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okay, yes, I know that comma isn't supposed to be there but I want the reader to take a breath! I want a pause! Stop trying to correct me, I'm trying to control the flow of reading

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Zoom In, Don’t Glaze Over: How to Describe Appearance Without Losing the Plot

You’ve met her before. The girl with “flowing ebony hair,” “emerald eyes,” and “lips like rose petals.” Or him, with “chiseled jawlines,” “stormy gray eyes,” and “shoulders like a Greek statue.”

We don’t know them.

We’ve just met their tropes.

Describing physical appearance is one of the trickiest — and most overdone — parts of character writing. It’s tempting to reach for shorthand: hair color, eye color, maybe a quick body scan. But if we want a reader to see someone — to feel the charge in the air when they enter a room — we need to stop writing mannequins and start writing people.

So let’s get granular. Here’s how to write physical appearance in a way that’s textured, meaningful, and deeply character-driven.

1. Hair: It’s About Story, Texture, and Care

Hair says a lot — not just about genetics, but about choices. Does your character tame it? Let it run wild? Is it dyed, greying, braided, buzzed, or piled on top of her head in a hurry?

Good hair description considers:

Texture (fine, coiled, wiry, limp, soft)

Context (windblown, sweat-damp, scorched by bleach)

Emotion (does she twist it when nervous? Is he ashamed of losing it?)

Flat: “Her long brown hair framed her face.”

Better: “Her ponytail was too tight, the kind that whispered of control issues and caffeine-fueled 4 a.m. library shifts.”

You don’t need to romanticise it. You need to make it feel real.

2. Eyes: Less Color, More Connection

We get it: her eyes are violet. Cool. But that doesn’t tell us much.

Instead of focusing solely on eye color, think about:

What the eyes do (do they dart, linger, harden?)

What others feel under them (seen, judged, safe?)

The surrounding features (dark circles, crow’s feet, smudged mascara)

Flat: “His piercing blue eyes locked on hers.”

Better: “His gaze was the kind that looked through you — like it had already weighed your worth and moved on.”

You’re not describing a passport photo. You’re describing what it feels like to be seen by them.

3. Facial Features: Use Contrast and Texture

Faces are not symmetrical ovals with random features. They’re full of tension, softness, age, emotion, and life.

Things to look for:

Asymmetry and character (a crooked nose, a scar)

Expression patterns (smiling without the eyes, habitual frowns)

Evidence of lifestyle (laugh lines, sun spots, stress acne)

Flat: “She had a delicate face.”

Better: “There was something unfinished about her face — as if her cheekbones hadn’t quite agreed on where to settle, and her mouth always seemed on the verge of disagreement.”

Let the face be a map of experience.

4. Bodies: Movement > Measurement

Forget dress sizes and six packs. Think about how bodies occupy space. How do they move? What are they hiding or showing? How do they wear their clothes — or how do the clothes wear them?

Ask:

What do others notice first? (a presence, a posture, a sound?)

How does their body express emotion? (do they go rigid, fold inwards, puff up?)

Flat: “He was tall and muscular.”

Better: “He had the kind of height that made ceilings nervous — but he moved like he was trying not to take up too much space.”

Describing someone’s body isn’t about cataloguing. It’s about showing how they exist in the world.

5. Let Emotion Tint the Lens

Who’s doing the describing? A lover? An enemy? A tired narrator? The emotional lens will shape what’s noticed and how it’s described.

In love: The chipped tooth becomes charming.

In rivalry: The smirk becomes smug.

In mourning: The face becomes blurred with memory.

Same person. Different lens. Different description.

6. Specificity is Your Superpower

Generic description = generic character. One well-chosen detail creates intimacy. Let us feel the scratch of their scarf, the clink of her earrings, the smudge of ink on their fingertips.

Examples:

“He had a habit of adjusting his collar when he lied — always clockwise, always twice.”

“Her nail polish was always chipped, but never accidentally.”

Make the reader feel like they’re the only one close enough to notice.

Describing appearance isn’t just about what your character looks like. It’s about what their appearance says — about how they move through the world, how others see them, and how they see themselves.

Zoom in on the details that matter. Skip the clichés. Let each description carry weight, story, and emotion. Because you’re not building paper dolls. You’re building people.

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writing is easy. writing is so hard. writing is fun! nothing is more agonizing than writing. i forgot to do literally everything else on my task list except writing. i am doing anything but write

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it’s easy to forget, so I’ll remind y’all: you can make fantasy versions of anything. yes even things you might not think about. like soil types. I am thinking of fantasy soil types right now

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A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

fascinated by this article, "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind," about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that's something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i'm writing.

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My favorite writing tip I’ve seen lately was to create a Scraps folder, especially if you’re working on something long-form. That way you have somewhere to dump scenes or bits that don’t quite fit but you don’t want to delete them entirely either. And sometimes you’ll find that they slot in perfectly somewhere else in your story.

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YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YRS YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

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“Style for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual.”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VII (via exhaled-spirals)

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The disease of writing. This pathological hope of grasping, even fleetingly, the expressible marrow of every lived moment, and the kernel of what remains unspoken in all speech.

— Pierre Péju, La Vie courante

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it's my own fault. i'm an adult now so i don't have to impose those Rules on myself

the ones where if it's my suggestion and it doesn't work out, it's my fault it was bad

the ones where i can't get upset, so that mom can be upset and little sister can be upset, but i cry when i'm frustrated and i get too loud when i'm feeling strongly and someone has to keep their cool here so i can't let it get to me because it's fine what are you even upset about

the ones where everyone can back out but me

the ones where she can forget and she can fall asleep but i can't because that means i don't care

the ones where they're asking me for something and i say ok and put in the work to get it going because we have to keep it up or else what's the point but no one else is looking for the solution so i present one but no one else wants to look at it

and if we go back to that first rule, the one where if it's my suggestion and it doesn't work out. well, it's my fault.

so im and adult and i don't have to impose those Rules

but im not going to make that decision. you're going to have to remember. you're going ro have to wake up. and actually go. and actually give your opinion. and actually also make a decision.

because im not actually the only one imposing those Rules. so im refusing to play that way, i guess.

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I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school. 

And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good. 

And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways. 

Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.

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I want to write. I have ideas. I open document. I type four of the worst sentences ever created in the english language. I daydream the rest of the scene. I close document.

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A11 - Much More Interesting

Under normal circumstances, Scriptmaster Amaranthe Bix and her two apprentices would have stolen away under the cover of darkness the first chance they had. But these were most decidedly not normal circumstances.

The first rather extraordinary circumstance was that their destination was distinctly more interesting than the dwarven ruins the three of them were originally headed towards: Swordmaster Imer Amolynn’s manor, dramatically nicknamed the Library of Blades. The house was more than halfway filled with the most enticing texts from millennia ago, and was only a couple hours from the Keeping Forest, the keeper and releaser of the most interesting individuals often carrying the most interesting scripts, stories, oral traditions, and more. The Library and the Forest: the two reasons the court magus believed Imer’s house to be the best base for their current mission, and the first two reasons Amaranthe was more than happy to tag along. She and Imer were friends, but the Swordmaster was famously defensive of the Library, and this was a rare chance for the three of them to explore it unchecked, as Imer would very much be busy with other things. Things he and the court magus would prefer her to be busy with, but how could she be? The Library of Blades was within reach!

This other circumstance really only sweetened the deal, becoming a delectable third reason to nod along with whatever plan they came up with, despite Amaranthe having already made up her mind to go. She and her apprentices were a part of the first group who would go to the Library, accompanied by Imer himself and two women from the most mysterious and therefore most tantalizing class of both Scriptmaster and Spellmaster: the Songmaster. Singers of the ancient languages, some of the last people alive to know the sounds of the Mer, to be able to feel the meaning of the drake verses, and be able to keep the power in the words that had long since died out for everyone else. The few of them that were left kept to the north, the misty mountains and bottomless lake, away from civilization and protected by the thorny, judgmental forest at the edge of their valley, but this had lured them out, put them right in front of her. Amaranthe shivered with anticipation of the conversations they would have, and Amaranthe did not often do this for conversations with the living. Oh, it was absolutely seductive! How lucky they were that the court summons had reached them in time!

Read Here

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"i don't think that's a real sentence, but you can deal with that" the author, to her editor (me)

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Roan Grisham woke up in an unfamiliar room, dizzy and disoriented, and then was immediately grounded by the full force of the famous Darlene Deerson glare. Those who know only the Deerson brother say Spellmaster Darius Deerson knows no fear, and those who know them both say it is because he grew up with Darlene as an older sister. He groaned and closed his eyes again.

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Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. V: 1947-1955

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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.