Sometimes the description of a character in the stage directions says as much as lines of dialogue.
Conversely, from the "go figure" category, Mr. Busch left in a description of a character who had dropped some figurines in a store as "a retail terrorist".
In its opening pages there is a description of a character called Ferdinand Lopez, which reminded me of Lu and made me want to read more: "He had been as though he had been created self-sufficient, independent of mother's milk or father's money".
To introduce "A Sleepin' Bee," the Harold Arlen song with lyrics by Truman Capote, Mr. Weinstein read a description of a character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as someone who was as "out of place as a violinist in a jazz band".
"Beyond Black," Mantel's last novel before she began the Tudor sequence, was also Spark-like in its surreal description of a character who makes her living summoning forth the spirits of the dead, but it had an amplitude, warmth and generosity very unlike Spark, and its style in turn could not have been less like the sparkling historical realism of "Wolf Hall".
A world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald's very deliberate portrait of Gatsby wearing "a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie" when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan's casual description of a character dressed in "black cords and a white button-up shirt" in her brilliant novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad".
Well, I wrote one thing that I would call a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, and then I've written a bunch of four-, five-page descriptiofs of a character or a moment.
India's Sikh community is angered over J. K. Rowling's description of a Sikh character in "The Casual Vacancy" as a "hairy man-woman".
In seconds, I can find every simile I've ever written about an onion or every description of a particular character asleep.
Last year's award was taken by the debut novelist Iain Hollingshead, whose description of a female character's "crotch taut against my bulging trousers", in his novel Twenty Something, sealed his win for the judges.
L.A. Opera is asking contestants to tweet a description of an operatic character that Domingo has played using 140 characters or less.
