How much detail do you like about character descriptions?
 

Do you prefer having every detail described from clothes to hair style or do you like to have things left to your imagination?


Personally I get bored when every story begins with a paragraph stating "she was 5"2 with medium length auburn hair and a mole above her left eye." I want to scream, just get to the story! I also often like to implant mental images of people I know into the stories so less detail isn't an issue for me.

How do other's feel?

I suppose there's a reason on why so many stories start with an introduction to its characters - which I tend to promptly skip. I don't care that much how your characters look, and chances are you're not going to bring up most of the details in the story later anyway. But hey, it's probably not hard to write :p

Like FoxyFluff, I strongly prefer when the character descriptions are injected into the flow of the story. That block description is just awful. It's mostly irrelevant detail, and it's hard to remember anyway because it's not linked to anything I can really connect with emotionally.

If instead, you introduce character details with things like, "My soft brown eyes met his baby blues across the room. Self-conscious, I looked away, brushing a strand of strawberry-blond hair back behind my ear to get it away from my eyes..." then that's memorable, and it flows nicely, adding to the story instead of detracting from it. It also tends to mean you skip over irrelevant details.

Now, if you can make it sexy, I think it's fine. "His hips and fine ass filled out stonewashed jeans, with a few cuts in all the right places to let me know he had creamy skin and blue boxers with little dolphins on them. Bare feet poked cutely out of the ragged cuffs, dusty from the sidewalk, and when he stretched and moved, I could just make out hints and flashes of his treasure trail and abs beneath his tight green t-shirt." That's something I'd want to read.

On the other hand... those awful block descriptions are easy to find, and when suddenly out of nowhere the author goes into poetic mode, "The raven stared into the blonde's eyes..." and I have to scroll up and go "Who was the raven, again...?" there is something to be said for making that easy to find. On the -other- other hand, though, if the descriptions had been memorably strewn throughout, maybe I wouldn't -need- to look them up.

So... maybe the optional method would be to blend the description in, but also, right up front, just put a quick bio and stat-block for each character, in an obvious table format so it's clear it's not meant to be read verbatim.

As far as overall level of detail... hmm... -most- of my writing is actually roleplay, and in those, it's important to me that the other player visualize my character as I do, so I get -very- descriptive, spending multiple pages on character description at the start of an RP. I suppose in erotic fiction written for consumption as an art form, leaving some detail up to the imagination is good... but for me, personally, clothing needs to be described. So much of my enjoyment of an erotic story involves exactly how, when, where, why, and in what order clothing is removed, to the point that if an author skips over, say, removing a character's shoes and socks, going straight from unbuttoning pants to magically naked, I may very well click the Back button and move on.