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Do you have a picture of what your character looks like taped to your computer?

Do you describe characters, and do you have a picture of what your character looks like taped to your computer?

26 replies on “Do you have a picture of what your character looks like taped to your computer?”

I don’t have pictures taped anywhere but my two main characters I based on two actors so I just keep watching their movies over and over. One movie has the actress I based my main character on in the same time period as my story so that helps a lot. It’s weird, she even has the same body language.

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It would be interesting to see how readers describe your character after reading the story, or which actress they would guess you had in mind. It’s probably nowhere near what you had in mind but it would be an interesting thing to find out.

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No pictures, but I do have a list of traits.
I have an idea of what I think my mc would look like. (Based on people I know.) I like to keep the descriptions vague (tall, short, dark, fair) because my idea of attractive would be different then the next persons. I probably need to be a little more concrete at times, but I hate it when I read and I’m getting into a characters personality then am hit with a concrete description that is not what was in my head.
E6

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In Scrivener I have folders for each character which include photos (headshots of actors/others that I picture when thinking about my characters, homes, cars, places that serve as the inspiration for settings in the novel), back stories, free-writing exercises I’ve done in “their” voices, etc. I’ve also let my (future) readers in with a section on my home page headed, “Meet the Cast” which you can see here >> http://lcrooney.com

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I usually start with an idea of how a character is first; their personalities, their quirks, how they speak, how they see the world, and somewhere along the way, I get an idea of what they look like, how they dress, their favorite food. Pinterest helps me build my visuals, but I also make notes, both on paper and in Google Docs. I treat setting as character too, as much as I can. I didn’t in my earlier work, it’s ever evolving I hope. I keep whole storyboards in Pinterest for setting, architecture, home decor that my characters would have, even one character’s car collection!

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A lot of my characters are real historical people, although there aren’t pictures/portraits of all of them. One minor character, Francis Lovell, was a real person but there are no pictures or descriptions of him. Most of my Ricardian author friends picture him as blond,so I made him dark and brooding in my novels, just for a change! I like to be different.
For fictional characters, I tend to have a real person in mind just to ‘fix’ them in my head. I hope that way to make them more individual. So I don’t have real pictures, only the ones in my head and I also have their voices in my head too, both the fictional ones and the historical ones.

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What do YOU think? Let me hear from ya.