Seriously, six plates of food. It’s like he stopped at every single station in the caf, craving everything from home-style fried fish to Japanese fried rice. You would think he’d weigh more than a horse, but the guy was stick-skinny and didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought of him. He gorged on his food while donning a pair of black lensed glasses; they looked like something with a sales tag that would’ve been labeled “Gold-rimmed Vintage Glasses from the 80s! 50.99!” Although shaming the idea of hipsters by blowing sixty bucks on a pair of glasses (bud, you’re supposed to shop online or in obscure stores no one else knows about) he was more than trying to plaster the image to his body. It was like punk meets hipster, what with his skater-boy black tee and some majorly intentional tousled black hair, reminiscent of a Mr. John Travolta swaggering around on the set of Grease. 

“I gotta tell ya, Danny, you should probably ditch the ugly red and white striped watch. It doesn’t match your punk-slash-hipster look very well, and dude I wouldn’t even be totally sold on the look anyway if your jawline wasn’t cut to perfection. Of course, your personality’s not so bad, either. Full of energy, but cool in your surroundings, you demand attention without overstepping boundaries. I commend you for that, my friend. The girls at your table definitely appreciate it, I can tell you that, but you should probably kick that weird habit you have about touching your belt buckle the second you get a little uncomfortable.”

But why do I care about describing his looks or his mannerisms or whatever? I wanted to shed some light on this random guy, let’s just keep rolling with Danny (because why not?), and the only way to do that is to pack on more dimensions and make him human. Throw in something about his eyes because that’s the first thing people usually want to imagine in a character, along with their hair. Give him an action to do to give the reader something realistic to imagine. Nobody wants to see someone standing awkwardly in a blank space as personality and clothes and mannerisms are coming together. A character has to be created in a setting.

Next give the reader something to relate to. Hello John Travolta! But all kidding aside, Danny’s hair really did look like, well, Danny’s. Mannerisms are what make a person real and give them depth, and it’s something I always try to include when describing a character. Danny used hand gestures for nearly everything he said and when he was just a tad uncomfortable, he would shift in his seat and go to touch his belt buckle. It happened several times over the course of glancing at him (yes, glancing).

So I gift our lovely Danny to the world and hope he never finds this blog and doesn’t track me down and yell at me for making fun of his sixty dollar hipster-not-hipster glasses. Then again, if he did, it would allow me to voice a question that’s been burning in the back of my mind.

“Of all the drinks to drink while eating such a wide variety of food, why the hell did you think chocolate milk was a good idea?”