For the Love of God, Don’t Describe Female Characters as Beautiful
And what you should describe them as instead
There’s nothing worse than reading a script with an elaborate, detailed character description when the male protagonist is introduced but a simple, one-word description for the female characters—beautiful.
Or attractive. Or athletic. Or slim. Or pretty, but doesn’t know it. Or hot despite her glasses.
It’s done a lot. Like more than it should be. And women are guilty of it, too. We should all break ourselves of this bad habit. On top of reducing the character to her physicality (and potentially her worth to her sexual viability), it’s just bad writing.
The descriptor “beautiful” is both vague and generic, and it gives us no sense of who this person is. We’re not given a type. We’re not even given an archetype. All we know is her features should look good on screen. But what those features are exactly is unclear.
The description when we first meet a character is crucial in setting up expectations. They’re our first impression, tipping off the reader as to who this person is and what we’re in store for. And they actually do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of how a character is perceived in the script, so we need to get the blueprint of how these people are…
