, you might find yourself tempted to ask, 'Can someone do my homework for me?' - and that's completely understandable! We're here to help you become more confident and articulate communicators through your writing!

3 Additional Tips for Writing

While writing a descriptive essay, your goal is to make your subject come alive for the reader. Unlike more formal essays, you have the freedom to be creative with your descriptions, using figurative language, sensory details, and precise word choices to make your writing memorable.

Use Figurative Language: Figurative language, like metaphors and similes, adds flair to your descriptions. Instead of sticking to literal descriptions, use comparisons to create unique and memorable imagery. 

• For instance, describing a city as a bustling beehive of activity ' or a forest as ' a blanket of whispers ' adds an unexpected twist that captures the reader's attention.

Engage Your Senses: In a descriptive essay, don't just focus on what something looks like; appeal to all the senses. Describe how things smell, sound, feel, and even taste, if applicable. This adds depth and richness to your descriptions, making them more immersive. 

• For example, instead of just describing a beach visually, include sensory details like feeling the warm sand between your toes , hearing the rhythmic crash of waves , and t asting the salty sea breeze.

Choose Your Words Carefully: Use effective adjectives, verbs, and nouns to convey your impressions vividly. Avoid clichés and opt for original, precise language that reflects your unique perspective. Take the time to review your sentences and consider if there are better word choices that could enhance your description.

In Wrapping Up

To sum it up, descriptive essays are all about encouraging students like you to explore your surroundings and unleash your creativity by describing scenes in detail with words. When you carefully select and organize these descriptive details, it not only enhances your writing but also sharpens your critical thinking skills. Plus, diving into this expressive writing style allows you to appreciate the beauty of language and feel more connected to written communication. And remember, if you ever need a little boost in your writing journey, our descriptive essay writing service is here to help!

Need To Describe Something But DON'T KNOW HOW?

Let one of our essay writers do it for you, all you have to do is send us your paper requirements and wait for your original paper to be written.

How To Write A Descriptive Essay?

What is a descriptive essay, what is the purpose of a descriptive essay.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

• New samples
• New information on each of the rest sections 

Axelrod, R. B. and Cooper, R. C. (2008). The st martin’s guide to writing. (English Edition). New York: Bedford/St Martins

Okono, U. M. (2021). Descriptive essay: An assessment of performance by undergraduates of AkwaIbom State University. Erudite Journal of Linguistics and Languages . https://www.globalacademicstar.com/download/article/descriptive-essay-an-assessment-of-performance-by-undergraduates-of-akwa-ibom-state-university.pdf

Okono. U. M. (2020). “Qualities of a good essay: An assessment of the writings of Nigerian undergraduates.” International Journal on integrated Education. 3: vi.

https://irsc-asc.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/8/1/31813909/e7__descriptive_essay_guidelines.pdf

English Compositions

Essay on My Favourite Cartoon Character Shinchan [PDF]

Hello readers, today let see the essay on My Favourite Cartoon Character Shinchan. So let’s dive into it!

One of the more interesting aspects of cartoon characters is that they can be endowed with adult capabilities and abilities even though they are supposed to be children. It never ceases to amaze me at how these cartoon figures can be so smart, strong, and capable even though they are not over 10 years old.

Shinchan is one such character. I could never possess the capabilities and abilities he has when I was 5 years old. When Shinchan is kicked out of his home for not eating vegetables, a crime in today’s real world, he goes to his friend’s house and watches tv.

I would be too scared to do that if I was 5 years old and told my mother to leave the house. I would sit on the front step afraid to make any move because I would be alone in a very risky area.

Also, Shinchan has no fear which makes him a better person than I even though he is only a fictional character. He is able to walk the streets, go on shopping errands for his mother and return home without being afraid or scared of anything. That is something else I could not do as a 5-year-old.

What I see in Shinchan that makes him my favorite cartoon character is that he has abilities, etc., that I never had, and wished I did have like a 5-year-old child. One thing we do share though is our inability to be understood.

This was a character flaw that was endearing, not off-putting. Shinchan looked human because of this problem and it helped me to relate to him a lot better. He is difficult to understand because the character is written and voiced from a Japanese point of view.

There are a lot of Japanese words he uses that just cannot be translated into another language. Plus, he is 5 and he does not understand all the meanings of the words he uses. His inappropriate use is funny but makes one scratch their head in bewilderment.

A similar reaction I got as a child from my friend’s parents and other adults. Another flaw that helps me like this character is his ability to misunderstand an instruction and then go off thinking he knows what to do. As a 5-year-old boy I did some of the exact same things.

Unfortunately, my results were real and not so good. They also can’t be erased or forgotten like Shinchan’s can. He is luckier than I as when he is punished he does not get hurt. Sadly, my seat of learning hurt quite a bit when the belt of knowledge was applied to it.

But that difference wasn’t enough to dissuade me from making him my favorite cartoon character. Instead, it helped me identify with him more as we both have our own problems and character flaws.

I can only laugh at his lack of tact when he asks inappropriate questions of adults. I do not know how many times I did that. I laugh even harder when I recall some of their facial expressions when they heard my questions.

If there was a character quality I did not like about Shinchan, it is that he doesn’t age. No matter how much time passes, he remains 5 years old. Unlike me, who ages with every passing year.

Sometimes I wish I could stop time and keep from aging. But then I think, it would not be a good life being stuck at the age of 5 for the rest of my life. So I guess I have something better than Shinchan has.

I get to grow up and see what the good things he brings to my life when I need some healthy entertainment. Also, I get to do adult things he will never be able to do.

How was the essay on Shinchan? I hope you liked it, please feel free to share your thoughts on the comment section, and do share it on your favorite social media platform and help us to grow!

Please sign in to submit your valuable feedback. Sign In or Register Now.

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

A memoir in essays, by nicole graev lipson, you must sign in to see if this title is available for request. sign in or register now, send netgalley books directly to your kindle or kindle app, to read on a kindle or kindle app, please add [email protected] as an approved email address to receive files in your amazon account. click here for step-by-step instructions., also find your kindle email address within your amazon account, and enter it here., pub date mar 04 2025 | archive date mar 03 2025, chronicle books | chronicle prism, biographies & memoirs | reference.

Talking about this book? Use #MothersandOtherFictionalCharacters #NetGalley . More hashtag tips!

Description

Available editions.

Available on NetGalley

Additional information.

• We Are Bookish
• How It Works
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• International
• www.netgalley.fr
• www.netgalley.de
• www.netgalley.jp
• www.netgalley.co.uk