Someone will observe the character's appearance, clothes, manner. This someone may be the author, or another character, or even the protagonist himself. Whoever does the observing, the description will be related to us readers, and we will get our first chance to form an impression of this person we're going to spend five hundred pages with. Readers pay a lot of (mostly unconscious) attention to this first impression. They want to know if they're looking at a beauty, a beast or something in between. Thus, you must make the reader's first encounter with your character sharp and memorable. The key is to choose your first descriptive details carefully. These details should: • create a visual image, so we can picture the character in some important way(s) • tell us something about the person inside the visual image • convey an impression of individuality, of someone unique and interesting, whom we will want to know more about What you don't want is the kind of description that turns up in police reports: ''Caucasian male, twenty-seven years old, six feet, 170 pounds, short brown hair, blue eyes.'' That could describe thousands of men, none of them memorably.
