To Describe Is to Reveal: On Character Descriptions in Fiction

We seldom observe others as a list of neutral facts, but instead seize on a few memorable details and attach meaning to them. This is how memorable descriptions are written.

Character descriptions are a contentious topic.

Some editors will strongly argue against anything that sounds like a description—especially if placed immediately after a character enters a room or sees themselves in a mirror. Others may not have a strong opinion unless every character description in the book follows the same pattern or order.

Regardless, we can indeed find a large variety of character descriptions. For example:

Roion was a tall, light-skinned man with a dark, well-trimmed beard. He was thinning on top. Like most of the others, he wore a short, open-fronted jacket, exposing the shirt underneath. Its red fabric poked out above the jacket’s collar.

…which was taken from Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings; as you noticed, it focused solely on appearances.

Here is another, and quite distinct, example:

Control’s father’s side of the family came originally from Central America, Hispanic and Indian; he had his father’s hands and black hair, his mother’s slight nose and height, a skin color somewhere in between. His paternal grandfather had died before Control was old enough to know him, but he had heard the epic stories. The man had sold clothespins door-to-door as a kid, in certain neighborhoods, and been a boxer in his twenties, not good enough to be a contender but good enough to be a paid opponent and take a beating.

…from Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer—where the narrating character describes himself at the same moment he’s reviewing his own family ties before considering how those brought him to where he now is.

While both styles are entirely valid, the more interesting question is not which description a reader prefers, but why the descriptions differ in the first place. The answer lies in narrative distance.

All in all, a first-person or limited third-person narrator should not describe another character—or even oneself—in the same tone than an omniscient narrator would. The reason for this is that the narrating character’s biases colour their opinion of the one they’re describing and so remove all neutrality from that description. In these cases, the text focuses on the impression the latter causes—or left—on the narrator.

Therefore, today I have one quirky example to discuss with you: an utterly biased, thoroughly opinionated description of a woman—the ex-wife of the male narrator. It is, admittedly, a contentious subtopic, but the example itself is well worth the analysis.

Yet before that, it’s worth revising two concepts:

Narrative distance and stream-of-consciousness narration.

In short, narrative distance refers to how close the reader feels to the mind of the character experiencing the story: detached and far away (as it happens in omniscient narrators) or close enough that the prose itself becomes affected by the character’s mental state—the case of third-person limited, or first-person narratives.

If you want a more detailed explanation, I wrote a separate essay on narrative distance in which I propose a framework for thinking about it:

[ LINK ]

On the other hand, stream-of-consciousness narration is a style applied only to closer narratives because it “tries to capture a character’s thought process in a realistic way”¹. Consider your own interior monologue: the non-linear way in which you (we, all of us) ‘jump’ from one idea to another that seems barely connected, how we don’t quite shape proper sentences, how we linger in a word as if mentally stuttering. This fluency is precisely what stream-of-consciousness aims to replicate—a narrative that doesn’t focus on being tidy or legible, but psychologically truthful.

These two elements—a close narrative distance in third-person, and a stream-of-consciousness style—are fundamental pieces of the example I have for today.