How to Describe Your Character’s Home II |

It’s been a few years since I last discussed houses. I have a lot more to say about this topic now (mostly because I’ve read about 214 books since then, often being inspired by descriptions from my successful colleagues).

A home tells as much about a character as a long narrative about their background and personal history–in a more interesting fashion. By discussing the choices s/he makes in decor, furniture, nick-nacks, cleanliness, you as writer speak volumes about the motivations and core of the people in your book, develop empathy with the reader, and make them likable or feared.

Here are some of my favorite ‘home’ descriptions organized by:

Is this your character’s home? Maybe for Lord Hawke.

Outside
Inside
Room
Yard
Bathroom
Doors
Entry
Walls
Windows
Furniture
Sensory

As with all my descriptors, don’t use these verbatim!. They are some other author’s intellectual property. Use them for inspiration. See how others have done it so you can create your own unique path.

Overall

Do you see a dinner party in thiJacqui Murray is the author of the popular prehistoric fiction saga, Man vs. Nature which explores seminal events in man’s evolution one trilogy at a time. She is also the author of the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers and Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. Her non-fiction includes over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, reviews as an Amazon Vine Voice, a columnist for NEA Today, and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. Look for her next prehistoric fiction, Savage Land, Winter 2024.s room?

Fair-sized house built of red Lyons Sandstone with the most god-awful-looking picket fence I’d ever seen.
Small upstairs apartment on Newport Island, a tiny piece of land accessible only by a bridge so narrow, it would admit just one car at a time.
The weather-beaten slat cottage sat at the far end of a mostly brown lawn. Wood silvered by the sun. Roof shingles warped. Small stands of plantain and giant bird-of-paradise for privacy.
Rambling old farm house
Gleamed with the spotless silence of for-company-only.
He leaned on the old boards. They felt thin and veined, frozen by a hundred winters, baked by a hundred summers. They smelled of dust and age.
A big house, the kind in which most American kids dreamed of growing up. Secluded among trees on one of DC’s most exclusive streets, it had turrets, gables, dormers, balconies, a screened-in front porch, a free-standing garage, a gazebo, a pool, formal gardents, the American dream.
Sturdy two-story residence designed without the least imagination

Outside

Or is this closer? Barely making it.

Were columns and friezes and arched windows twenty feet high
It might once have been nice; it might once have been the home of an actual family. But scrub and tall weeds now covered the yellowed lawn, which clearly hadn’t been cut in years. A wire fence bordered the property, sagging at spots where the wind had knocked it down, a wooden gate hanging from its post.
Set far back from the curb, beneath three tower pines. It was white plaster with a brown tile roof and Castillian wrought iron over the windows.
The house was an old brown tumbledown wreck, its clapboard weathered and cracked, several roof shingles missing
Beyond them rough hills sloping into the sharp blue Pacific
Perimeter of the grounds was patrolled by armed security, and every inch of the property was wired with cameras, security lighting, and motion sensors.

Yard

Weed-choked courtyard
Home. eight acres of scrub and savannah, a pasture and paddock, a pond, a stream, avocado, lemon and orange trees loaded with fruit.
It was abandoned. It had a mailbox entirely hidden by tall grass. Its driveway was overgrown. It had bushes and brambles up against the door and the windows. It had weeks in the gutters, and green slime on the walls, and a cracked foundation pierced by creeper tendrils thicker than my wrists.

Room

Could you get comfortable here?

Small with clean white walls, a twin bed, a desk with a blank blotter on it, sliding closets opposite the bed, and thin green shag carpet.
My Writing Area: My computer faces out the window. I like having the sky and buildings in the background. Occasionally a bird or plane flies by in the distance. To my far left is my 42″ flatscreen TV (size does matter), which often displays my daily dose of CNN or Grey’s Anatomy. Next to that is my Buddhist altar, which I need to make better use of. To my right is a framed poster displaying a poem of mine that had been on Chicago buses and trains. And to the far right is a black and white picture of Grand Central Station with wide beams of light gushing in through the windows. The beams look like they are about to make the commuters levitate at any minute and float skyward.
A single light burned, casting light on a chintz couch and an antique Quaker chair
Improvised kitchenette off to one side
Walls and ceilings were covered with mirrors, a high-tech bordello.
Furnishings were cheap, black-painted. A worn mustard-yellow bean-bag chair, a relic of the seventies. An old tape deck and a towering set of speakers whose cloth was fraying

Door

A front door that could accommodate a family of giraffes.

Entry

A foyer that would accommodate the Serengeti Plant at the foot of a vast curving staircase that probably went to heaven
Polished wood floors and a graceful banister that curved up toward a soaring second floor gallery.
Persian rug cove red a shopworn carpet.

Walls

Not bad for a room

Prints of gentlemen riding to hounds decorate the walls.
Crumbling rock walls

Windows

Beautiful high arched windows
Velvet drapes framed the windows, the lace inner curtains remained drawn, allowing daylight to enter while rendering the heart-stopping view over the city a blur
bay windows

Bathroom

The bathroom was clean. The tub and the towels were dry. The medicine cabinet above the sink had a mirrored door and behind it were over-the-counter analgesics, and toothpaste, and tampons, and dental floss, and spare soap and shampoo.

Furniture, etc.

Uses his exercise bike as a clothes rack
Old wooden chair with the two missing back slats
gathered the whole mess and shifted it to the alarmingly large pile tilting dangerously
Locked in shadow in a corner of the room
Brown plaid sofa with heavy oak arms, a bookcase neatly stocked with paperbacks, family pictures on one wall, a china cabinet against another.
beautiful gilded mirror
FBI-approved safe, a four-drawer Mosler combination safe, concrete-and-steel, good for material up to top secret
trestle table
lamps washed the window in a strong incandescent glow
Is this how busy your protagonist is?
He rummaged through the chest. Tshirts were pushed into the top drawer along with more underwear and wadded socks. The next drawer down held a pair of folded sweatpants but nothing else. The final drawer held nothing belonging to the thief, just a stack of well-0fingered brochures and menus from local businesses.

Sensory

Back when home was more than a TV and a microwave
No sound in the house, not even the sounds that houses make: air-conditioning, or furnace, or the stairwell creaking, or the frig cycling on; nothing but a silence that seemed to have been thickening since
doors opened and closed and water ran and toilets flushed and then the house went quiet. The heating system whirred and the taped-up football players muttered and grunted and snored
is your garage like your garden or like your television set?

Watch this slideshow of homes, rooms, personalities. What story do they tell?

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a K-6 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, creator of two technology training books for middle school and six ebooks on technology in education. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog, Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and a bi-weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.