Character Traits
As important as personality, occupation, and motivation are, another quintessential aspect of creating your character is their physical appearance. There are more writers than you would think that do not pay enough attention to their character’s appearances in their writing.
This doesn’t necessarily mean eye and hair color, height and weight, etc, but also takes into account things like race, scars and deformities, clothing choice, makeup, and even hygiene.
Each of the above details can tell the reader a lot about a character, and possibly can be used to foreshadow a future event (like the girl that cut her hair before dumping her last boyfriend and who is in the mood for another haircut).
Depending on the setting (though you can do whatever you want in writing fantasy since the setting will be a product of your own imagination) you may want to shy away from taboo characteristics, or embrace them, whichever fits your character’s personality and sense of identity.
The social, personal and professional ramifications of dressing a certain way or being from a certain country, family or class, can be as infinite as you make them. If the story depends on, say, your protagonist being fired from his job in chapter one, is it because of something he did? Maybe it could be that a co-worker who doesn’t like his dragon tattoo was just promoted to a position with power over your protagonist. If your character has always regretted getting that tattoo, it could drive him to finally invest in removing it, or, if he’s proud of it, to switch careers and become a tattoo artist himself.
See what I mean? The physical can often be overlooked because of its apparent simplicity or low ranking in the important aspects of writing a character. There are a lot of characters whose physical appearance may not make any difference to where the storyline goes, but it is more influential than you may initially think. People in real life spend a significant – or sometimes extravagant – amount of their time on fashion, makeup, and things indirectly tied to their image such as cars.
Physical traits can be a useful tool for fleshing out your characters and bringing them to life for the reader, especially in writing fantasy.
3 Comments
This is good info; something I have probably overlooked and I need to take a fresh perspective on. Thank you for the tips and I will be paying closer attention when sketching out the physical traits of my characters. This is where it would be very beneficial for writers to also be artists!
I agree that physical traits should not be overlooked. The default mode for my brain is visual, so if anything I tend to overwork the physical actions and traits of my characters, but that should not take away from how important they are.
If you start to explore aspects of psychoanalysis in your writing, then this becomes even more important. Stutters and blindness as well as physical deformity can all carry real meaning at that level – its not everyone’s thing but it works for some, including me.
My degree is in Film, so I think in movies and and imagine in moving images… as a writer I try and translate what I watch in my imagination into writing. I suppose I work backwards compared to most, but that’s just me!!
Thanks for the input, Donald. I’ve taken my share of psychology classes (actually, just in high school) and it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of writing for me; the way people behave and interact with each other.
It’s true that movies and novels are not all that different. A picture may hold a thousand words, but words can hold a thousand meanings.