What’s your view on detailed character descriptions in fiction?
Personally, I’m not a fan of detailed descriptions–whether that’s descriptions or character, setting, or anything else. I’d rather get on with the story. A brief description is fine, but please don’t spend pages and pages telling me things I don’t need to know.
(I don’t need to know the character’s eye colour or hair colour or blood type unless that’s going to be relevant to the story in some way.)
If authors do feel the need to include a description, make sure it’s not the character describing their own eye or hair colour. The only time I think about my hair colour is when I’m at the hairdresser … or deciding I really need to go to the hairdresser.
I do have a bad habit of skimming or ignoring overlong descriptions, particularly if I’ve already formed a mental image of the character. For example, if the author describes the character as attractive with a tidy beard, I have a problem. I do not find beards attractive, so I either have to imagine the character as attractive and cleanshaven, or not attractive.
I mostly read romance novels, so you can guess which one I pick.
As a result, I prefer more vague character descriptions. Tell me what I absolutely need to know, and let me imagine the rest.
This is a very interesting question!
My problem isn’t so much with description as with when it’s intrusive and disrupts the flow of the story. My own writing is rather light on description because I find it challenging to weave it in so it doesn’t look tacked on.
Descriptions are best when they tell as much about the point of view character who’s doing the describing as they do about the thing being observed. Then it’s not just a list of attributes, but they’re filtered through the lens of the character who’s describing them.