I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".
Iâm fairly skinny but I would like to write diverse characters in as many ways as possible, bc I feel like skinny white people like to pretend in their books that skinny white people are the only type of people that exist (even worse if theyâre straight). Does anyone have advice for how to write fat characters respectfully?
The main difficulty you're gonna run into when describing fat characters (or characters with any kind of physical trait that differs from "the default") is that fatness itself is usually short-hand for something terrible. Fat characters have been depicted as grotesque and off-putting -- either to emphasize their evilness and lack of morality or as the punchline of a cruel joke -- across genres and time periods to such a degree that a purely neutral description of a fat character will be interpreted as negative by most of your audience, just because "fat" means "bad" so often that the association is subconsciously there.
So, my advice for describing fat people is actually usually Don't.
A character's appearance matters only so far as it's actually relevant to the story. This is the classic "dear god just use their names instead of calling them by their hair-colors" rule. Every time you describe a physical characteristic, you are drawing the audience's attention to that characteristic. So, if a characteristic is important in some way, you can bring it up sometimes. Otherwise, once your audience knows what the character looks like, you don't need to remind them all that often.
Most fat people can walk, pick things up, sit down, stand up, and otherwise move around just fine. There's no real reason to describe them preforming mundane actions at all. Unless a character is struggling with mobility for some reason, "he walked" or "she ran" or "they sat down" all work fine across body types. The fatness does not need to be mentioned.
Atmospheric descriptions are usually more effective than physical descriptions. How a character feels and the energy they bring to a scene is more important than the physical proportions of their body. Fat people can be broad and mountainous and intimidating, they can be soft and plump and welcoming, but they can in fact also seem small or timid. A fat person might be hyper-aware of trying not to take up space, or they might be jolly and languid and sprawling out everywhere. How they exist will tell the audience way more about the character than just what they look like.
Basically, if you wouldn't emphasize a skinny character's appearance in that scene, there's no reason to emphasize a fat character's.
In scenes where you do describe a character's appearance, your best bet is honestly to just... be objective. Don't try to get creative with language because, again, the language has negative connotation. Outright saying a character is fat will already skirt the line, going into detail about that fatness or using words like "doughy" or "lardy" or "porky" or whatever will always come across as gross. I also wouldn't describe their body more than you describe any other part of them.
By that I mean, "He was head and shoulders taller than m/c, and nearly half again as wide, with broad shoulders obscured by a wild mane of copper curls and a great big barrel of a chest thickly padded over with supple fat. His grinning face was slashed through by a single, diagonal scar, which ran from the corner of his nose and narrowly missed one amber-brown eye before vanishing into his hairline. He had a great, booming laugh that could be heard clear across the dining hall, and though it was early in the night there was a drunken flush across his cheeks."
Verses "He had brown eyes and red hair, and his face bore a diagonal scar. His wide grin stretched the extra layer of fat on his cheeks, jaw, and chins, which were stacked three on top of each other until they blended into his doughy neck. The heavy swell of his chest and belly strained the seams of his shirt, adhering the fabric to every roll and dimple of his large frame. When he laughed his whole body jiggled with the force, and despite the early hour, his face was red from too much drink."
See how one of these makes fatness a whole Thing and the other just... has a guy who happens to be fat? It really is as simple as the ratio. In one paragraph, the character's fatness is just one thing about him. In the other, it's his entire identity.
So, yeah. Unless your narrator is specifically focusing on the other character's fatness (which they may very well be! There are reasons to do that!) the best way to describe a fat character is generally... not to.
