Does a physical description have to be specific to make a character feel real, or can the physical description be general and the details be left to the reader's imagination?
Answer
A character does not have to be described at all to feel real. In many stories we are told little of their appearance beyond whether they are male or female, and occasionally not even that.
Where physical appearance is described it can really go no further than to place the character in a general class of people (An cavalry officer. A southern belle. A poor sharecropper. Etc.) and specify certain significant physical traits (fat, thin, bald, etc.).
You can go into more detail, but language does not give us the facility to easily describe the particular details of face and form that allow us to recognize individuals in real life. If a character has a face to a reader, it is the reader, not the writer who has supplied it, at least until the movie gets made, at which point the actor provides the face.
What makes a character feel real, more than anything else, is their behavior. When the characters in as story do not feel real, it is because the author has treated them as props instead of people, has made them behave in a way that advances the plot or make the point the author wants to make, but is simply not the way a real person, particular not that real person, would behave.
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