how to describe a character

Hey Christian Indies!

Have you ever stared into a swimming pool? Or a pool of rainwater, collected on the sidewalk? What about the pool of condensation on the corner of your coffee table?

You haven’t?

I haven’t, either.

But, I’ve noticed my protagonists love staring into pools – big brown ones, icy blue ones, deep amber ones – they seem to delight in lovingly gazing into them all.

Of course, I’m talking about human eyes, so often described in literature as “pools.” 

The other hosts and I were talking about this oddity, and it seemed the situation was chronic – their characters, too, spent an inordinate amount of time staring into pools. Eventually, we discovered the problem was not with our characters, but with us, the writers. We’d gotten into an eyeball description rut: we’d run into a staring scene, and, well, the word, “pools” was just convenient. It was also familiar, “tried and true,” if you will, guaranteed not to raise brows.

The more we  examined this issue, the more we realized that  eyes were not the only physical feature we had difficulty describing with any sort of originality whatsoever.

Thus, episode #98 was born. In it, we hope to broaden your (and our own!) horizons, so to speak, when it comes to providing physical descriptions of characters in (y)our novels.

See you on the podcast,

Jamie

Jamie Hershberger

writingshorts.net