Being the Casting Director
Posted by Laura Drewry on 05 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: Chit Chat, Writing Life, Books
Casting Director
I don’t plot, I don’t plan, and just thinking the word “synopsis” is enough to give me hives. But one thing I do need to know before I start writing is what my characters look like. So with my Casting Director’s hat securely in place, I start thumbing through my resources.
Glossy entertainment magazines are a bounty for writers, like me, who need visuals. The articles in these publications are useless to me because, frankly, I couldn’t care less where Angelina Jolie sends her kid to school, nor do I care what Spice Girl Beckham is wearing today. Good Lord, I can barely keep up with things in my own life, never mind the lives of perfect strangers. Anyway, I buy these publications because I want the pictures. Big, glossy, beautiful pictures.
Page by page, I go through them, and cut out as many faces as I can. Most of the time, they’re faces of beautiful people (both male and female), but I’m also looking for interesting faces, homely faces, and those faces that show specific expressions or personalities. While I can’t deny I often want my heroes and heroines to be attractive, it’s more than that. It’s a “look”; a frown, a smirk, or any one of a million other expressions that helps define who my characters are. If that look happens to be attached to Johnny Depp’s face, more the better. J
I keep all the faces pinned to a huge bulletin board in my “office”. When I start a new book, I study that board to see if the perfect face or look is there. It’s not just the main characters I’m looking for, but secondary characters, too. If there are animals in the story - I find those, too. If I’m lucky enough to find the perfect look, I pull it down and pin it to my work space. If it’s not there, I drop another small fortune on glossies and keep hunting until I find the perfect face. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes. . . .OY!!
Simple or not, when I find the perfect look to go with my character, it’s like I can make anything work. Of course, I’d still like all those looks to be attached to Johnny Depp’s face, but I can’t have everything, can I?
It’s interesting isn’t it? I have no idea how my characters look and I leave description to a minimum in my books-probably too much
I rarely ever see a picture of how I imagined the person either!
November 5th, 2007 at 3:08 pmThat’s too funny. I like the image you presented and I like that idea. In a story I was writing a while back I cut out a few pictures as well. I knew what the hero looked like because he was patterned after someone I know but I went looking for clothes he might wear and ended up on my “hero” page with only a pants shot, which someone who saw it called the crotch shot. That wasn’t what I was going for…honest.
November 6th, 2007 at 12:13 pmThe crotch shot - that’s hilarious!
I don’t normally use the whole face of the photos I cut out. Most of the time, it’s something specific about it - the eyes, the hair or the way the person is smiling (or not). I even had a copy of a few mugshots posted on my board for a while, but they’re too creepy, so I’ve stuffed them in a binder instead. I have them if I need them, but I don’t have to look at them all the time. And, more importantly, I don’t have to feel like *they’re* looking at me.
Laura
November 6th, 2007 at 2:48 pm