The worst ever description of a character

I was working on the Mack Hawthorne Project yesterday and I just felt that something was wrong. I looked back over what I had written so far and decided that it just felt thin and the scenes were not interesting enough. They have the potential to be awesome, but I'm not writing them well enough. So I decided some additional training could help. I started my way through the Foundations of Fiction course by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell.

The first lesson involved writing good descriptions for characters. Basically, how to make them interesting and form a picture in our minds, but not to go over the top with describing them. Jessica and Joanne were engaging and gave great examples of descriptions that work very well. I got a kick out of their recap about Hagrid from Harry Potter.

Then they issued a writing prompt to practice. They gave a list of options for a person and said to write "the worst ever description of a character." We were to go into as much detail as we could and therefore make it boring. We were also to set a timer for 10 minutes and end our writing when we ran out of time. I'm not sure if I did too good at the boring bit. I kind of made it into a short story. I decided to describe a medieval knight and I had too much fun with it.

Please enjoy the description of...

Sir Knuckledragger

The doors boomed as Sir Knuckdragger shoved his way into the dining hall of the castle. The man was already drunk and walking with a lurching gait as he headed towards the lunch laid out on the tables. The man was filthy and looked like he had slept in a pigsty. His brown hair was greasy and looked like it had bits of mud and twigs stuck in it. And his beard… His beard was a snarled mess that looked like it still had pieces of last night’s dinner left in it.

His clothes were stained with food and filth. His tunic was worn and could barely close around his growing paunch. His hose was ripped out at the knees and looked like they were fraying dangerously in unmentionable areas of his body. When he brayed for beer, a passing maid nearly gagged at the stench coming from his breath. It would be all too funny if we weren’t stuck in the same room with him.

His eyes were glazed over with drunkenness, but still managed to look piggish in their appearance. His eyebrows were growing wildly and looked like they were trying to catch up to his receding hairline. I would pity the man’s wife, but he never went home anymore, which was something she must have been profoundly grateful for.

His hygiene was enough to make you gag just by being in the room with him. The last time he washed must have been the rain that we received two weeks ago. His hands were filthy, and yet he grabbed food and shoved it in his mouth like it was going to disappear on him. Obviously, his stay with the pigs had rubbed off on him, for he looked less like a human the more I examined his appearance and watched his behavior. Just when I thought it could not get any worse, he let out a massive belch, which caused bits of food to fly out and land on the platters in front of him. He didn’t even look the slightest bit ashamed. He just reached out and grabbed more and shoved it in his face.