what makes a good description? preferably a better writer
We’re all guilty of describing a character with blue eyes as various types of weather and lakes or cloudy days, green eyes as emeralds, etc. And of course, the color of their hair is next. What is it? Flaming red, or a golden blond to rival the dawn? Or perhaps raven, or ebony, or some other word to rival the darkest shade of night. You might, perhaps, be even guilty of trying to describe skin color by various types of foods and coffee combinations.
There’s a reason these things are not only cliche but made fun of in writing communities. None of these things actually describe the character, do they? they don’t tell me anything about the character. Perhaps another character with jasper eyes and flaming hair and soy latte skin comes walking down the street– what separates them? What makes them different people? Colors are not infinite to us, and soon enough the permutations and combinations run out.
The colors a character is made up of– their hair, their eyes, even their skin, tell me little to nothing about them, especially if they’re in a fantasy world. Do blue eyes decide how kind he is? Does red hair dictate how in control of her life she is on first glance? Skin color might add a note or two about possible experiences with racism, but besides that what does it actually say about their personality?
So I’m going to challenge you here, dear writer: forego talking so much about the colors, unless they’re actually important to the plot (please don’t go out of your way to make them so). Do not describe any feature or article with a color. Now, that’s not to say you ought to try and reinvent red like that popular post you’ve seen going around. Do not compare their hair. Besides knowing they have dark or light hair, what more do I really need to know? Perhaps if they’ve combed it or not, if they cut it them self, if they’ve tried to dye it or perhaps they hide it because they’re ashamed. I don’t care what color the nail polish the character is wearing, is it perfectly newly manicured despite being a week old? Or is it cracked and chipping, even layered messily over old coats? Does the color of their eyes really tell me more about this person than perfect or smeared makeup, or lines, or red veins in them?
What do you think? Are colors as character descriptions over used?
This is fine for a general note on over-description of useless characteristics but it’s by no means universal.
First, as a matter of representation, skin color can be important to establish. Sometimes it is important to the plot that someone be a specific race and then it’s absolutely correct to mention. Even if it’s not important to the plot, it’s kind of hard to include racial diversity without in some way establishing race and the simplest, most honest way it often via skin tone. I’ve used “Ebony” before because when I asked a couple African-American friends, they both said that was the most flattering word to be sure people got that the guy was black, as ‘dark skin’ can mean a tan white person and so on.
Then artistically, color coding can be an amazing poetic tool. Some hair colors have literary and mythological connotations galore, as do eye colors and all kinds of things. That’s not even approaching clothes, which in the Hitchcockian sense can and often should be color coded to symbolic means. “Sir Gawain and the Knight of Indeterminate Hue” just doesn’t work.
And finally, if you’re the author and you have a vision of a character, why shouldn’t you say what color their hair or nails are? Every author has every right to describe what their characters look like and colors are a critical component of visual description.
Overdoing it is pretty silly, and limiting to it exclusively is indeed bad writing. But I’ve honestly never read any published book that overdoes it. The above post would seem to suggest that mentioning how my main character is blonde with purple eyes is going too far. I disagree. Both are important because of changes that happen in the final book. And even if they weren’t, it’s not a great sin to mention them.
If I were to give any criticism, it would be to just avoid overly flowery color-descriptive prose when it’s not necessary. “He had black hair” isn’t a crime. “His hair was the deepest black like the jet stone from within a Canadian coal mine just south of the arctic circle which absorbed more photons of the visible spectrum than all others,” might be pushing it.
