How do I write a character’s physical description without it feeling unnatural and clunky? I’m able to describe their hair and body relatively easily because my writing puts emphasis on small movements and fidgeting, but I can’t describe faces.

You know when people say ‘Show, don’t tell’? Thomas Wolfe was an incorrigible teller of stuff.

Why do you want to write a character’s physical description?

Why do we need to know what they look like at all?

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The other problem is specific to Wolfe himself: the reason why he was determined to tell you what his characters looked like is that they were based on people he knew—family members, friends, neighbours—and he was heroically but idiotically determined to render them in fiction with as much completeness and detail as he possibly could.

This is because Amina’s submission to her husband is one of the themes of Palace Walk, and indeed the trilogy as a whole. He is a complacent and immensely confident philanderer, whereas she lives as though he is her faithful and wonderful husband, and her role is to treat him as though he’s perfect. She overlooks things like the obvious evidence that he’s been drinking wine all night, which is frowned upon for someone who claims to be as good a Muslim as he is, because she thinks he’s flawless.

One is that Wolfe is determined to tell you what the person looked like, and so the story grinds to a standstill while he does that.

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FFS, Thomas Wolfe, enough with the face-describing!

If so, why? What’s so important about their appearance that you have to describe them to us?

(Donoghue went on to write the award-winning novel Room, which was later made into a 2015 movie of the same name, for which Brie Larson won the Best Actress Oscar, and Donoghue was nominated for the Oscar for her own screenplay.)

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What’s it got to do with the story?

Do you feel it’s absolutely necessary to tell the reader what characters look like?

The problems with the above are manifold. (It goes on for two more pages.)

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Is the story set in a world where visible ethnic differences matter? Is it about sexual attraction? Then physical appearance may well play an important role, and could be worth mentioning.

Case Study #1a because he wouldn’t shut up: Thomas Wolfe

You might find it liberating.

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The book opens with Amina waiting for her husband to come home after a night on the town, and she is described as looking slender and still beautiful, whereas he is extremely well-groomed and also very overweight—because he doesn’t need to bother to keep in shape, since he has an extremely obedient and, indeed, subservient wife, who gets up every night at midnight, and waits up for him to come home around 1am, so that she can tend to his needs (i.e. take his socks off, among other things) and make sure he goes to bed in comfort.

There could be other cases. Is a character well-known for having an unusual appearance? Then it’s worth mentioning.

If a character is a bit out of physical shape, there’s no need to point this out in advance.

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In the Irish novelist Emma Donoghue’s second novel Hood, the protagonist and narrator, Cara, is supposed to be rather on the large side, but the only way we know this is that she talks about how she habitually sweats and chafes, and gets red in the face, whenever she has to do even minimal exercise, plus (iirc) a couple of casual remarks by her deceased lover. Donoghue never actually tells us what she looks like.

What do you want to do?

Because, as I hope I’ve shown, some of the greatest writers ever have not been bothered to describe what their characters look like.

Hello,hope y'all doin good, i came to Quora to share my strange story , a very weird one , a story when luck smiled at me ,maybe u will enjoy it , let's begin,have fun... A year ago ,I was a real porn addicted(btw I was 18) ,but never had sex before, I don't have a gf I didn't try to find one even ,always thinking to go to find a sex worker but then I just don't , everyday watching different bodies getting fucked and everyday enjoying. One day, I was watching porn, a big ass lady with big boobs ,just after seeing her the image of my female cousin poped in my mind, (let's introduce her : she's 35 years old , very big ass , nice boobs ,not very big but nice,always wearing tight clothes , she's divorced ) and I thought of me fucking her ,I never had sexual desires for her but now I do days went by and when I met her I was so horny ,I couldn't stay with the family cz my penis was clearly erected , I realized this is my first time I get horny for one of my family ,it not illegal in my country.well to make a long story short( if u want details just text me I will tell u 😊),I decided to give her signs that I want to fuck her,finally I decided to have sex and with my cousin , I thought it is the best beggining for me, i started touching her when I came across her in a narrow place , make her feel my hard cock when we hug , I thought it will hard and I will be ashamed but no , I felt nothing and she said nothing , probably she thought it was by mistake,anyways, I decided then to talk with her about sex, waited for her to be alone in a room and talk with her, I confessed everything about me watching porn and addicted..etc,she said it's normal and u are growing up and u must have sex,well at that time I was like whaaat????? Well I didn't control myself and asked her for sex ( horny like I Ve never been before) she said that she will think Abt it ,2 weeka went by then she called me ,telling that she reserved a room in a hotel and we meet tonight ,we met,and bruuhh, sex is great , I mean, I had to find a pirstitue ,what I was waiting for to have such a feeling ????, I will never forget that night, I started kissing her she was kissing hard ,she misses sex so bad , she sucked my dick and swallowed my semen ,I felt I'm in a dream , then when fucked ,her ass was very big and the anus was open ,didn't struggle to get my hard cock inside it , she was obviously missing sex , she was shouting ,fuck me yh fuck me , I go fast after every word until I cum , we did that 3 times , then we went to her pussy , using condoms I fucked her so hard the moans were higher , everything was perfect ,in the end I asked her to lick her body , licked pussy ,ass, boobs,then she sucked my cock until we sleeped ,all I know that she was dirty ,well before even having sex with her I knew she is an open minded woman , and a woman that looks that she donesnt know anything , but she knows everything, but never expected having sex with her ,well she was horny and that helped...but no one of us regretted that sex ever.. We still have sex from time to time ,and I started having sex with sex workers , joining threesomes..etc If u want pics of her text me.

But if the story is mostly about what goes on inside the characters, and their physical appearance isn’t really that relevant… why mention it?

If I think of classic novels that I admire, like Kafka’s The Trial, or Melville’s Moby-Dick, in neither of those novels do I ever find out what the protagonist looks like.

Well, here’s Thomas Wolfe to show you how not to do it.

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Physical appearance should be worth mentioning if it matters to the story.

Case Study #1: Thomas Wolfe

Free yourself from the need to describe what your characters look like.

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I would echo Rachel Neumeier’s question in her fine answer:

In the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s 1956 novel Palace Walk, the first volume of his Cairo Trilogy, the physical appearance of the two principal characters, Ahmad Abd Al-Jawad and his wife Amina, is sketched fairly quickly but in detail in the first few pages.

Another is that he is determined to emphasise how this character’s inner soul is reflected in her face, perhaps by way of justifying why he’d described it in the first place. But he’s just telling us this stuff.

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In the end, we always return to the same question:

Why? Because it’s completely irrelevant to the stories that Kafka and Melville want to tell.

Thanks, Thomas. The problem with the above is—

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Case Study #2: Naguib Mahfouz

But that doesn’t mean that a character’s physical appearance is always completely irrelevant.

So, in terms of Mahfouz’s artistic intentions, it makes sense for us to know that Amina is portrayed as someone who, under other circumstances, wouldn’t need to be content with such a patriarchal asshole as Ahmad, but she is anyway—and that’s one of the things that drives the story.

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Please tell us that you’re not also describing what a character’s face looks like, as if it directly reflects their innermost soul.

So, does this really need to be a problem?