My Thoughts on Writing Character Descriptions

How much detail do you go into describing your characters? Is it a little or a lot? Are you vague in your description and leave the rest to your reader’s imagination or are you as detailed with your character descriptions as you can possibly be?

When it comes to writing characters, I am the former. My character descriptions are pretty much vague for the most part. The most I will usually give of a character’s description is their approximate age and gender (ex. a young man in his early twenties), the tone of their voice along with very vague physical descriptions (ex. a young woman with mid length wavy hair). I like to leave the rest up to a reader’s imagination.

I tend to invest my focus more on a character’s personality than their physical description.

I do believe, however, there is a time when it is needed to be more descriptive and a time where one should leave it up to a reader’s imagination.

Even with the most detailed descriptions given to us, we have our own visualization of how a character looks. A book might state a young woman with tanned skin and long, wavy, dark brown hair that’s loosely tied up and green eyes but that same woman you see in your mind’s eye is going to look different to the next person. It will be their own version of the young woman with dark brown wavy hair and green eyes.

That is one of the best things about imagination and reading! What you see is your own unique interpretation of a character.

Do you like it when a story’s description of a character is in depth or do you like vagueness and for the writer to leave room for imagination?