When describing a character, consider which of those details truly need to be conveyed to bring this character to life…and which are just filler.
— William Bernhardt - "Creating Character"
This works because readers build people, not photographs. A face gets constructed from two or three sharp cues plus the reader's own imagination filling in the rest; every extra cue you add competes for attention and dilutes the ones that matter. Say a character has a chipped front tooth she taps when she's lying, and leave her hair color unstated. That single habit tells us more about her nerves and history than a full physical inventory would, and readers will happily invent the rest.
The caution: stripping too far becomes its own kind of filler-avoidance, leaving characters as bare function rather than people. A detail that seems irrelevant to plot can still matter for texture, humor, or grounding a scene in a real body and place. The goal isn't minimalism for its own sake — it's choosing which few details do the most work, not simply having the fewest.
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