Character Development
I started on a new novel last week. I had said I wouldn’t start working on this one until after I’d finished editing my nonfiction book (which is coming along nicely), but the story crystallized for me on Wednesday morning and by Friday I just couldn’t help myself.
Photo by paveita, via Flickr
I’m going to try to write regularly about my process as I work on this novel, sharing what I’m doing, learning, and experimenting with over the next few weeks as I hammer out a first draft and then later when I start revising. So this week I’m going to talk about character development, one of my absolute favorite parts of writing fiction.
One of the first things I do before I start writing a new novel is to cast my characters. Sometimes I know instantly who my leading man would be, who my main character should be, or who some of my secondary characters would be played by. Other times I spend hours pouring over celebrity photo sites looking for the right face. That’s right—I use actors and actresses, not just random photos I’ve found online or in magazines.
There are a couple of different reasons for this. The most important one to me is that it makes it easier to hear their voices in my head, to see the way they move, the way they talk, their facial expressions if I’ve actually seen them in movies. This makes it much easier to write believable dialogue and believable characters in general.
For my current novel, I’ve basically got four main characters. There’s Cass, who in my head is Kate Winslet; there’s Dave, Cass’ husband, who bears a striking resemblance to Matthew Fox; Tessa, who, in a perfect world, would be played by Charlize Theron (though a bit older); and Grady—the leading man in this particular work—Hugh Jackman in my mind (this might have something to do with recently watching both Australia and the new Wolverine movie). In addition to casting like this, I’ll save a handful of images of each actor or actress in a “characters” folder within the folder for my novel. The only thing I won’t do when working on a novel like this is watch any movies these actors appear in that are at all similar to my current work-in-progress. It’s too easy to end up making the character exactly like an existing character without even realizing it.
One of the other primary bits of character development I do is to fill out a Proust Questionnaire for each character. I’m partial to Vanity Fair‘s version, though I’ll sometimes add in questions from the Inside the Actors Studio version, too, which was modeled on Proust’s questions. Proust’s original questionnaire is helpful, too.
I keep the questionnaires in a Google doc, along with my outline and research. But more on outlines in my next post in this series.
Feel free to share your own character development tips in the comments below.
