How do I write a character’s physical description without it...

Case Study #1a because he wouldn’t shut up: Thomas Wolfe

What’s it got to do with the story?

In the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s 1956 novel Palace Walk, the first volume of his Cairo Trilogy, the physical appearance of the two principal characters, Ahmad Abd Al-Jawad and his wife Amina, is sketched fairly quickly but in detail in the first few pages.

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Do you feel it’s absolutely necessary to tell the reader what characters look like?

(Donoghue went on to write the award-winning novel Room, which was later made into a 2015 movie of the same name, for which Brie Larson won the Best Actress Oscar, and Donoghue was nominated for the Oscar for her own screenplay.)

Case Study #1: Thomas Wolfe

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The book opens with Amina waiting for her husband to come home after a night on the town, and she is described as looking slender and still beautiful, whereas he is extremely well-groomed and also very overweight—because he doesn’t need to bother to keep in shape, since he has an extremely obedient and, indeed, subservient wife, who gets up every night at midnight, and waits up for him to come home around 1am, so that she can tend to his needs (i.e. take his socks off, among other things) and make sure he goes to bed in comfort.

Free yourself from the need to describe what your characters look like.

Another is that he is determined to emphasise how this character’s inner soul is reflected in her face, perhaps by way of justifying why he’d described it in the first place. But he’s just telling us this stuff.

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I would echo Rachel Neumeier’s question in her fine answer:

Why do you want to write a character’s physical description?

You might find it liberating.

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Why? Because it’s completely irrelevant to the stories that Kafka and Melville want to tell.

Case Study #2: Naguib Mahfouz

The other problem is specific to Wolfe himself: the reason why he was determined to tell you what his characters looked like is that they were based on people he knew—family members, friends, neighbours—and he was heroically but idiotically determined to render them in fiction with as much completeness and detail as he possibly could.

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The problems with the above are manifold. (It goes on for two more pages.)

There could be other cases. Is a character well-known for having an unusual appearance? Then it’s worth mentioning.

Why do we need to know what they look like at all?

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If a character is a bit out of physical shape, there’s no need to point this out in advance.

Because, as I hope I’ve shown, some of the greatest writers ever have not been bothered to describe what their characters look like.

If so, why? What’s so important about their appearance that you have to describe them to us?

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This is because Amina’s submission to her husband is one of the themes of Palace Walk, and indeed the trilogy as a whole. He is a complacent and immensely confident philanderer, whereas she lives as though he is her faithful and wonderful husband, and her role is to treat him as though he’s perfect. She overlooks things like the obvious evidence that he’s been drinking wine all night, which is frowned upon for someone who claims to be as good a Muslim as he is, because she thinks he’s flawless.

But if the story is mostly about what goes on inside the characters, and their physical appearance isn’t really that relevant… why mention it?

Well, here’s Thomas Wolfe to show you how not to do it.

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One is that Wolfe is determined to tell you what the person looked like, and so the story grinds to a standstill while he does that.

What do you want to do?

So, in terms of Mahfouz’s artistic intentions, it makes sense for us to know that Amina is portrayed as someone who, under other circumstances, wouldn’t need to be content with such a patriarchal asshole as Ahmad, but she is anyway—and that’s one of the things that drives the story.

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In the end, we always return to the same question:

In the Irish novelist Emma Donoghue’s second novel Hood, the protagonist and narrator, Cara, is supposed to be rather on the large side, but the only way we know this is that she talks about how she habitually sweats and chafes, and gets red in the face, whenever she has to do even minimal exercise, plus (iirc) a couple of casual remarks by her deceased lover. Donoghue never actually tells us what she looks like.

Physical appearance should be worth mentioning if it matters to the story.

You know when people say ‘Show, don’t tell’? Thomas Wolfe was an incorrigible teller of stuff.

Is the story set in a world where visible ethnic differences matter? Is it about sexual attraction? Then physical appearance may well play an important role, and could be worth mentioning.

But that doesn’t mean that a character’s physical appearance is always completely irrelevant.

FFS, Thomas Wolfe, enough with the face-describing!

Thanks, Thomas. The problem with the above is—

So, does this really need to be a problem?

If I think of classic novels that I admire, like Kafka’s The Trial, or Melville’s Moby-Dick, in neither of those novels do I ever find out what the protagonist looks like.

Please tell us that you’re not also describing what a character’s face looks like, as if it directly reflects their innermost soul.

How do I write a character’s physical description without it feeling unnatural and clunky? I’m able to describe their hair and body relatively easily because my writing puts emphasis on small movements and fidgeting, but I can’t describe faces.

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