Experience in writing has taught me that exhausting a lot of words on a big description of a main character, especially in the beginning of a novel, is worthless. The way characters are defined is not by how they look or what ordeals they go through, but by what they say and do, and how they act. This is how you create a character: have the character make conscious choices and their personality will develop infinitely better than if you just list their characteristics. If you must describe a main character by their physical characteristics, make it a minor description — a club foot, a pencil mustache, bright white hair — rather than their whole body, and make sure you are doing it for a reason. The sin of writers is to make their writing like their masturbating: only for their own pleasure. Do not underestimate the reader and fill in every detail of a room; if you leave the room undescribed the reader will fill it from their own experiences and thereby develop a stronger affinity with the text and the text’s events. A novel is a dialogue, through which ideas from both sides enter and exit, not a soliloquy by the author, written for the reader to bow down in front of. Almost paradoxically, the only characters who should actually be described physically are the ones who enter and leave shortly thereafter, who never have time to have any huge impact or reveal their full personality. It is okay to describe these people in a way that conveys their essence — a jolly fat man or something like that — so you will not waste valuable words.
[The cover image of this post is James Mason’s portrayal of the pedophilic professor Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful novel Lolita. Humbert’s character is one of the greatest in modern fiction.]
