Generally, I think characters needn’t be described—not, at least, from within their own heads. People rarely think deeply about the color of their eyes or hair in the course of a day’s business; it feels awkward to push such a description in where it doesn’t belong, and when characters aren’t described, I usually just form an image of them that seems to fit their personalities. But I wonder sometimes how commonly readers do need some sort of description to ground a character, and how critical it is to either given a description in a timely way or give none at all.
In Rosedawn, I’ve never had Bren think about her own appearance in specific terms, but when I write her from other characters’ viewpoints, they describe her. When this happens, I find myself wondering how late in a story is too late for a first-time description. Late-given descriptions that don’t match whatever mental image I’ve formed of a character can throw me. (For example, when I read the end of Hannibal, I was startled to learn that Clarice Starling is a blonde. I had imagined her all through Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal as a brunette. Of course, I’d also [spoiler] imagined her as a law officer with a certain sense of professional integrity and not as someone who’d leave the FBI to bang Hannibal Lecter, so that was hardly the most jarring part of the end of Hannibal for me.) [end spoiler]
When you read characters who aren’t described, do you find it easy to form a mental image of them? Does it vary depending on the strength of the character? Would a late-given description annoy you—or would you just shrug it off and say “Oh”?
Write Free or Die 
I suppose the characters’ description should only serve to drive the story — to the extent that their appearance is important in that sense, anyway. But we’re dealing with people, here, and we want to picture them in our minds. 19th century writers usually provided lavish descriptions of characters, but we’ve moved away from that — I’m not sure I like that trend.
This calls to mind Jesus. My parents have a typical Catholic (repro) tryptic on their mantle with Jesus in the center panel, a very Renaissance, European Jesus, wearing wealthy Italian 16th century robes. He has long, flowing blond-ish hair and blue eyes, and a long, slender nose. He looks like us, pasty-white Northern Europeans. And yet I remember the stir back in the 1970s when some school in South Carolina made a big deal over some black kid portraying Jesus as black. My wife was also taken aback when my sister sent us a gift Nativity set one Christmas from Mexico — where Jesus, Mary and Joseph all looked like Jésus, Maria and José. And I remember the outcry just a few years ago when a bunch of anthropologists produced a portrait not of Jesus but of what the typical Judean Jew of the last Millennium looked like. (https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a234/1282186/) Their portrait was based on the simple fact that we have no description of Jesus anywhere in the four Gospels — but neither does anybody react to Jesus’ appearance in any way, which suggests that he looked like everybody around him, pretty much like everyone expected him to look. Nobody says anything about his appearance because there’s nothing remarkable about his appearance to 1st century A.D. Jews. And so the question is, for those of us who grew up in Christian households and received some sort of Christian education, what does Jesus look like in your head? Your religious beliefs notwithstanding, he’s a character you’ve grown up with and about whom you’ve been forced to think a lot about. Is his appearance important to you?
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I grew up surrounded on all sides by Catholics of varying ethnicities and degrees of piety. It always seemed to me that the French Canadians were the most observant, the Italians the least, but I was a heathen kid, what did I know. They all had those dreamy-eyed, Fabio-esque, blondish, fair-skinned Jesus pictures on their kitchen walls. I knew bupkis about Jesus, but I was pretty sure a guy from the hinterlands of the boonies of that time and place wouldn’t look like that. I once asked a friend’s mom about it. She shrugged and said “If nobody knows what he looked like then he looks like whatever we want.”
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I received my education in Bible stories from illustrated kid’s books, in which Jesus was, as I recall, portrayed as white and blond. I still handle a ton of religious art for my work, in which Jesus is… still portrayed as white and blond, which I’ve come to realize is ridiculous.
There Is No White Jesus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APMu32sC2nM
While I don’t have strong feelings about the appearance of Jesus, this raises the diversity question. Describing characters enough to at least indicate that they’re not white could be valuable in itself when the population of fiction is disproportionately so.
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Not to beat the Jesus analogy to death — and funny video, by the way — but this really goes to the heart of your question. What kind of Jesus do you want? There’s the historical Jesus, who by any rational measure looked like a typical eastern Mediterranean person, but there’s also the “Christ” Jesus, the divine figure who is often made to look like the culture worshiping him. Putting theology aside for the moment, it is a question of character — because making Jesus white to Europeans and mestizo to Mexicans makes him more accessible; he’s one of us. This is the issue you’re struggling with — how much does a character’s appearance impact their role in the story? So the answer to any question about the depiction of Jesus is really, well, what sort of Jesus do you want?
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You make an interesting point about the connection between role and appearance. I suppose describing a character could, in some contexts, strengthen the idea of her I want readers to have. On the other hand, I sometimes like the idea of a reader being able to picture my heroine in whatever way works for them—so maybe I lean more toward the culturally mutable Jesus.
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As for diversity, I think it’s a bad idea on its own for stories. I remember cartoonist Scott Adams once in an interview complaining about an incident he took a lot of heat for. He explained that he typically submitted his Sunday paper panels to his publisher in black & white, and the publisher would colorize them. Well, in one panel where there was a larcenous coworker in an office setting, the publisher, in a fit of bad timing, chose to make that character a black guy, and Adams was lit up by a huge wave of outraged reactions. So I think it depends on the setting of your story. Every time I go back “home,” to my native (post-industrial) New York, as soon as I get off the airplane I’m immediately reminded that oh yeah, there are more than just white people in this world. I love New Hampshire and intend to live my days out here, but it is Lilywhite, almost total, plain, boring white bread. It is easy here to lose sight of just how mixed this country is. And of course I’m talking ethnic diversity, but gender, religious, etc. are all also important. When I was a kid watching TV, one area that seemed odd to me was that all the main characters usually were not just white, but all had Anglo names too. I think Sesame Street was the first place on TV I saw Hispanic names, for instance. In my world, everybody had “ethnic” (i.e., non-Anglo-) names: Polish, Italian, Jewish, Irish, German, Yemeni Arab, Greek, etc. I seriously had never met a real, live person named “Smith” until I moved to New England. This just goes to show how regional our culture is. So again — setting should define diversity in a story.
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I remember reading about that comic strip incident. Diversity shouldn’t be used blindly, of course—I have to be mindful of it also when I’m doing layout work, what types of people are presented in artwork and in what way. (No one ever complains about white Jesus though.)
For my own stuff the rules are a little looser, because I don’t usually write in a real-world setting, and I just try to keep in mind that it doesn’t make sense for all the universe to look like New Hampshire. (In an effort to come up with realistic distributions of race, I tried to plot them out on a world map once, years ago, but now that everyone’s in space the issue is still more confused.)
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For as long as I’ve been sharing the fiction I’ve written I’ve gotten mixed feedback on the level and manner of physical detail I’ve attributed to characters, particularly protagonists and their sidekicks. Frequently I limit myself to a couple of details, particularly of attire, which actually serve more as setting indicators than actual descriptions of the character. Barkis, for example, wouldn’t be caught dead without brown fedora and ratty trench coat. And a pack of Camels, of course. Somewhere it’s revealed that he’s shortish and slightly paunchy, but I don’t think much more than that. Characters in other stories get even less, unless it’s important to the action. There’s a fair amount of description of all the (three) characters in “Vongeleen” because it’s needed to make it clear that the other two characters (the one who are not Vongeleen) are odious barbarians, and their speech is not translated so I’m limited in that way.
Basically, my take is a lot like yours – only as much as is called for by necessity. Extensive physical detail is one of the parts I think Elmore Leonard would tell us to leave out as one of the parts “readers skip over.”
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