ji-ang

what would completely break your character?

what was the best thing in your character’s life?

what was the worst thing in your character’s life?

what seemingly insignificant memories stuck with your character?

does your character work so they can support their hobbies or use their hobbies as a way of filling up the time they aren’t working?

what is your character reluctant to tell people?

how does your character feel about sex?

how many friends does your character have?

how many friends does your character want?

what would your character make a scene in public about?

for what would your character give their life?

what are your character’s major flaws?

what does your character pretend or try to care about?

how does the image your character tries to project differ from the image they actually project?

If a character is standing a good distance away from the character describing them, then unless they have massive and/or unusually vivid eyes (in which case, carry on) then no, they’re eye colour isn’t gonna be what jumps out about them.

So save it for later.

It can actually be a really moving experience to notice something pretty about another person’s eyes, the first time you’re close enough to. One of the major downsides of the ‘list format’ of description, where you just dump stuff like hair colour, eye colour, skin tone, height, built, etc in one big block, is that you lose a lot of the little human moments where people are honestly liable to pick up details about one another.

If you just tell me that, say, a character’s eyes have flecks of green in them, that’s boring. If your POV character notices the flecks of green in someone’s eyes because they’re sitting together on a couch and laughing and the light hit them just right and oh, so-and-so actually has unfairly pretty hazel eyes?