KayeDacus.com

Due to exhaustion brought on by spending the last several days at work packing up to move to new offices next week, I wasn’t able to write a new post for Writing the Romance Novel. But just in case you’re jonesing to read something about the craft of writing, check out these past posts on Characters and Point of View:

Creating Credible Characters (June 2007). See also Be Your Own Casting Director, Point of View
Creating Credible Characters—Introduction
Creating Credible Characters—Where Do Characters Come From?
Creating Credible Characters–Who Are You?
Creating Credible Characters–Culture Clash
Creating Credible Characters–Let’s Get Personal
Creating Credible Characters–Mannerisms and Quirks
Creating Credible Characters–What Do You Want?
Creating Credible Characters–What’s in a Name?

Point of View (June 2007). See also Creating Credible Characters, Showing vs. Telling
Point of View–Whose Story Is This? 
Point of View–How Important Is It?
Point of View–Semantics & Book List
Point of View–Giving POV the Third Degree
Guest Blogger Erica Vetsch–Making your Point (of View)
Guest Blogger Georgiana Daniels–Getting POV Right
Point of View–Showing vs. Telling

Have you ever read a book where a character’s name just doesn’t fit? Seen a movie that you enjoyed, but then when you’re trying to describe it to someone afterward, you absolutely cannot think of the character’s name? (If I may, this is one of the things that is wonderful about www.imdb.com—whenever I forget the name of an actor or character, I can always go there to look it up.)

I have written a couple of other posts about naming characters which explain my approach:
Which Comes First–the Character or the Name?
By Any Other Name . . .

Usually the character names come to me pretty easily . . . once I find the Real World Template, I can almost always immediately come up with a name that is perfect.

But like naming children, this process is different for everyone. Some people come up with the name before they even have an idea for a character or for a storyline. Some people want to live with the character a while—to really, truly know who the character is—before figuring out what the name is.

Sometimes, we name our characters one thing and halfway through our novels, they stop, throw a temper tantrum and refuse to cooperate until we change their names to something else. Or sometimes we try to change the name when we think it doesn’t fit any longer, and then the character refuses to cooperate any longer—stops talking to us or doing anything he should—until we go back to the original name.

Some of the factors to think about in naming characters:

• Time Period. Naming the heroine of a Revolutionary War-era novel “Tiffani” or “Destinee” probably isn’t a good idea, unless she’s traveled there from the 21st Century. Research historical names through geneological websites, historical documents (wedding/funeral registries, cemetery logs are great), and literature written in your time period. If you don’t want to go to that length, Biblical names work well. When I first started working on Ransome’s Honor, set in 1814 England, I sat down with my complete works of Jane Austen and made a list of every single name she uses/mentions in those books (not a very long list, I’ll tell you). I also looked at old Navy Lists for men’s names and names of ships.
• Region/Ethnicity. Certain names are necessarily going to give connotation to the region where your book is set as well as the ethnicity of the character. Javier Gonzales isn’t going to call to mind a blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandanavian man. Mandy Faye or Tammy Lynn are flags that this character has a Southern heritage. Wojciechowski or Pulaski as a last name tells us the character comes from Polish stock. Minelli, Giovanni, or Alborghetti call to mind dark hair, dark eyes, olive-toned skin and a love of pasta, fast cars, and over-bearing Mamas. In my contemporaries, set in central Louisiana, I have used surnames such as Guidry, d’Arcement, Thibodeaux, Boudreaux, and Babineaux—each time one of these names occurs, it serves as a reminder of the setting for the reader.
• Age of the Character. In a contemporary setting, someone with the name Edith or Ethel is going to immediately be thought older than a Jordyn or Heather. A great resource for making sure your character’s name is suitable for the age of your contemporary character is the Social Security Administration’s Popular Baby Name website, where you can search the top names of each year going back to 1880 (John, William, and James; Mary, Anna, and Emma) through to 2006 (Jacob, Michael, and Joshua; Emily, Emma, and Madison).
• All Alliterative Appellations. Y’all know how much I love alliteration. When naming characters in a certain story, I sometimes have a tendency to get carried away with a certain letter or sound (I have one set of characters, five best friends, whose names all end in an A.) For example, in my current Contemporary WIP, I have Major and Meredith. In the same novel, I have Maggie, who is a carry-over from another novel. I also originally had Major’s ex-girlfriend’s name starting with an M. Meredith’s mother’s name is Mairee. But as a reader, I know that having too many characters whose names all start with the same letter can be confusing, especially when they’re around the same length. When we read, we do not technically see every letter—we recognize cues, such as a capitalized first letter and length of the word. So, if you have a Jack, John, and Jake all as primary characters (whether POV or secondary) in your novel, you may want to consider changing two of them, just to give your reader’s eyes a break.
• Too Common/Too Unusual. You don’t want your reader to feel like you went with the first name you thought of—that it’s too common/too familiar to be memorable. Yet you don’t want the name to be so unusual (or so many syllables) that the reader stumbles over it—stopping to try to figure out how to pronounce it—every time they come across it on the page. Give your characters’ names different numbers of syllables: Maj-or. Mer-e-dith. Anne. Will-iam (two syllables to me, to others it might be Will-i-am). Jul-i-a. O-Har-a. Gui-dry. Wi-ther-ing-ton. Ran-some. Changing up the number of syllables keeps the names from falling into a monotonous pattern that will bore readers to death.
• Too Many Names Per Character. Most of us will have characters with a First name (”Christian” name) and a Last name (Surname). Some of these characters will have professions or civic/social positions that will add titles to their names (Captain, Sir, Lord, Mayor, Congresswoman). They also have family relationships (brother, sister, Mother, Father), and some will have marital status (wife, husband, Mrs.). Therefore, Admiral Sir Edward Witherington is: Admiral Witherington, Sir Edward, the admiral, Julia’s father, her father, and Papa. That’s six names for one character. If I were to suddenly give him a nickname halfway into the novel, the reader would have no idea to whom I’m referring. If your character is going to have a nickname or title in addition to their “normal” name (one that isn’t a natural shortening of a name, such as “Will” for “William”), you must introduce it almost immediately and you must make the decision of whether the character will use it for himself in his POV scenes, or if it’s just something his best friend calls him (only William’s best friend’s wife calls him Will, for example). I tried reading a book recently where the aristocratic male character is, in his own POV scenes, referred to by his first name, last name, title, nickname-derived-from-title, title+estate name, and so on. It was very offputting, because I had a hard time keeping up with who he was supposed to be within his own head. So if you start out using your character’s full first name in his or her first POV scene, stick with it. Or, if the character’s story-arc includes the character’s change in self image, you can slowly change from the full name to the new name, using that transition as a signpost that the character is changing how she thinks about/views herself internally.

How do I keep it all straight?
In addition to my character boards I keep in PowerPoint, where I collect as many images of the RWTs as I can find, I have started keeping a spreadsheet for each novel I work on (especially with at least two if not more projects going on at once) to keep track of both characters and settings. Keeping a written summary of the decisions you’ve made about your characters (and settings) becomes especially helpful if you’re someone who doesn’t write every day or when you come back to a first draft for the revision. That way, when your character has green eyes in chapter three and brown eyes in chapter sixteen, you can go to your “bible” to see which decision you made—and if it isn’t written down there, you can make the decision and change what needs to be changed in the draft.

So, how do you do it?
How do you name your characters? How do you keep it all straight?

Why did Pirates of the Caribbean become such a successful film franchise? Jack Sparrow—Captain Jack Sparrow, of course. If the story had just been about a down-on-his-luck pirate whose crew had mutinied against him and who was merely trying to get his ship back, it might not have been more than just a flash in the pan. What kept us going back to see it time and again and got us to buy the DVDs? It was Johnny Depp’s inspired performance of Captain Jack Sparrow and the mannerisms and quirks he gave to the character . . . the staggering, the always wondering “why is the rum gone?”, the flirting with Elizabeth, the way he got into other characters’ faces, his trademark facial expressions, the way he runs . . . shall I continue? Never in film history has there been another character like Jack Sparrow—Captain Jack Sparrow. That’s why we love him so much.

The level of quirkiness Johnny Depp brought to that character most likely would not translate well to the written page. It works fine in the movies because they are physical gags that we quickly interpret visually and understand. But if you tried to describe his facial expressions, it would take too many words and would slow the pace of the story too much. Our characters’ mannerisms and quirks will arise out of who they are—so as you go through the personalization process with them, be looking for things that can become something unique to help define your character for the reader.

This is yet another area where the character casting process comes into play for me—the more photos/movie clips I can find of my real world templates, the easier it is for me to develop physical mannerisms for my characters. Stefan (The Best Laid Plans) slouches constantly because he’s very tall (6′6″) and is self-conscious about it (found several images of the template, Goran Visnjic where he has one shoulder dropped or is kind of hunched over, and this became a defining mannerism for the character). Anne (HEI) is rarely seen not smiling, even when things aren’t going right. This is part of her self-defense mechanism. If she’s smiling, no one will know what she’s thinking inside. In every picture of the template for Anne, the model (Emme) is smiling. But it’s a practiced expression. It’s the eyes where her real emotion and thoughts lie . . . just waiting for George to figure them out!

Sometimes, characters have developed mannerisms out of necessity. William, for example, as a captain in the Royal Navy in the early 19th century, has had to learn to hide his emotions, to tamp down his anger, to swallow back his amusement. While it is helpful in maintaining order and discipline aboard ship, it will become a major problem in his relationship with Julia. In an environment of constant movement and activity, William, when in deep contemplation or listening to his officers give their reports, stands very still, hands clasped behind his back, face expressionless. Can you imagine being comfortable expressing your feelings to someone like that?

In the same novel, in contrast to William, his best friend’s wife is constantly in motion, constantly talking, shows her excitement by reaching out and grabbing someone by the wrist and bouncing up and down on her toes. This serves as a point of comparison as William falls in love with Julia—to see her calmness compared to their mutual friend, to see how she, like him, can control her emotions, can remain still, can be silent when the occasion calls for it.

Do all quirks and mannerisms come from deep internal processes? Some yes, some no. Sometimes we just pick up on little habits/quirks because someone else around us exposed us to them. In my early 20s, I became a huge fan of Star Trek because a coworker and friend got me hooked on it—I even attended several Trek conventions with her. Now, I cannot remember the last time I watched an episode (even though they’re in reruns on G4 and the SciFi channel all the time). It was a phase, something I enjoyed for a while, but not something that was a part of who I am. But my love for movies—including science fiction and fantasy—is a part of who I am. (In fact, I was watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King as I wrote this.) Another quirk: I write romance novels, but I can’t stand most “romantic” movies—if they’re comedies, they’re usually so silly as to be stupid, and if they’re dramas, they’re usually tearjerkers which annoy me.

In Law & Order: Criminal Intent, when the actress Kathryn Erbe was pregnant, they wrote it into the script and gave Bobby Goren (Vincent d’Onofrio) a substitute partner. In one episode, he’s sitting at a computer looking through someone’s files, with this substitute looking over his shoulder. She sighs and he starts to move, telling her that if she doesn’t like the speed at which he’s going, he’ll let her do it—Eames likes to drive so he lets her drive, if this new partner wants to scroll faster, he’ll let her do that. It served as a great insight into his character that the reason Eames is always shown driving is because she didn’t like the way he drove. Maybe it’s a control issue, or maybe he was just too slow or erratic behind the wheel and Eames didn’t feel safe, but these are the kinds of mannerisms that can pop up that can actually lead us back into the personalizing stage and give us greater understanding of our characters.

Of course, like Captain Jack Sparrow, some of our quirks are just quirks and are there for the enjoyment of the reader and the annoyance of the other characters (these work well in romantic comedies, especially).

What are some mannerisms your characters have that you aren’t sure where they come from? Have you personalized them (asked, “Why?” / “So what?”)? What are some fun quirks you have given or can give to your characters that will make them more unique, more realistic?

And you didn’t think I could get any more alliterative than I already was!

Now we’ve come up with our characters and we’ve spent time getting to know who they are. What’s next?

Creating conflict, of course. No matter what kind of story you’re writing, your characters will have both internal and external conflict. It is how your character copes with these conflicts—how they adapt, overcome, react, or not—that will reveal the most about your character.

One of the driving sources of character revelation in literature is through culture clash. In Stein on Writing (are you shocked it’s taken four posts to quote from Stein?), Sol Stein cites two prime literary examples of characters in culture clash: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (the novel on which the musical/movie My Fair Lady was based) and Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (later made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Vivian Leigh and Marlon Brando).

“Characters of different cultural classes caught in a crucible are, of course, ideal for fiction. The dramatic heat generated by cultural differences, inherited or nurtured, added to the differences of individual temperaments, can help writers create wonderful stories. These differences are a valuable resource for scenes as well as entire plots. It is the underlying basis of conflict in fiction.” (Stein, 75)

To simplify this example, where would our civilization be without the Cinderella fairy tale? It is nothing more than a story about the clash of culture and character—and the ultimate triumph of character over culture.

As humans, we are most comfortable around “our own kind.” This can be taken to extremes (the holocaust, slavery, ethnic cleansing), but it is something that is hard-wired into our psyches. When we are forced into situations (or choose to go into them) where we are the lone “one of our kind” amongst a vast array of “otherness,” this is when our true character comes to the forefront. It can be something as simple as starting a new job where everyone else is more experienced than I am, or as extreme as going to a foreign country where I do not speak the language and look physically different from everyone surrounding me. How I act/react in these situations are the truest test of my character.

“A culture consists of the behavior patterns, beliefs, traditions, institutions, taste, and other characteristics of a community passed from one generation to another.” (Stein, 75)

As much as we would all like to consider ourselves open-minded about other cultures, the truth of the matter is that each of us at a deep level will react in some way to someone else’s “otherness”—whether it is noticing the way they’re dressed, the difference in the shape of their eyes, an accent when they speak, or the way they hold their knife and fork when they eat. For the purpose of creating a plot, highlighting and having the characters react to these differences is more important than being politically correct and trying to gloss over cultural differences.

How do we identify these differences without splashing “WARNING: CULTURE CLASH AHEAD” signs in our writing? Stein calls them markers: “easily identified signals that to the majority of readers will reveal a character’s cultural and social background” (Stein, 77). What kind of clothes do your characters wear? Tailored business suits? Jeans with a collared shirt and jacket? Baggy denim shorts with a slogan-spashed T-shirt? What about shoes? Italian loafers or two-pairs-for-a-dollar rubber flip-flops from the bargain bin at Wal*Mart? Brand name apparel or clothes lovingly made at home? The latest style or something obviously from a decade or more before? There are, of course, exceptions to every rule (these types of markers can be used against type), but how you choose to show your character’s culture through physical aspects will give the reader subconscious clues about their cultural background. (For more on showing what characters look like, see Showing vs. Telling—Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and Showing vs. Telling—In the Eye of the Beholder.)

Here are a few markers I used for Anne in Happy Endings Inc.:

• dark green Chrysler Sebring convertible
• crossed her office to the gilt-framed mirror
• Anne hated shoes that didn’t stay on her foot of their own accord, but they were fashionable.
• her camel-colored leather planner
• Just about the only remnants of her personal life she hadn’t given up were an hour of swimming laps in the large swimming pool in the backyard . . .
• the article about her in Southern Bride back in January
• filled the apartment with the dulcet tones of crooners like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Kay Starr, and her favorite of all, Dean Martin

Go through your first couple of chapters and see what markers you’ve used that show your character’s cultural background—whether their social status, ethnicity, fashion sense, or tastes—and choose some of your favorites to share.

Now that we’ve defined where characters come from, it’s time to figure out how we get to know these characters. One of the worst things we can do in our writing is not develop our characters well. This comes either from a lack of knowledge of how to do it or not spending enough time getting to know the characters at a deeper level.

In Noah Lukeman’s writing craft book The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, the first THREE chapters of eight are about characterization. There are dozens of books on the market about characterization—to help with everything from naming them to giving them careers to describing what they look like. That’s in addition to general books about writing that contain chapters or entire sections on building believable characters.

“Begin with an individual and you will find that you have created a type;
begin with a type and you will find that you have created—nothing.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald

What Fitzgerald was saying is that if our characters do not stand out as unique individuals—if instead they fall into “types”—then our writing will be empty.

On a road trip more than twenty-five years ago, we took along a little questionnaire booklet called, “So, You Think You Know Your Parents?” Instead of just trying to answer all the questions ourselves, my sister and I used it as an opportunity to get to know our parents better. The beginning of it contains questions like:

When are your parents’ birthdays?
What cities and states were your parents born in?
Were they named for anyone?
Did they have childhood nicknames?
What was their favorite subject in school?
When they were children, what did they argue most about with their parents?
How did they meet?
Where did they go on their first date? (My parents went to see The Sound of Music for their first date. Is it any wonder I love that movie?)

And so on. Later in the booklet, the questions get a little more in depth:

If your parents found a wallet with $100 in it, would they try to find its owner or keep the money?
What one food do your parents absolutely refuse to eat?
Are they open to changing their minds after making a decision?
What was the happiest moment in each of their lives? The saddest? The funniest? The scariest? (My dad’s being sent to Vietnam, for both of them.) The most embarrassing? The most important?
What irritates them more than anything else?
What do they worry about more than anything else?
Do they always believe “honesty is the best policy”?
What would they say is their worst habit?
What part of the newspaper do they read first?
What do they think about when they daydream?

“When the characters are ready, the story will come out of me.”
~Jeff Shaara

There are as many different ways to go about learning who your characters are as there are writers. Many writers talk about “interviewing” their characters during the development process. Here are three examples I have run across:
Character Background Worksheets
Character Chart
Character Profile Worksheet

I have tried each of these over the years—and while they’re fun for characters who come to me, but whose stories I do not plan to write immediately, I don’t usually bother with them . . . I find that much of what’s on them isn’t relevant to my particular character or the story I’m developing.

The first thing I do when developing a character is cast him. I must know what the character looks like before I can start writing about him. This is true of major and secondary characters.  Once I have the image, I can start writing down the basics: age, height, hair/eye color, physical characteristics.

Then, the real work begins. I start by writing the character’s entire backstory: their family background, where they grew up, what they were like as a child/teen/young adult, where they went to school, what their interests were, and so on. For example (from Happy Endings Inc.):

Anne Hawthorne

·        Born and raised in Bonneterre, Louisiana.

·        Her parents were world-renowned magazine photographers who traveled extensively and left her with her grandparents or her mother’s brothers or sister. Anne begged her parents to take her along, but they went places with unstable governments, diseases, etc., that they didn’t want to expose her to. This left Anne with the subconscious feeling of being unloved and that she had to work to earn her parents’ love.

·        For the first years of her life, she spent a net total of about six months a year with her parents.

·        When she was eight years old, they surprised her with a trip with them to Washington, D.C. for the 4th of July. The commuter plane they were on to get from Bonneterre to New Orleans crashed.  Only Anne and one other person out of 25 survived.

·        For a year, while she recovered from her burns and injuries, Anne lived with her grandparents, at their rural home outside of the city. Her grandmother, a retired teacher, tutored her, and when Anne was tested to determine what grade she should go back in, she was able to skip ahead a grade.

·        Because her grandparents lived so far out of town, Maggie, Anne’s mother’s only sister, and her husband offered for Anne to come live with them. While Anne loved her aunt and uncle and their four sons, she never allowed herself to become completely attached to them, not knowing when or if they might get tired of her and send her to live with someone else. After all, when her parents would leave her behind when they traveled, she would get bumped from home to home until they came back.

·        The scars from her burns ran up the left side of her neck and onto her cheek. The teasing from the other children in school made her turn inward and become very isolated. Her cousins tried to protect her, but the other kids knew better than to do it around them and Anne didn’t talk about it. She also got teased about reaching her full height of 5’11” by age 13 and being larger-sized than was considered popular.

This is just the beginning of three pages that explain who Anne is and what her psychological makeup is.

“Our adaptation of personalizing focuses not on hair color and body type, but on the discovery of a character’s inner values, which give rise to the unique traits and mannerisms that will become an integral part of the story.”
~Brandilyn Collins
(Getting into Character)

Does your character feel like a real, unique person to you? Do you feel like you know enough about him or her as a person that you’d be able to answer any of the questions I listed above? Have you interviewed your character and yet feel he or she is holding something back from you? Have you delved deeply enough into the backstory to truly know where the character is coming from? What techniques/books/questionnaires do you use to get to know your characters?

Those of you who have children are probably familiar with this question: “Mommy/Daddy, where do babies come from?”

The age of the child asking the question probably determined how you answered this question—whether you told them about the stork or about the “birds and the bees” in full disclosure mode.

Answering the question, “Where do characters come from?” is very much like answering the baby question. There’s the stork-like answer we give to non-writing friends and then there’s the full disclosure we discuss amongst fellow writers. There are no storks here (well, maybe just one).

There are usually two methods of developing characters in fiction:

(1) We have a great idea for a story—we know the plot, can visualize the action scenes, hear snippets of dialogue—and we come up with characters that will make the story happen.

(2) We have a character come to us (the stork brings him!)—we know what he looks like, sounds like, thinks, feels, does, etc.—but we have to figure out a story that will make his existence interesting to others.

In most writing circles, the first type of story is typically called “plot driven” and the second “character driven.” A plot-driven story is something like The DaVinci Code—where the action takes precedence over character development. Conversely, someone like Nicholas Sparks’s novels are mainly character driven. It’s about the emotions, about the relationships—it’s the character arc that is the most important part of the story, not the action.

I have heard recently from a mentor at the grad school where I’m an alumna that we should be cautious in labeling our stories “character driven,” because many editors and agents interpret that as “it has no plot.”

This is not to say that you cannot come up with the character and the plot at the same time—many times, what seems to be a fully developed character will come to us with plot in hand: 1+2=novel. But even in those instances, once we start writing, we discover we didn’t know as much about this character as we thought we did. And then other characters start walking onto the stage and throwing their own ideas, their own conflicts into the mix—and things can go haywire pretty quickly . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Where do my characters come from?

Most of the characters I have written have been inspired by real people (me and my friends from college who became the fictional characters I wrote about for nearly ten years and more than 200,000 words), by people I’ve seen on TV (such as the idea I came up with for a story involving a former 80s boy-band member and an opera diva forced to work together on the spring musical at the community theatre in the small city they now live in), by actors (such as George in Stand-In Groom, who was inspired by the British actor Peter Wingfield), or by other fictional characters (usually because of the way they’re brought to life by certain actors, such as my heroine’s father in Ransome’s Honor, Admiral Witherington, who was inspired by Sir Robert Lindsay’s portrayal of Captain/Commodore/Admiral Pellew in the A&E Hornblower movies).

I wrote about the process of CHARACTER CASTING in the series “Be Your Own Casting Director,” which can be found on the FICTION WRITING SERIES page under “Storyboarding/Be Your Own Casting Director.”

I do tend to be a character-driven writer—in other words, I get inspired by characters first, story second. The story usually develops out of the characters I come up with, and each character—major or secondary—comes to me with their own story of who they are. I’ve written before about my fictional city, Bonneterre, Louisiana, that I’ve been using as a setting for more than fifteen years. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that I have a spreadsheet that contains more than five hundred “characters” who live in this city. They are named, grouped by family, and the majority of them have an occupation to define who they are. Ninety-five percent of them will never show up in anything I write. But when I do need a real estate agent or a nurse or a welder, all I have to do is go to this database (created over the span of many years), and the character is already there, set up, ready to walk on stage. With the exception of the characters from my first two complete novels, the main characters of my subsequent novels have all been developed outside of this “population database”—in other words, the database has become a repository for background characters, or extras, to use a filmmaking term.

In moving my setting to 1814 Portsmouth, England, I’ve had to create all of the characters from scratch . . . well, mostly. Many of them have been inspired by other works set during the era, though I’ve made them into my own creation. But what gave me the idea in the first place? Paul McGann as Lt. William Bush in the Hornblower movies, of course. I fell into a deep infatuation with this actor/character, which led me to the book, where the character of Lt. Bush is even more dead-set against Horatio’s marrying Maria, as he feels women are simply a distraction. So this started me thinking: what kind of woman would it take to make a man with this kind of attitude fall in love with her? I went through several different ideas until I finally came upon my heroine: the independent, “old maid” (twenty-nine-year-old) daughter of the hero’s admiral/patron—the man William most highly respects in the world. The catch—she can’t stand to even hear William’s name mentioned, because she feels he took her twin brother’s place in her father’s heart after her brother was lost at sea fifteen years before. So in fact, the Ransome trilogy was conceived/birthed because of the idea for one character. One character has spawned thirty or forty others (though I did completely cut three characters last night)—and an entire history of three families: the Witheringtons, the Ransomes, and the Pembrokes.

Where does the inspiration for your characters come from? Give an example, either of your favorite character or of the most unusual place you’ve ever gotten inspiration for a character.

As promised, let’s do some brainstorming with some “random” images (random only in the fact that I’m hoping you’ve never seen them before).

What does this image make you feel? Who is this person? What year is it? What is she thinking? What emotion is portrayed in this image? Where is she? What is the weather like?

What is going on in this image? Who are these two men? Where are they? What is their relationship to each other? Now, imagine these two are characters in your story. What’s the setting? What is going on between them? What is being said as this “snapshot” was taken? What will happen immediately after this? Is one the good guy and one the bad guy? How will what’s happening in this moment influence the rest of the story?

What has just been said to her? What is she in the middle of saying? What emotion is she feeling? Where is she? What kind of person is she? What’s going to happen next?

Who is he? What is he in the middle of? What is he thinking about? What’s about to happen? Where is he? What kind of family does he have? Is he married? Does he have children? If so, what kind of relationship does he have with them?

I would love to know what you come up with!

Hopefully by answering some or all of those questions by looking at images of “random” RWTs, once you cast your characters, you will be able to find and use images of them to help you build your characters and brainstorm ideas for your story.

If you have any questions or additional information you’d like me to discuss on this subject, please leave me a comment!

(There are lots of links in this segment. You may want to right-click on them and choose to open them in a new window so you don’t have to keep navigating back to this page.)

Once you have cast your characters and begun the process of collecting images, you may find yourself thinking of scenes inspired by the images you see. Just like there are two ways to cast characters (see BYOCD: Introduction), I employ two methods of collecting images—those that seem to fit with the actions or emotions of scenes I’ve already written, and those that generate ideas for potential scenes.

A few weeks ago, when I was blocked with my writing but wanted to spend time in that world and with those characters, I started creating chapter-by-chapter storyboards, utilizing images of characters and settings to give a snapshot of each major scene in the chapter. With minor secondary characters, I stuck with their primary “headshot” image. For Julia, William, Sir Edward, Lady Witherington, and—to a lesser extent—Susan and Collin, I sought out images (or screen captured them from DVD) that conveyed the major driving emotion of the scene. Here is the post where I linked to the first three chapters’ storyboards with a brief synopsis of the chapter. (Side benefit to this exercise: a skeleton chapter-by-chapter synopsis ready to be filled in with a little more detail should an editor request it!)

Brainstorming with RWTs
It isn’t just after the fact that I put my RWTs to work for me. When I first started brainstorming this story and collecting images of Paul McGann for William, I came across two expressions that I screen capped. They became the inspiration for the first scene of the novel where William is introduced, simply from the subtle shift in his expression from one image to the other. By examining the RWT’s facial expression, I began wondering what William would be thinking if he wore that expression. Click here to see the images and read the results.

(This is really much easier to do in a classroom environment, but hopefully you’ll stick with me!)

Let’s look at some images I haven’t used but that have given me ideas and possibilities of emotion or action I can use.

Next time . . . a guided brainstorming session using RWTs.

(There are lots of links in this segment. You may want to right-click on them and choose to open them in a new window so you don’t have to keep navigating back to this page.)I realized that in the last post, I didn’t really explain my process of finding images of RWTs. So let me do that before I get into the storyboarding process. The best example I can give is by illustrating the process for the hero of my current WIP, the Ransome’s Quest trilogy.

The inspiration for this historical romance involving a Royal Navy captain and the spinster daughter of his admiral came through an actor in a secondary role in the A&E movies based on the Horatio Hornblower novels. While watching these movies, I became enamored with the somewhat stiff and stodgy—but loyal and good-hearted—Lt. William Bush, portrayed by an actor with the most amazing light-blue eyes I have ever seen. (I’m an eye-girl, what can I say?) After seeing the movies the first time, I knew I wanted to add several of the actors to my casting book. (Upon multiple viewings, I started focusing on Lt. Bush as inspiration for my Captain Ransome.)

So, I went to http://www.imdb.com/ and did a keyword search for Hornblower Mutiny. And I started adding names to the database and images to the image files.

So, how did I find all of the personal info on the RWTs? When I clicked on the link for the movie title I wanted, it gives the cast list. Each name is linked to the page about the actor. So, I clicked on Paul McGann. I see where he was born in 1959 in England. When I click on show more, I see that he is 5’8” tall. Okay, so he’s actually quite a bit older and a little shorter in real life than my character, but that’s okay. It’s not like I’m casting a movie, after all! When I go back to his main page, I see there are no photos of him available through IMDb. But that’s okay, because copying images from IMDb isn’t as easy as other methods.

Because I want as many images of him as I can find, I do a Google Image Search for Paul McGann. When I see one I think I want, I click on it and it takes me to a page where the image has been isolated. By clicking on the image in the top frame, it brings up the image alone. In Internet Explorer, I can right click on the image and copy it to then paste into the image file in PowerPoint. If I’m in Netscape I can either try to highlight the image by clicking and dragging the mouse over it, then right-click/copy or I can just right-click and save the image to my computer to later insert into PowerPoint. Now, if you aren’t going to keep your casting book electronically, you could just go ahead and print it at this point; but even for hard copies, I recommend the copy/paste into PPT method, as you can put multiple images onto one page and save paper.

Once I start developing a character, I like to have as many images as possible for study, so I start a new PPT document in my electronic file for the project entitled Characters. This becomes my repository for all of the RWTs I use in my novel—and I cast everyone! I also keep a cast listing file for quick reference, especially when I can’t remember a minor character’s name or physical description.

Where do I find my images? Google, obviously. On IMDb.com, when there are images available, it doesn’t allow the right-click/copy feature. But there is a way to capture the entire screen. On most PC keyboards, there is a key, usually at the top right, labeled PRINT SCREEN. Hit it and you’ve captured an image of what’s currently on your screen (so make sure the image is centered!). Now, you can paste it into PowerPoint. On the Drawing or Picture toolbar (Picture toolbar should pop up when you single click on the image), you can click on the Crop button and trim the image down to just what you want.

Other than online images, because 99% of the templates I use are actors/actresses, I get my hands on as many movies/DVDs of TV shows the template has been in. The DVD player on my computer lets me pause and capture the screen (unfortunately PRINT SCREEN does not work for DVDs) and save static images of the RTW. But I also like to watch them in action. I study how they walk, sit, stand, their facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. By watching an RWT in multiple roles/settings, I start picking up on the real person’s real mannerisms. Think about it—when you watch a Tom Hanks movie, you automatically know what his character is thinking/feeling with the briefest glance at Tom’s face. How? You’ve seen him in so many different roles, but deep down, he’s still Tom Hanks with a finite number of facial expressions and emotions. Once you can recognize those in your RWTs, you’ll have an easier time showing your character’s emotions through his actions, facial expressions, and body language . . . which is a lesson for another day!

Before we get into using these images to help you in developing your characters, you need to know where to find them! As of today, I have almost 950 Real World Templates in my casting book. This has been a 20 year project, so I do have a little bit of a head start.

Always be on the lookout for images of people who strike a creative nerve inside you.

• Go online to clothing sellers such as Land’s End, LL Bean, J Crew, Eddie Bauer, etc., and request to receive their mailed-out catalogs.
• Buy magazines such as People or other publications that focus more on photos of people and less on articles. (Entertainment- and fashion-focused mags work best.)
• Watch for actors in movies – especially those in secondary roles – and find out their names by watching the credits or looking the movie up on IMDb.com (Internet Movie Database). Then do a Google Image Search for the actor/actress.
• You can also use real people, and in this day and age of camera phones it’s easier to capture an image of someone you happen to see who strikes that creative nerve, but just make sure that you aren’t describing someone whose features are so unique they’ll be able to pick themselves out.

There are two decisions you now need to make: how you want to store and organize your Casting Book.

For storage, you can:

• paste/tape photos, pictures, images you print from the computer onto notebook paper and keep them in a 3-ring binder.
• cut/print them out and store them in file folders.
• store digital images (scanned or downloaded) electronically on your computer.
• or choose the storage system that works best for you and is easily accessible and updatable.

For organization, you can:

• sort images by feature: ethnicity, age, hair color, eye color, or whatever feature you tend to look for when you’re casting your character.
• store images alphabetically by the real world name of your Real World Template. This is the system I use. If it’s a model I cannot find a name of, I use the name of the catalog or magazine where I found them as their last name.
• or, again, choose a system that works for you.
  

I believe I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I am 50/50 right-left brained, so this is where my left-brain organization comes in handy. Because I’m extremely weird, I like to know a lot of information about the real world templates I use, including their ethnicity, real age, and height, all of which can usually be found on IMDb. I include hair/eye color for when I’m looking for something specific, and where I first noticed the person so I can call to mind a mental image of the person without having to look him/her up. I keep all of this information in an Excel spreadsheet for two main reasons: I happen to like Excel, and Excel gives me the ability to sort by the criteria in each column, allowing me to narrow down my casting process without having to search through all 950 names.

Because I love my blog readers so much, I’m going to put you 20 years ahead of the game by sharing my casting book. In this version, they’re sorted in alphabetical order. But if you’re familiar with Excel, you can see I have it set up with auto filters—which means I can easily narrow it down to a certain year born, certain height, certain ethnicity, or even certain eye color. Granted, Real World Templates are for REFERENCE ONLY, but because I am so visually oriented, it’s hard for me to use a template who doesn’t share most of his major physical traits with my character.

Now, I also keep electronic files of images of my RWTs—in PowerPoint. Again, for two main reasons: PowerPoint is my favorite program, and PowerPoint gives me an easy way to store, move, organize, and view my images. Here is a screen capture of the Mac-Mc.ppt file from my casting “book.”

Here is a close-up of the first page (of several) of the RWT for my character William Ransome, Paul McGann. Because this is just a working file, I don’t worry if the pictures overlap one another. When I’m ready to use them, I can move them around and pick out the ones I really want to use. The DVD player on my computer came with a software program (Power DVD) that allows me to do screen captures, which is where several of these images came from. This is great especially if you’re like me and you’re drawn to secondary characters who might not be well known.

Okay, great. Paul McGann is in my casting book. But let’s take it a step further. Do you use a physical storyboard when you write? Pictures of houses, floor plans, etc? Next time, I’ll show how I use my casting book to create files and storyboards for my novels.