While reading Flannery O’Connor’s "A Good Man is Hard to Find" recently, I tried to pay attention to how she described her characters. She was so good at describing characteristics and mannerisms without slowing the pace of her stories.
For example, this description of the rich old farmer, Mr. Cheatam in the short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”:
“He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gullys. He wore a pale green shirt with a thin black stripe in it and blue galluses and his trousers cut across a protruding stomach that he pressed tenderly from time to time with his big flat thumb. All his teeth were backed with gold and he would roll his eyes at Miss Kirby in an impish way and say ‘Haw haw,’ sitting in their porch swing with his legs spread apart and his hightopped shoes pointing in opposite directions on the floor.”
