Do I Look Like a Protagonist? Ways to Describe Your First Person Narrator

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Finding ways to describe your first-person point of view narrator isn't easy--and a few things not to do.

First person point of view has its own share of challenges, but one of the trickier ones is describing your narrator. You’re always looking out, never in, and it can be awkward to have your character talk about their own attributes. If done poorly, you wind up with a character who sounds incredible self absorbed.

Before I suggest things to try, let’s start with some common cliches you don't to do.

How Much Do You Need to Describe Your Characters?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Does that character need a full-on dossier or just a brief mention? Do you give all the details or just a few? It's not always easy to know how much description you need to do with a character.  

At some point in your story, you'll have to decide how much to include about the physical description of a character. You don't want to describe your characters to death, but you also want to use enough details so readers can get an idea of what they look like. How much is too much and how little is too little?

This is one of those things that's really up to the author. I dislike a lot of description, and I admit, I skim a passage when it's clear it's a big "this is what stuff looks like" paragraph. Even description about a character. I'm much more interested in who they are and what they'll do than what they look like.

Because of my personal feelings, I tend to be sparse when I write my own character descriptions. In fact, if I didn't know there are readers who love knowing every detail about what a character looks like, I'd probably skip them altogether. But that's just me, and my way may not be your way--nor should it be.

Bringing Your Characters to Life

By Joyce Scarbrough, @JoyceScarbrough

Part of the How They Do It Series

Characters bring a novel to life, so it's only fair we do the same for them when we write those novels. To help us with that, Joyce Scarbrough visits the lecture hall today to talk about characterization.

The valedictorian of her high school graduating class, Joyce is a Southern woman weary of seeing herself and her peers portrayed in books and movies as either post-antebellum debutantes or barefoot hillbillies á la Daisy Duke, so all her heroines are smart, unpretentious women who refuse to be anyone but themselves. Joyce writes both adult and YA fiction and has five published novels as well as several short stories available as Kindle downloads. She’s lived all her life in beautiful LA (lower Alabama), she’s the mother of three gifted children and a blind Pomeranian named Tilly, and she’s been married for 33 years to the love of her life—a superhero who disguises himself during the day as a high school math teacher and coach.

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Take it away Joyce...