“I didn’t usually notice people’s skin, but Natasha’s glowed. It was almost alien. Night could be falling, or we could be sitting in a dark classroom, and I’d still see her out of the corner of my eye, faintly golden. ” “His arms looked too long for his body, and disproportionately muscular, like pale twin boa constrictors. ”
To describe a face, for example, you could write, “Her nose and her two front teeth were just slightly crooked. She was constantly pulling her long hair forward and throwing it back again, blinking her bangs out of her eyes like she had no idea how they’d gotten there. ” To describe someone’s body or clothing, you might write, “He was a big guy, but carried himself like he wanted to apologize for it. He hunched his shoulders and bent his neck over his phone, and wore gray clothes so he could blend into the walls. ” Even the general details you’re describing should only be mentioned if they add insight into the person or character’s personality or impression. For example, if their eye color doesn’t hint at any deeper part of them, you don’t have to include it.
“I’d known Lulu for years, but I’d never seen her wear a pair of shoes. In the summer, I’d watch the soles of her feet turn black and callused from the asphalt, which baked so hot under the sun it would let off waves of steam. It had to burn, but she just rose up on her tiptoes and laughed. ” “In spite of the loud voice, the confident set of his shoulders, and the easy smile, Henry was the saddest person I’d ever met. ”
“She’d been wearing the necklace for so long, the chain seemed to blend into her skin. It was thin and the jewel was very small, sitting at the exact center beneath the dip in her collarbone. ” “The water bottle lay on its side in the dirt, just off the main path, so dented that you could barely tell what its original shape had been. ”
For example, you could say, “It was her lucky pencil, the one she always used for tests, and she kept it in a separate section of her backpack for that reason. She sharpened it slowly with her personal handheld sharpener, then carefully swept the shavings into the trash. ”
For example, you could show the importance by writing, “He took his watch off in the bathroom every night, cleaned it gently with a wet tissue, and placed it on a small cloth on his bedside table. ” For a more direct option, you could write, “The journal had been passed down by her grandmother to her mother and finally to Katie. It was the oldest thing she’d ever owned, and the thing she loved the most. ”
“The river ran so high along its banks that it sloshed over the sides of the walls, spilling brown water into the streets, but no one seemed to view this with alarm. I watched a man ride his bike just along the wall, speeding straight through the biggest puddles. ” “The neighborhood was perfectly suburban, but sat right across the two-lane road from miles of sprawling cornfields, green arms sifting through the breeze, punctured here and there by broken-down farm houses. ”
For example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood describes a room as “A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. ”
For example, you could write, “He couldn’t remember the last time the house had been quiet. Someone was always flying up or down the stairs in heavy, clomping boots, peeling open the refrigerator door, blaring a baseball game on the radio or yelling to turn it off again. ”
“Standing there at the foot of the Rockies, seeing mountains for the first time, it was like the whole world was shrinking, especially me. It made me dizzy, how small I had become. ” “The rain slammed down around them, standing at the bus stop in a dim yellow circle of light. She tugged her coat closer, feeling the chill in her fingers and watched him try to talk over the sound of the water. ”
