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Most of my characters are real people I've known well enough to put down on paper accurately. I change their names changed to protect the guilty, but not much else about them. That's casting.
I was reading the pantsing versus outlining thread and thinking about my own technique, and I realized that one thing I do whether I'm pantsing or outlining is that I cast my major roles.
There's a folder with all my word files, strictly pictures of actors and actresses that I've picked out to represent characters in my mind. Everyone from famous Oscar winners to people from stock photos or hair-style websites. (I tend to stay away from really evocative performers, like, say, Robert Downey Jr, who bring their own personalities with them.) It simply helps that person stay vivid in my head.
Do other people do this? Would you consider it a cheat? The thing I like most about it is that you can describe that specific person if you want, in immense physical detail, and your readers would still rarely actually picture the actor you're describing. Unless they cast books as they read them, which is probably a thing.
I think that's really smart. Once I cast a whole novel with a-list celebs and deeply regretted it later on It was like writing fan fiction about celebrities, just with different names.
Thinking about it, I don't cast my characters so much, but I do hunt around for photographs of locations. So, frex, I have a photo of a house that belongs to two particular characters.
As for picking key players for a book-to-movie, I tend to think more in terms of directors than actors. Right now I'm thinking Guillermo del Toro....
As for picking key players for a book-to-movie, I tend to think more in terms of directors than actors. Right now I'm thinking Guillermo del Toro....
Other people certainly do, but I don't. I don't pay much attention to the physical descriptions of characters, which is probably not a good thing. :/
Be careful what you say and do around me, or you could be "cast" into my novel....