Inspiration Boards for Characters

You know what color your character's eyes are. You know (and probably envy) her hair. You know whether she's tall or short. You know her body type. But do you know what she really looks like? Do you know what face she makes when she's royally brassed off? The shape of her nose? The line of her jaw? Do you know how she carries her hands? Do you know what clothing/accessories she would but if she was in a store?

Painting a complete picture of your characters not only helps you get to know them better, but it's also ridiculously fun. (Especially when you're a mom with three jobs and you're painting a picture of your protagonist's chiseled love interest... but I digress.) It's also really easy.

The old fashioned way: grab a few magazines and cut out any and every thing that makes you think your characters: clothing, colors, faces, bodies, personalities, accessories, locations, etc. Separate them into piles per-character and then glue/tape them to an "inspiration" poster board. Write notes on your board as they pop into your head: catch phrases your character might use, bits of dialogue, memories, plot ideas, whatever strikes your fancy. Write it ALL down. You never know what little gem may tumble from your brain as you cut away like an 8 year old in art class.

The www. way: Pintrest. It's amazing, addictive, and a mess-free way to create inspiration boards for your characters. With a couple of clicks, you can pick an image and put in on a board for your character, and then keep on perusing. I usually run out of time before I run out of attention for Pintrest. I have even started inspiration boards for a couple of my main settings as well. Warning: I'm a homebody, and the pictures on pintrest of amazing sights all over this world have made me want to travel. Bad. (site url: http://www.pintrest.com)

An added bonus to creating online inspiration boards: your fans and potential readers can see exactly what was going on in your brain when you crafted your character/setting. And any link between a reader and a character only serves to strengthen the bond between them. For those of us penning a series, this is particularly helpful. I want my readers to KNOW my characters. I want them to have feelings for them: love, hate, fury, etc. And it's a lot easier to feel those things if you have a high-resolution picture in your head.

Just for fun, I'll post a few pictures from the inspiration boards for my main characters here. I think the old adage: a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. How many words will your inspiration boards create in you?

Tanzy Hightower

 Vanessa Andrews

 

 Lucas

 

Asher

 

Here's a link to my pintrest page: http://www.pintrest.com/jadiejones1.  I've created inspiration boards for my main characters and a couple of settings. If anyone has any other websites or ideas on this topic feel free to post - and please include and blog/site address.

Tackling writer's block: how to turn a stop sign into a speed bump

Writer's block: invisible, silent, and about as unsympathetic as ants to a picnic. And just like those pesky ants, it marches away with your plot/dialogue/character and drops it down a hole too tiny for you to follow. It's easy to glare at your screen, to consider the blinking cursor a traitorous bully. But I've noticed that any writing I muster with my face twisted into a pretzel typically comes off just as snarky and sluggish as I feel.

This debut novel of mine took me three years to write - and in those three years, I've faced down a lot of dead ends. Some successfully, and some not so much. During a particularly long stand-off with myself, I went on the hunt for a proverbial jackhammer. I read (a lot) and I google-searched til my finger cramped from scrolling. I've provided a list below of a few exercises I found most effective, but the key word is: exercise. I had to take time out from moving forward with my plot and stretch new muscles in my creativity. It meant slowing down my pace, but if I was being perfectly honest with myself, I had to admit I was at a complete stand still. So slowing down was actually an improvement.

1. The empty picture frame: Can't figure out how to get out of a scene? In Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird," she describes an exercise she gives in classes that she teaches. She tells her students to find/make/buy an empty picture frame and to write these words inside: What do you see in here? Forget about the action that you can't force forward, and instead make notes about what you see - no detail too small to notice. Top to bottom, horizon to horizon. Paint the picture. Live in it. What do you smell? What do you hear? This helps me 99% of the time that I use it. My picture frame is green, by the way.

2. Who ARE you? When my dialogue starts to err on the side of a polite conversation in a church sanctuary, it takes my whole scene down with it. The ho-hum banter paves a path straight to somewhere fiery. Usually what's happened is that I've lost track of who my characters ARE. What are they all about? What makes them tick? In a separate file/notebook/etc, create a complete - and I mean crazy complete - description of the inner workings of your character. Ask yourself asinine questions about what he/she might do in every day situations: found a lost dog, made a cup of coffee, answered the door to religious zealots, found a fifty-dollar bill, got behind an extreme couponer in the 10-items-or-less checkout line. What would your character do? What would they say? Does their inner dialogue have a catch phrase? What word do they typically use to agree or disagree? Considering these questions seems like the long way around, I know. But knowing how they speak in every day circumstances will make their dialogue read in a way that feels meaningful and authentic to your reader without weighing down the whole page.

3. Plot stall: Your main characters are standing around staring at each other. Cocktail hour is over and the main course is still thirty minutes away. Awkward. Instead of sending your characters for another round of free drinks, try this: kill off your main character. Seriously. Copy the section/chapter/whatever and paste it into a new file. Then, write a quick story from the point where the engine fell out of your plot and kill off your protagonist. This exercise makes you look through the eyes of all of your other characters and consider their integrity (and their resourcefulness.) Or maybe your leading hero succumbs to an unknown food allergy or a moment of tragic clumsiness. Either way, I promise your original scene won't look the same upon return.

4. Back track: sometimes, I have to level with myself and embrace the fact that I HAVE written myself into a corner. Somewhere along the way, I chucked the spare tire to cut down on weight and now I've got a flat. Then I have to do what every writer dreads: search back to the last place the story was breathing on its own, and pull the plug on the rest. I'm a huge advocate for the delete button. To be fair - and honest - I always start a second document file where I paste the bigger pieces I've cut from my work-in-progress just in case I need them again. But I very rarely go back for them. Our stories are in our minds - not in our key strokes. A scene can always be recreated, even with some well-earned grumbling.

Please feel free to leave your own tips - or links to your own posts on the subject. Thank you for reading and happy writing!