Visualizing your characters

[PennameWombat]

My idea book is full of amateur pictures. They are more like real people than actors and porn stars.

This is closer to where I am. A few of the physical characteristics of various characters are loosely based on people, mainly women, I've known or encountered. But generally that simply takes very little from them, e.g., "tall (5 feet 8 inches) with wavy black hair." And the rest, including personalities and behaviors, is invented to the needs of the character and story.

I have after the fact of writing my stories come across photos, usually casual and rarely of porn stars or celebrities, that strike me as matching to my characters and I collect those. But it's always AFTER. But it helps me in doing future stories, did what I invent truly fit with someone I can see.

And that's as much about clothing choices as it is about their actual physical looks. Such as this picture for my character Mel (short for Melanie, which she hates.) I cam across it over a year after my first "Mel's Universe" story and it's not an exact physical match for the way I envisioned my character, but it's close and Mel DOES dress just like this in a public park. Especially including the ankle socks!

 

[KeithD]

Some of my characters are based on still photos or videos seen, but not all that many, and extremely few are based on real people. I probably deal mostly in stereotypes. I think readers visualize in stereotypes as well--ones of their choosing, so I don't try to counter that unless the plotline requires it.

 

[Dubinsky]

I haven't written much here, but my mind's always full of images. Lots of images. Prolly too many images.

They inspire plots all the time, and I'm starting to get better at writing some of them down.

 

[gunhilltrain]

This may be one I have to find ... or create a character for.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/18/8c/da188c6cb87379f81846754c03837253.jpg

I like the way her garter strap is showing. Women who do that: it sort of goes beyond flirty into seduction territory.

I have long-standing stories or series where I've never pinned down a character's looks. One I have visualized is Marilyn Jannsen, the history professor who seduces a student in "Season's Greetings." She also appears as a voice on the telephone near the end of "Shelley's Revenge."

http://galleries.allover30.com/mature/LexaMayfair/yHiMme/lex003005007619003.jpg

She can get the hot librarian look going if she wants to:

http://galleries.allover30.com/mature/LexaMayfair/yHiMme/lex003005007619007.jpg

 

[nkdoldman]

Agree!

My idea book is full of amateur pictures. They are more like real people than actors and porn stars.

I have quite a large selection of video clips from nude beaches. All unstaged and all amateur and most of the voyeur type that I downloaded from the Newsnet News groups.

In any case, the advantage of my using them to visualize characters is that they are all of different ages, body 'styles', and genders (female and male...after all, they ARE on a nudist beach).

 

[TadOverdon]

https://i.imgur.com/8Ta79V3.png

 

[jaF0]

Purdy!!





(But not Claire. That magic rarely happens.)

 

[BuckyDuckman]

I'm late the party, but I'll add what I do.

I've worked with co-authors who needed a pic of someone. It helped clarify the writing in that instance. Otherwise, I tend to be rather loose with my descriptions. Hopefully, I use enough to ground them in reality, but that's about it. Oh, and a couple distinctive traits to help tell who is who without using their names:

"The darker haired girl lifted the hem of her skirt. . ."

As long as you know one is blonde and one is brunette, you know who's doing what.

With all that said, an individual picture can inspire a character or a complete story because of the story the picture tells me. It's often dangerous to look up more pics of the same person because it might interfere with the story idea the original picture told me.

For example, there was a fun pic of a blonde that inspired a lesbian themed story. Later, I stumbled on more pics of her and I couldn't find any lesbian stuff. So, is she bi or not? Dunno, but in MY story, she's VERY bi!

 

[SexyShel]

As all my stories are based on real events in my life then it's easy for me to know what the people involved looked like. I just change the names a little bit.

I don't have the writing ability to describe them in glorious detail unfortunately. I just try and do an outline of their body size and shape.

If only Lit would allow real pictures to be published as most of my swinging events did have photos taken. You could have seen me and the others involved in all our glory (sometimes not a pretty sight)!

 

[TadOverdon]

Purdy!!
(But not Claire. That magic rarely happens.)

Ah, so in answer to a question you raised elsewhere, the artist says they use imagery of well-known people only for the figure pose, with the single exception of "Claire." A picture of an older European actress was one of four or five pictures used to "collage" her, and I promised not to post the name.

 

[Trionyx]

It seems so artificial to give a paragraph or two going into minute detail about how a character looks. I usually prefer rather vague descriptions so that the readers’ minds can fill in the details.

 

[TadOverdon]

Two observations that were passed on to me long ago by a professional fiction editor of some decades experience:

• However you describe characters, readers will assign them the faces of people they know either personally or from television;
• The book you spend a year or three revising and rewriting and agonizing over every word of will be consumed by most of your readers at skimming speed within a couple of hours and then put aside forever.

 

[jaF0]

• However you describe characters, readers will assign them the faces of people they know either personally or from television;

Which is exactly why I don't go into much detail.

 

[TadOverdon]

To state the obvious: a major reason for physically describing characters in porn, of course, is because doing so arouses so many readers.

Personally...the way people dress and wear their hair, make-up and so on interests me and often contributes a little to characterization. Self-presentation has a large effect on the way people first respond to one another.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Before I start a story with new characters, I like to write short bios for them so the actions of my characters are consistent, especially if I decide to use them in future stories. It's important to know, for example, if the character is left-handed or not, since describing actions performed by the character are influenced by that kind of information. Education level can determine their speaking patterns and the words used by the character while talking. Since I write first-person stories, I have to become the character in order to write the story. Information about physical appearance - height, hair/eye/skin color, DOB, birthmarks, etc. - are important to have in hand so the characters are believable.

 

[TadOverdon]

Aural visualization, which is a contradictory phrase: prepping The Mom Next Door for posting here in a few days, I noticed again that I hear one character's exact voice clearly in my head when writing or reading her, and always have. It's as clear as if she were speaking aloud to me, and is the only instance of this I've ever experienced when writing. I know whose voice it is; it belongs to a casual friend I knew from the local town council about fifteen years ago. How it came to be "Sharon's," I have no clue. But it always has been.

 

[JanusGoneAwry]

...I hear one character's exact voice clearly in my head when writing or reading her, and always have. It's as clear as if she were speaking aloud to me...

I experience this frequently. At least as frequently as I see my characters in my mind's eye. It is extremely helpful when writing dialog since as TadOverdone has already said it's like the characters are speaking to me. I'm also one of those writers who tends to fall into a scene and live it so to speak.

 

[yowser]

I'm also one of those writers who tends to fall into a scene and live it so to speak.

Well, that certainly has to be exciting.

 

[LanaBehave]

I know there have been a few past threads on this and I've always said I never got that vested, often not even naming them.

But I was recently smacked in the face and knocked nearly unconscious by a certain image and it got me started hunting for images to help me with mine. Some of them are being gleaned from the picture threads in F&S, the PG and GB, but also doing outside searches.

Some alteration of Veronica Avluv can be a starting base for a main character, but taller and a few years older than what I've seen so far.

With fiction generally, isn't there a school of thought that suggests a few clever hints about the character's personality, and some physical generalities, to then let the reader fulfill their own part of the author/reader contract, making the visual and physical details of the character fit their own preferences?

I think this would be especially powerful in erotica, where readers tend to look for traits, both physical as well as psychological, that resonate with their....unique desires.

In my stories, I've tried to give impressions, rather than detailed descriptions, at least as far as the actual physiques of the interacting characters are concerned.

 

[TadOverdon]

https://i.imgur.com/pPpEmlZ.png

 

[NotWise]

With fiction generally, isn't there a school of thought that suggests a few clever hints about the character's personality, and some physical generalities, to then let the reader fulfill their own part of the author/reader contract, making the visual and physical details of the character fit their own preferences?

I think this would be especially powerful in erotica, where readers tend to look for traits, both physical as well as psychological, that resonate with their....unique desires.

In my stories, I've tried to give impressions, rather than detailed descriptions, at least as far as the actual physiques of the interacting characters are concerned.

Your mileage may vary.

That's what I was taught in a course focused on short stories. Most novels provide more opportunities to describe the character.

One downside to not describing a character up front is that if you do slip a bit of description into the story later -- she's brunette, he has rough hands, she has small breasts, he's missing a tooth -- then it may clash with the impressions you let your readers build.

And sometimes you want to give a detailed description, even in a shorter work. The main female character in my most popular story is a ballet dancer. I gave a lot of details of how the main male character saw her and reacted to her when they met. A reader commented that he pictured her as Darcy Bussell. That was great for me, because a young Darcy Bussell (from The Prince of the Pagodas) was one of the images I had in mind when I described her.

 

[TadOverdon]

Here's a tangent: what's the worst piece of physical description you've written?

I just pose it because I ran across something really bad in an early draft of the story I'm posting on lit right now:

She looked like a middle-aged Tinkerbell with bolt-ons.

 

[jaF0]

I'm not sure if I prefer post 83 or 97.

 

[NotWise]

Here's a tangent: what's the worst piece of physical description you've written?

I just pose it because I ran across something really bad in an early draft of the story I'm posting on lit right now:

You know that description will rev somebody's motor. I might have been able to use that for my "Pixie" character, but nah.

Some of the impression that imparts depends on what you envision as "middle aged." It means different things to different people.

 

[TadOverdon]

You know that description will rev somebody's motor. I might have been able to use that for my "Pixie" character, but nah.

Some of the impression that imparts depends on what you envision as "middle aged." It means different things to different people.

Yeah...it's not super-bad out of context, it just was completely wrong for what I was doing. It's a flippant, phony hard-boiled-sounding sentence that looked superficially clever to me when I typed it but didn't really describe the character. She was a blonde woman in her late thirties who wore her hair in a pixie cut and had big boobs, but they weren't supposed to be artificial.