Is it important to describe every character of the storyline?
Note: I am not sure of which site this question belongs to: Writing SE or Literature SE. If this question is unfit for this site, I will happily migrate it there.
So I am writing about the protagonist's school life adventures. Naturally there are lot of characters - classmates, school teachers, friends, etc. and by and large more than 50 characters has some or other appearance in the story. By appearance, I don't mean about their existence for one or two line. Each one has some reasonable amount of role to play across protagonist; sometimes together and sometimes individually.
I am confused here of whether I should describe each and every character with detail for readers to understand that character's norms, habits, beliefs and nature? If not, then won't it be abruptness and vague when that character will pop out of no-where without much description?
Can anyone justify if possible with the citation of already written literature their stand of what should I go with -> describing the characters in detail or just pop them up whenever required with as little detail as possible.
Edit: My draft is a short novella. I want to keep the length of my draft smaller and stick to story but I feel that description of each character alone will increase the size of my draft. My genre of writing is fiction (inspired from reality though) and the protagonist and stage is setup in India. The story is a fictional story about the protagonist's life in school and some great adventures he gets into during his school life.
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3 answers
It depends. Are you in an omniscient perspective? Are you in a limited perspective?
If limited, you'd only describe those attributes that the point-of-view character notices. So, if the point of view character was color-blind there'd be no color described. If the point-of-view character was a thief, the features described would relate to (for example) wealth. And ... If the point-of-view character is arrogant or narcissistic, other characters wouldn't be noticed - or described - at all, by her/him.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37426. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I am confused here of whether I should describe each and every character with detail for readers to understand that character's norms, habits, beliefs and nature?
Do not do that.
All that matters is the feelings and reactions of your protagonist in the moment. Treat your reader like a ghost friend of your protagonist. If she recognizes fifty people in the hallway, she is not mentally or verbally going to go through a laundry list of characteristics and histories of everybody. You have two seconds for her to have a thought; that is all the reader gets too.
Talking about these norms, habits, beliefs and nature, or physical descriptions, are all a boring shortcut beginning authors try to take, and it doesn't work very well. You are basically asking the reader to memorize a list of features for a character and remember them for later, so you don't have to explain that X says "cool" every other word.
Instead, adopt the idea of immersion. Your protagonist is taking a certain path through the story, having encounters with people (perhaps with animals like pets) and with the setting. Show us his thoughts and emotions as they happen, including if he likes or dislikes somebody, fears somebody, is deferential to authority figures or not, etc. If people have quirks, he reacts to them as he does. Do not give the reader any "extra" knowledge besides that, it should not ever be necessary.
By analogy, think of a movie, opening on the crowded hallway of a school before classes start. We (the audience) are immersed. We get no special tags or asides or anything else; we see kids in action and hear dialogue, we see facial expressions, laughter, anger and we figure it out. The camera focuses on certain kids.
Joe just tripped Kyle and made him drop his books, Kyle only shakes his head in resignation and kneels to pick them up. Joe walks away as if nothing happened, except for his stupid smirk.
Pria is, as always, looking in her mirror. Who can blame her, who wouldn't fall in love with that face?
Do I have to describe these three characters any further? As an author, your ability to show thoughts and feelings of your protagonist is what is important; the reader identifies with the protagonist and sees the world through his eyes and thoughts. Exactly what Pria looks like should not be told, because different readers have different standards of beauty and a specific description can actually alienate them. What matters is how the protagonist feels about her, and those are feelings the reader is willing to share; let them come up with their own mental image of a Pria they can understand feeling about in the same way.
I only describe character elements that will have some direct impact on the story, sooner or later. The later the better, except in the case of highly unusual or improbable characteristics (special talent or physical attributes) which should be described as early as possible, so they will be taken as "givens" instead of deus ex machinas.
For example, if your protagonist's best friend is the tallest person in the school, presumably that unusual characteristic plays into the plot somehow: They can reach what others cannot, they are on the basketball team and that matters, etc. Or suppose the friend is a chemistry wizard, or chess champion, or judo black belt, because that will matter.
Bring up unusual or outlier characteristics as early as possible, again without telling but showing. "Showing" does not have to mean a scene of chess or judo; it can be as little as an excuse in dialogue: "Not tonight, it's chess club! The district tournament is just a month away." A line like that could set up the protagonist, in a month, to accompany his friend to the tournament in some other town, as part of the plot, without seeming contrived (as it would if this chess tournament suddenly appeared three pages before the trip and too-conveniently solved the protagonist's problem of getting to this other town).
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Remember your own days at school? Some people you knew well - they were your friends. Some you didn't know so well - classmates you weren't close with. Perhaps there were the people you didn't get along with: you probably didn't know why they were like that, you just knew their unpleasant trait, and to keep your distance. Then, there were the teachers; how much did you know about them, save whether they were strict, and whether their exams were hard?
It should be the same in your story: some characters you show in detail. Others - a little bit. Yet others - the reader doesn't need to know much about them at all. It's realistic to a school experience.
Look as an example at Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone. (Harry Potter being a series, we get to know some characters later in the following books, but that's not relevant to what you're looking for.) The main trio are characters you know well. Other students: there's Neville who loses and forgets stuff and gets bullied, there's Malfoy the Bully, and that's it. Crabbe and Goyle aren't really characters - they are Malfoy's satellites. The teachers - we get Snape and Quirrel, enough of McGonagall to know she's strict but kind and can be trusted, nothing of what goes on in Enigmatic-but-Good Dumbledore's brain, and the names of some others.
You see? We don't need a lot of details about every single character. We need as much detail as is relevant, as much detail as the MC(s) would have. Let me stress this again - not "as little as possible", not "each and every character with detail", but the relevant detail, as much of it as is needed and makes sense.
Another smart thing J.K. Rowling does is she introduces characters early on, in a brief line or a brief scene, and then "puts them on the shelf" to be used later. So when a character is needed, they don't "pop out of nowhere". Parvati Patil, for instance, is mentioned in the first book (during the sorting hat scene), reappears in the third book, and so on. It creates the sense that she's always there, the MCs just don't really interact with her. You can use the same tool in your novella: mention a character in one line early on, then later on, when they become important, it makes sense that they've been there all along.
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