Most new authors always struggle with a concept whenever they write their first chapter. That concept is 'how do I describe my main character?' So you have this person, and you want to introduce them to your reader. In your head, you know what they look like, who they are, and why we should care that they are about to go on some journey. However, you don't know how to properly introduce them to your reader.

This leads to the infamous mirror scene, where your character, for whatever reason, looks at a mirror, sees their own face, and then describes what they see. I cannot stress to you enough how immature this makes a writing sound. Every writing! For all my talk about how clichés aren't bad and how using them right can be good, I can't tell you I've ever read a single mirror scene that hasn't instantly given me the impression that the author lacked skill. I'm not sure it can be done well. I suppose there were cases where I didn't notice it all that much, and that's really the best you can hope for, to hide so most of your readers don't notice.

The thing is that you don't really NEED to introduce your main character. I don't really NEED to know what they look like. Let's put it this way. When you were born, how long do you think it took before you looked in a mirror and realized what you looked like? Do you think that knowing what you looked like contributed to your development as a human being? How about the experiences you received?

Unless a characters physical appearance is fundamental to the story (like a physical abnormality in the elephant man), is it honestly all that necessary to tell me what your main character looks like? The answer is probably not.

Most stories, especially on wattpad, have a certain degree of self-insertion. Especially stories in first person. The idea is that you are the main character. In that way, the less description of the protagonist, the easier it is to self-insert yourself into the story. You read twilight not because you want to read about some teenager getting vampire action, you read twilight because you want to pretend you ARE that teenager getting vampire action. Which is also why characters like Bella Swan are so nondescript and disinteresting.

Although, let's assume you're writing in third person, or that you genuinely want an interesting, dynamic character that pops. That character is going to unfold over the course of many chapters. As I learn more about their appearance, it'll be a gradual thing, a buildup of characterization in layers. That's what you should strive for... and anything else is just info-dumping. However, instead of infodumping lore your infodumping character descriptions.

Wattpad doesn't always make this easy. Most critics will only read 1 chapter, and many readers will only give one chapter a chance. Therefore, you might get criticism when they don't know what your MC looks like and that might bother you. I'd argue that if you're trying to get people to read your story, why you are wasting time describing a generic character? Shouldn't you be using your time setting up the story and making people want to read it, rather than setting up the characters who will be in the story?

It's far more likely people will start reading a story because the story is interesting, rather than because the characters are interesting. Now, interesting characters might be why they KEEP reading the story. Game of Thrones has certainly gone on for almost 3 million words because the characters are interesting, not necessarily because the story keeps moving forward. However, that doesn't help you on the first chapter.

Still, I understand. At some fundamental level, you have to present your main character. Here is a list of all the ways you can introduce your main character from WORST to BEST. Please note that the first couple are the ways you should RARELY use. We start with the bad ways to do it.

"Hi, my name is Annabelle. I have green eyes and brown hair and I am 5'4'' with the cutest smile you ever did see. I enjoy competitive sports and..."

This is the most basic form of writing. This is what someone in middle school writes. There are Wattpaders in middle school, so you see it a lot on wattpad. However, realize that this is what middle schoolers do, and if you write like this, your writing immediately comes across with the maturity of a middle schooler.

Maybe you can justify this because you've seen a book that started this way. Maybe you claim that your "story" is starting with a journal entry and that is how your justify it. Sorry. I've written in journals, even when I was in grade school. I never started a journal entry with "Hi, this is my name and these are my dimensions. Here is a physical description of me."

Maybe you have written in a journal and decided to fill it out like a personal profile for a dating site, I don't know. What I do know is that this is not a sign of mature writing. Did some professionals do it? Probably, and probably because they were writing to young kids in elementary school, and probably for a specific reason, like perhaps Flowers for Algernon which depicted someone with a mental impairment. Unless you're writing your story for someone with a 3rd grade education, this introductory method will not be well received by anyone older than 14.

A modification of this can work in third person PoV sometimes. As a narrator, you can get away with just flat out describing the protagonist. However, in first person and limited third, it becomes harder and harder to get away with it. The point being that the reader needs to feel like someone on the outside watching this character, like in a movie, rather than being right there as the character. In that way, it feels more natural. The trick is to make it feel like the narrator is NOT the same person as the PoV character. I'll get more on this in a second, but first...

"I passed a mirror and turned to glance at it. I had dark green eyes and brown hair. My face was pretty, but not gorgeous. I had a thin face and a nose that was bigger than I'd like, taking after my dad rather than my mom. I looked frumpy, so I took a comb and fixed my hair a bit before moving on."

When you get over the introduction around age 13... the next step for most authors is to move on to the mirror scene. Since you need your character descriptions to come as a natural course of the story, rather than something that gets put in the way of the story, most people will fall on this. You see a mirror, and then immediately you can get to describing yourself.

I do see this in professional works, and whether a story is professional or not, a mirror scene is not professional no matter who writes it. This would definitely be a scene to avoid. I cringe every time I run into it.

Now, I mentioned circumstances where you don't notice a mirror scene for what it is. Ways to obscure a mirror scene is to have it later in the story, like chapter 2 or 3, to give the character a good reason to look at the mirror, like they are getting ready for a date, and to toss the descriptions as a side thought rather than the point. You can also have them glance at a non-mirror, like a reflection. For example.

"I had to get ready as quickly as possible. I leapt in front of the mirror and immediately begin applying makeup. Just a little bit of lipstick was able to cover my lips, which were thinner than I would have liked. The mascara really brought out my blue eyes a lot nicer. There wasn't much I could do with that flat brown hair, but I took a curling iron to it anyway."

In this way, you're not looking at the mirror to describe yourself, you're just describing yourself as you look at the mirror. I'll admit I've done stuff like this before, but any way you look at it, it is still a mirror scene.

"A lock of brown hair fell in front of my forehead, so I moved it aside. My blue eyes opened in shock."

I'll admit that I'm guilty of this from time to time. It seems to be the next evolution of writing, and it's honestly what I've advised a few people to do as opposed to an in-your-face mirror scene in the first chapter. In this way, you toss adjectives out to give descriptions.

The problem is that that can go from really good to really bad very quickly. You're trying to describe your character, and especially in the example I gave, it sounds like that is exactly what you're doing. It's obvious, and awkwardly tossing adjectives in there sounds awkward.

Unless your reader is very young, chances are they are going to pick up what you're doing, and when they do it can be as cringe worthy as a mirror scene. In some ways, it's worse than a mirror scene. Because, while a mirror scene might waylay your story for a paragraph to get character description out of the way, awkward adjectives go on for sometimes the entire chapter, so the reader gets continuously reminded of it.

Everything needs to sound natural, and that's really the trick to it. Randomly having hair fall in front of your eyes or giving someone a piercing look that can lead to those tasty adjectives just doesn't make sense in most writing. It's pulling a reader out of the story to say, oh yeah, this person looks like this, and you want to avoid that. So unless there is a reason to be describing your hair, you shouldn't be, and popping random reasons in there look just like that... random.

"I couldn't believe what I was looking at. She was absolutely beautiful. Not like me, with my short stature and frumpy appearance. She had green eyes to my basic brown, and blond, curly hair that contrasted with my straight black."

This is starting to move into the descriptions I consider acceptable. Rather than giving a mirror as a reason to think about your appearance, you give a comparison instead. Comparing your main characters appearance to a friend or rivals is a pretty okay. The trick comes that it needs to be natural. You can't just have this pop up out of nowhere.

That is easier said than done, especially if you goal is to ultimately describe your main character. The important part to keep in mind is that this needs to be built up so it feels natural. There should be a reason that your MC is having this comparison. And the time you're taking to set up this comparison is the time you SHOULD be setting up an interesting story, so either your story is really boring by wasting all this time setting up characters, or this is a natural part of the story and it was building to this thought.

"Ugh! I hate my hair," Jenny scowls, "Not like yours!"

You look down at your long, brown hair and raise an eyebrow, "Really? Your hair is way better. Plus you got green eyes, way better than brown."

"Please, your eyes are more hazel than brown. Plus green eyes are weird. People always look at me with surprise when they notice my eye color."

This suffers from the same basic issue as the previous entry, the awkward adjectives, and the mirror scene for that matter. You're basically inserting something in there to describe your characters. Unless the story happens to be heading that direction anyway within the first chapter, it rarely sounds natural. Now, it can be natural, and there are people that pull it off. You can even pull off the mirror scene if it sounds natural, but every option I've presented still suffers from the same main problem.

You are trying to stop, waylay, or redirect the story just so that you can give your protagonist a hair color. Not only is it not necessary, it tends to drag down a first chapter that might be better without that little piece of personal information. It simply isn't important to know what hair color someone is or what eye color they have to be interested in their story. Most of the best stories ever written rarely spend a second describing what the main character looks like.

Yet, at the same time, you get a feeling about what they look like, because of how they talk, because of how they look, because of how they act, because of little adjectives that pop up that are so innocuous you don't even notice. That's the difference between good writing and mediocre writing. You shouldn't notice characterization, it should speak for itself.

"The mysterious man was walking down the street. He had a hardened face and dark bushy eyebrows that intimidated everyone that we walked by. People turned their heads away when they heard him approaching, the limp in his leg was accentuated by the clicking of his long, hard leather boots as they struck the stone floor. Click, Click, Click he went as he walked down the street, giving any one who met his almost-black eyes a dark and hateful stare.

"Jim?"

The man glanced back to see a familiar face.

"What is it?" Jim demanded gruffly. "

That being said, there is one little trick you can use to get around it. Don't give the main character an identity until after they are described. You see, we don't know your main character, so you can have some unknown person starting your story. In that case, the only thing you can do is describe this mysterious person.

What I wrote above was a little in your face and obvious, but since we don't know the main character, we don't identify with him yet. Thus, you have a small window where you can get away with describing him as a separate identity before you give him a name.

Since you haven't named him, the only way you can differentiate him is by his description, and thus you can describe away. This works because of the next option.

"In a small town off the shore of Tagnata, there was a young girl named Marlene. She had a small frame a fierce temper. She had little beady blue eyes that she used to intimidate any of the boys who thought for a second they could take advantage of her for being so small. One time, a boy tried to..."

In essence, have another person describe the protagonist. In the case above, it's actually the narrator that is describing the girl. The tone makes it clear the narrator is NOT Marlene, and that makes it easy to describe her, keeping the tone like you're telling a story. It differs from the "Introduction" because there is a separation between the narrator and the PoV character. You aren't the PoV character describing yourself awkwardly, you are an outsider watching a story unfold, and one of the things you see is what this girl looks like.

That's very similar to why the unknown main character works. Ultimately, it's about separating the narrator from the MC. However, when that isn't possible, like in first person, another trick is to be in the PoV of someone who is not the MC and then describe them seeing the main character. It's a bit of a trick, and it probably won't happen in your first chapter. Maybe if you wrote a prologue cleverly you could get away with it.

Also, the PoV change would need to be reasonable. You can't just make a PoV change to describe your character, which would be very silly... however, if done well, it could work.

This event occurs when someone would logically think about their appearance. Notice that I do not provide an example of this. This is because it is all about context, and I can't give you an example of context. Simply put, take all the examples I've previously mentioned. The mirror scenes, the third person description, the conversation, and the comparative look... each one of these has the goal of setting up a reason for you to describe the main character.

If you don't come up for an appropriate reason to describe a character or at least parts of a character, then those options above set to engineer one. This option is different because you aren't creating an opportunity to describe your character. Instead, you're simply waiting until that opportunity presents itself.

When there comes a time in the story when it's necessary to describe a piece of your character, then you describe it. Only use an adjective describing their hair when their hair actually becomes relevant to the story. Only explain your characters looks when those looks are brought up in the narrative.

This might be your character doesn't get described until chapter 5. This might mean your character is never described. This might mean your character has aspects of their character description that simply never come up, because they aren't relevant to the plot.

Ideally, this is probably the best way to do things, but you need to be careful with it. You need to avoid surprises. We shouldn't be surprised that your character has no teeth, or that they are sexy, or that they are a transgendered hobgoblin.... At least not by the time we get head first into the story. Stating "oh yeah, and my character has blond hair" just as he reaches a "no blondes allowed" club might confuse your audience and make them do a double take.

So, how do you keep from surprising your audience? Well, you depend on...

This is the final form of describing your character... and I'll give you an example right here.

"The carjack twisted and collapsed, the car falling down with a thud.

"Ah, crap!" the man underneath cried out, the bulk of his body trapped under the edge. "Someone help!"

His voice came out hoarsely, and it was clear that he could barely breathe under the weight of the vehicle. A man raced out from the crowd, reached down and grabbed onto the edge of the vehicle. He began to pull up, his muscles taut and straining under the weight of the vehicle. He straightened his legs, using their length to his advantage.

Steadily, the edge of the car began to rise up, inch by inch. Two other men raced over and pulled on the legs of the man underneath the car. His stomach got caught on the edge and it took another inch before they could finally get him out. His face was bright red now, and he made loud gasping noises as he rolled to the side, the toupee he once wore now lying on the side of the road.

The man holding up the car let go, and fell back onto his butt, also breathing hard. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He removed the do rag covering his head and dropped it on the floor next to him. That did it. He wouldn't be playing basketball tonight with the boys, his back was shot."

Alright... can you describe the two characters in that scene? I bet you're imagining the guy under the car as a balding, fat, white guy, probably older like 40s. Meanwhile, the one who picked up the car was a tall, muscular, African American, probably in his 20s, with short hair, maybe a shaved head.

And that was just three paragraphs of a random scene. Imagine a whole story with descriptive cues. You think the white guy is white because he was bright red from losing his breath, not a color you'd expect in, say, a black man. You think he's bald because he lost a toupee. You think he's fat because I mention his "bulk" and that his stomach got caught on the way out. I built up this character, and I didn't spend a second actually describing the character. I just described things that indirectly gave you an expectation for what the character ought to look like for the scene to make sense.