Writing descriptions of fantasy characters presents a unique challenge because you evoke archetypes. The moment you have done this in your story, you have immediately filled your reader's mind with a host of connections the reader may be hardly aware of. The challenge is to keep from messing with the archetype too much. On a more basic level, some readers would rather supply hair and eye color themselves and practically resent an author insisting on blondeness, for example. My own story does not allow the reader this luxury. Everybody's hair and eyes are described. Maybe that's rather proprietary of me, but I insist.
In my latest rewrite of my first chapter, I tried just naming a thing with which most people (in my country/region) are familiar, such as species of trees, birds, mammals, which seems to work because the protagonist is in the forest. So I don't have to describe the bird - the species name serves as an adequate 'tag' to evoke the image in the reader's mind. Now, the difficulty with this comes when you subcreate a whole new creature in your fantasy world. Then you have to decide just how much description is necessary. I would lean on as little as possible to evoke the salient nature of the being.
Saxony Tarn, your "conservation of plot points" is excellent. I've run into that any number of times, usually catching them myself in the rewrite. "Oh! That's right! He's supposed to have a bandage on his left hand the whole time! She would have noticed. He couldn't just throw a left hook." And so forth.
I've always liked developing characters through conversational interaction, but as my sympathetic writer's group have said over and over again, if it doesn't move the plot forward, the interaction tends to seem pointless, even if it's developing character. So I try to limit my dialogue to that which does. As you can probably tell, I tend to be long winded 'on paper'. So I will use action, forced cooperation, psychological interaction, and any other method that comes to hand so long as it drives the plot.
|_|) aaah! Thanks much, Saxony Tarn.
Starbreeze, my suggestion regarding the necessary description would be to spread it out as much as you're able through your story's action.
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Here's a go around for all. Happy quaffing and writing!
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