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@consciousdreamer

Yeah, physical descriptions are tricky to do without info dumping or sounding awkward. Here’s some things I try to keep in mind when I’m writing description:

• Relevance to story (be it theme, plot, or character)
• The character’s POV (there’s an article on that here if you haven’t seen it yet).
• And emotion.

In the last book I wrote the first draft of chapter 1 was all description of what the MC was seeing as he stood on the top of the hill over his farm. *gags* Setting aside the horrible setting of tone, the info dump, and the breaking of basically every rule ever created for writing a first chapter…it was terrible because the description of the farm really had no value to the story. It did slightly display the MC’s pride, but I managed to do that in a later draft without the three eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pages of unbroken type. That’s probably one of the biggest things that turns me away as a reader.

Emotion is super important too. Let me demonstrate, because I’m horrible at explaining things. Here’s the snippet of description at the beginning of the prologue:

Threatening black clouds masked the last glow of sunlight. The stars trembled out of sight behind them, as if they dreaded to watch the terrors that would unfold. In a gaping hole between the clouds, an angry red moon scowled at the land. Its ghastly light shone like blood on the trampled snow.

Now I’m going to try and describe the same things, but without emotion.

As the sun sank below the horizon, dark clouds rolled in and covered the stars. A moon appeared through a break in the clouds, and its red light reflected on the snow, which was crossed with many pawprints.

Now here’s one that’s also conveying emotion, but a different one than the original example.

Slipping silently out of sight, the sun thrust its golden rays over the mountains one last time. Clouds sailed in and bid the sun farewell, and the light softly faded. Behind a thick blanket of black clouds, the stars slept, leaving the land in a dark, silent peace. The only light was from the red moon that peeked through a hole in the clouds, casting a soft glow on the trodden snow.

Now, in all the examples I described that the sun was setting, dark clouds covered the stars, and a red moon shone on snow that has been been walked on. But as you can hopefully see, they all created a different effect, so when you’re writing description, you’ll want to decide exactly what emotion you’re trying to convey. If you’re not conveying emotion or describing something else that the reader really needs to understand the appearance of, it might be better not to describe it at all.

As far as actually conveying that emotion, that all depends on your personal style, but I like to use a lot of literary devices. Things like personification and similes/metaphors are helpful in almost any situation (just, like everything else, don’t overuse them :P). Alliteration and assonance are very poetical and work well in a peaceful scene (like “Slipping silently out of sight…”).

All that basically applies to physical description as well. With that, I think it’s best to weave it in subtly. The reader doesn’t really need to know what your MC’s eye color is, unless for some reason it’s actually important to the story. So you don’t need to start off your book with something like, “Johnny was five foot two with sparkling blue eyes and jet black hair. His fingertips were callused from playing the guitar and freckles were scattered all over his face.” And so on. When describing a character from another character’s POV, think about what they would notice first about someone based on their current situation and emotions, their personality, and what little (if anything) they already know about that person. For example, if Anna knows Sylvia is the sister of someone she doesn’t trust, she might immediately notice anything that looks shifty about her, whereas if Sylvia is the sister of her best friend, she might immediately notice anything about her that’s like her friend. If you’re using an omniscient voice where there is no other character for a reader to see their impression, think about what you want the reader’s first impression to be. This is kinda what I did with Yeath when I described the distorted shadow as reflecting his personality. There wasn’t another character’s biased view to see him through, so I tossed in that bit to let the reader know he was evil and kinda ugly (also because it sounded cool :P)

ANYWAYS, there it is. Sorry that ended up being on the long side. I’ll tag @j-a-penrose too so she can correct me if I’ve got something wrong. I hope that helps you!