Color Week #3: Character Color Tags

You may not know this about me, but I'm a green. As a kid I was a blue, then went all Goth-black during my high school poetry days, and then faded back to a blue again. I had a couple years when I bounced between being an orange and a plum, and a couple other duos, but about ten years ago I finally settled on being a green. A dark green -- pine, hunter, shadowed emerald, that end of the scale -- but definitely green.

Why? Well, it's not because I'm green with envy, or greedy for the cash variety of green, or even ready-to-puke green. Green has always been a color symbol of creation to me. As colors go it's fresh, cool, and soothing. It's always growing. That's what I want to be -- and to remind myself to be -- so I embraced being a green.

I assign color tags to characters in the same way. Most of the time I use character palettes, but I've assigned single color tags to many of my characters, too. Cherijo from the StarDoc books was always a silver from the minute she popped up on the page. For me character colors can change, too -- Alexandra from the Darkyn novels began as angry scarlet and changed to lavender when she became an immortal and got tangled up with Michael, who I'd tagged as a lovely sky blue (which was also the reason I chose that scent for her.) Some character colors are so strong in my head I doubt they will ever change (for reasons that will ruin some books I haven't yet written, Dredmore from the Disenchanted & Co. series will forever be a gray to me. Since that color is now associated with all things naughty it also annoys me immensely, but I can't change it.)

Using color association with your characters is another of those creative things you can do to enhance them. You don't have to use a single color, or resort to a huge palette, either. Make a list of your character names, and beside them write the first color(s) you think of when they're in your thoughts. This can be something you draw from their physical description (Cherijo being a silver came from the sheen of her hair) or something you associate with them (Jessa Bellamy from the Kindred novels was a sapphire blue thanks to the original paint on the house she grew up in.) If you have nothing you associate with the character that gives you a color tag for them, pick a random color.

Once you have your color tag list, you have some visual mojo to work with in developing your character. Let's say your female protagonist is a pink: a bright, bubblegum shade of pink. Okay, not my favorite color, but I'm working on rehabbing my negative attitude toward pink. Meanwhile, you're already forming your own opinions about this gal based on that color tag, right? Is she girly, childish, pretty, naive, shy? Or is she hot, sexy, daring, electric? Pink is the symbolic color of hope for the victims of breast cancer, so it has a more thoughtful/wishful association, too. Pink can be a power color as well -- if you're wondering how a pink-tagged protagonist can be kick-ass, you should read Karen Marie Moning's MacKayla Lane novels. That chick is ferociously pink.

If the first tag you choose for your character doesn't inspire you, trash it and pick another color based on why the first color didn't work. Let's say your protagonist doesn't feel like a pink because she's dark-mooded and has a mean streak. So what is the color of dark/moody/mean? For me it's the purple-red of a fresh bruise, but your association will probably be different.

Choosing color tags for your characters won't solve all your development issues, but it can help you think in different directions as you build your story people. Too often writers construct their characterizations based solely on appearance, which while convenient is really lazy writing. Try tagging your crew, and see what assigning colors can do to inspire how you bring them to life on the page.

Image credit: Audrey_Kuzmin

Personal Legends

Here's something you don't know about me: Back in the eighties I was a lab rat for Quaker Oats. Or to be more precise I was one of the many volunteer consumers on whom Quaker tested several variations of their new chocolate-covered granola bar product before deciding on the final product.

I was actually approached by a consumer product tester while I was out shopping, and she asked if I'd like to take part in her group. I agreed because free food was involved; also, I loved granola and chocolate, so I didn't think it would be awful -- and it was actually really neat. I was given several boxes with different versions of bars, had to taste each one, rate them, mark a survey sheet and then report my opinions over the phone. I took it very seriously and answered honestly (and got to eat a lot of chocolate-covered granola bars, another happy memory.) The Quaker Oats people in turn treated me with respect and thanked me for helping them out. Since the product has stayed on the market for like thirty years, and it's the version I picked as the best of the test lot, I like to think my opinion helped bring the best form of the product to the shelves.

Most everyone has a personal legend or two in their lives, I think -- being remotely involved with some huge product as I was, or finding something enormously valuable at a garage sale, or having a brush with fame by meeting celebrities under ordinary circumstances. According to family lore, my grandfather, who came down with osteomyletis when my mom was a little girl, was among the first Americans to receive penicillin after the antibiotic was first approved for testing on patients in the U.S. Because at the time osteomyletis was a death sentence, it also saved his life. On the much lighter side of family legends, my mom once bought a dirty but pretty pearl ring at a flea market that she later had cleaned and appraised. Since it was made of platinum and had two nice little diamonds along with the pearl the jeweler valued it at $2,500.00 -- which was ten thousand times what she paid for it. Yep, she bought it for a quarter.

Although I've never met a celebrity under ordinary circumstances I think that would be pretty cool. Singers seemed to gravitate toward my family; while working the makeup counter at a drug store my mom waited on Roberta Flack, who was lovely to her. I definitely envy my brother, who along with being a minister runs an appliance repair business; one time he was called out to Gloria Estefan's house to fix her dishwasher and got to talk to her. Probably the most famous singer-celeb encounter story in our family is the time when my daughter and her classmate ran into rapper/actor Will Smith while they were on a school field trip, and he was kind enough to stop and talk to them, and answered a question my daughter asked him (which is why I will always love Will Smith. He was nice to my kid.) The unifying note in all these celeb personal legends is how kind famous people are when they deal with non-famous people. Generally speaking celebs tend to be very nice people under ordinary circumstances, as long as you're not shoving a camera or something to sign at them.

When you're building a character, consider adding a personal legend or two to their background. This doesn't have to tie into your story if you just want to add it to flesh them out, but very often personal legends do motivate us after they happen. My mom always pokes through jewelry boxes at every garage sale, rummage sale or flea market she goes to, hoping to find another treasure for a quarter. To this day I still buy Quaker Oats products and feel good every time I do. I also try to see in the theater or buy on DVD every film Will Smith makes (there's an example of how kindness to a child affects the kid's parent.) I suspect even my minister brother has a personal collection of Gloria Estefan's albums stashed away behind his Bibles. Connect a personal legend to your character's present and you add depth, realism and fun.

Blast from the Past #3

From Focus to Palette

After reading my Story Palettes post last month, some of you asked if I would give some working examples of how I create a character palette.

Simone, who is a female protagonist in an upcoming novel of mine, has been gradually developing over the course of the last six months while I've put together her backstory, built her personality and figured out who she is, what she wants and, of course, what is the worst thing I can do to her. Simone is a woman of contradictions; everything about her is new and old, yesterday and tomorrow, fire and ice. The problem with all those lovely contrasts is that they make her very hard to nail down. Despite all the character development I'd done, I still had trouble seeing her in my head.

Recently at an art festival I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with watercolor artist Peggy Engsberg Furlin, who painted this little gem (click on any image to see a larger version):



As soon as I saw it I knew it was the focus piece I needed for Simone's character. I can't tell you why; most of the time there isn't a why, it just clicks and I know. So I bought the painting and brought it home, at which point I began building the character palette. First, I took a photo of the painting and cropped it so that no other colors showed:



I then ran the image through DeGraeve's Color Palette Generator to get a working palette, and set up the page for my novel notebook. From there I cut and pasted the DeGraeve palette, and began adding images from my digital collection that I felt suited Simone and worked inside the framework of the palette, until I had this page of visuals:



Colors are an important part of my process. They're symbolic and evocative, and so are the real world elements that I associate with them. They also create new ideas when I combine them. All of these images and colors echo different aspects of Simone's character and what she has to face in the story; defiance, temptation, risk, silence, loneliness, endurance, realization, fruition. They relate to each other, too: Old death, new life; the transition from winter to spring; flowers blooming in snow, what ends to begin/what begins to end, etc etc.

I could go on for pages because now that I have Simone's colors, I know her better. I feel as if I can make her come to life on the page now. Because while I can imagine all the character elements I want, if I don't make the connections between them I can't feel the character or get inside her head. Having a character palette often helps me navigate my way through a lot of uncertainty.

As for inspiration, you should always be ready for it to come at you from any direction or source. Take these gorgeous lampwork beads, which I purchased last week from Pond Art Glass Studio:



I have been revising and updating Korvel, a character who has appeared in the Darkyn series, to serve as one of the protagonists in the new trilogy (there, you have some insider info no one else but my editor has, too.) I never created a character palette for Korvel, and I needed one, but I kept dithering around with old visuals I had from the original series notebooks, none of which were really tailored to his character.

It wasn't until the lampwork beads arrived and I was photographing them for an appeciation shot that I saw Korvel's colors gleaming at me from the intricate swirls in the glass. Twenty minutes later I had put together this palette for him:



For most character palettes I usually narrow it down to three colors, but Korvel and I have a lot of history together, so that's probably why he got a wider range. Readers know a lot about him as a secondary character; now they need to rediscover him as a protagonist, which requires a different approach than presenting a brand-new character. This palette will definitely guide my choices and help me shed some light on the Korvel no one but me yet knows.

I think the key to creating palettes that help you with writing is not to cheat on the focus factor. Inspiration is not something you can artificially generate by throwing together all your favorite colors. You'll be creating a pretty palette that looks nice, but you'll find it does nothing to help you explore your character. Instead, look for something (and not just art, it can be anything at all) that inspires you to think of your character in ways you haven't before you saw it. That's when you know you've got the beginnings of a great character palette.

(Originally posted on PBW on 2/9/11)

Story Carding

Long before manga or anime there was Kamishibai, a form of Japanese storytelling with picture cards based on the same practice used by 12th century Buddhist monks who used picture scrolls to teach morality lessons. This is now a popular form of storytelling in schools on this side of the planet, and board versions of kamishibai are even employed by some corporations as a visual management tool.

Back in 2008 I came up with the idea to make character trading cards using Big Huge Labs photo trading card generator, and I've always been interested in cards like as a storytelling tool. If you take the kamishibai approach to creating cards for your story, and use a strong symbolic image, some titles and descriptive sentences, you could card every chapter like this:



Now to show you how that template works with a real story, here are two cards I've made for my NaNoWriMo 2014 novel:





I think this might work as well if not better than index cards, sticky notes or all the other ways we outline stories. You can also do these cards for scenes versus chapters. Also, you can use any card form you like; I just went with Big Huge Labs's card generator because it's easy and the results are attractive.

What do you think of the idea? Let me know in comments.

The Character Web

The orb weaver living between my oak and Japanese maple trees has graciously agreed to help me out with today's topic by serving as an example of a story character. So if spiders creep you out, you might want to skip this post.

When most people first encounter someone in a story they tend to see the character like this:



This is as it should be (at least, how the reader's first impression of the character should be.) Because we're a very visual species, and books generally don't have any pictures in them, characters are usually introduced in such a way that readers can easily envision them.

For the writer, however, there should be more to the character than simply their appearance. For us, the character should look like this:



Yes, this is the exact same spider; I simply took the shot from a different angle.

Great characters don't pop out of thin air to hang around the story and do nothing more than show off how terrific (or terrifying) they look. A character is a fictional construct of a person, which means there should be a lot more to them than simply physical appearance or story placement. Like a spider, a fully-realized character is surrounded by a web of interconnecting threads; instead of being made of silk these threads are created from personal history, education, health, life experience, hates, disappointments, loves, ambitions and everything else that goes into making people who they were, who they are and who they want to be -- as well as what they do.



So how does a writer build a character web that provides the proper amount of support and dimension? Lots of ways; just do a search on characterization and you'll probably find a zillion different answers. What I notice most about how other writers characterize their crews is by relying on elements in the character's occupation and/or backstory. This is not wrong, either; what we do for a living and our personal history does contribute to who we are -- but there is a lot more to us than our jobs and our past. If there wasn't I'd simply be characterized as a crippled writer, and not a partner, mother, daughter, sister, friend, USAF veteran, artist, quilter, volunteer, cancer survivor, jewelry-maker, blogger, teacher, student, animal lover, mentor, photographer . . . get the picture?

Here are fourteen different elements I often use to better weave my character webs:



To escape heavy dependence on backstory, consider how the present and the future is shaping your characters. If you're wondering how the future factors in when it hasn't even happened yet, ask anyone who has ambition, hopes or dreams to tell you how they affect them now. Are they going to school, saving money, following a five-year plan? Have they committed recently to a monogamous relationship that they feel may become permanent? Are they considering relocating, starting a business, inventing something, breaking off with someone, acquiring something they've always wanted? Now think about your character -- what are they doing about those things now? How is it changing them as people?

Opinions vary on how much we need to put into characterization, and again there's no right or wrong. Whatever elements I draw on, I always try to know enough about my characters to make them come alive on the page, so my characterizations tend to be as involved and detailed as my world-building. Everything I know about them doesn't make it into the story, either. All the knowledge that the reader never has access to is really more to guide me while I'm writing and get me into the character's head.

Okay, writers, your turn: What are some of the elements you use for your characterizations? Let us know in comments.

Such a Character

Saw this incredibly fun character chart in a bunch of life-saving diagrams over on BuzzFeed:



The floating skull -- that's what has been missing from my writing life all these years! I call dibs.

Honestly, when I saw the chart I really thought it was a brilliant approach to characterization solely because of the stick figures. Everyone can draw a stick figure, and if you wanted to illustrate your story crew something like this would be perfect (and simple enough to make.)

The chart also gives you a one-glance look at your story crew, which after five or six chapters can often be difficult to herd, much less envision all at once. The archetypal categories on the Buzzfeed chart are for fun, but you could do a serious version with the same sort of role names for your characters: the protag, the antag, the sidekick, the dark horse, the love interest, the first victim, the floating skull, etc. Okay, maybe not the skull, but you get the general idea.

The other element about this chart that is seriously awesome is that the creator was having fun with the idea. Often taking everything about our stories so seriously leads to much stress, angst, sleepless nights, wrinkles, formation of stomach ulcers etc. The chart is a good reminder to give yourself enough creative space to have fun with your characters (and everything in your story, for that matter.) Writing is very hard work, but there's no reason you can't have a good time with it, too. Based on my own experiences, I think the more you enjoy your process, the more likely you'll be to stick with your story and actually finish it -- and possibly write something that has real potential.

Related PBW links:

ABCharacter is a quick and easy way to outline any character's personality

Get your game on by designing your own Character Trading Cards

Use colors to help explore and define your characters with From Focus to Palette

How to make your own Character Art

Ten Things to Help with Creating Character Names

(Found the Buzzfeed chart via another link swiped from Gerard over at The Presurfer)

Name That Ten

Ten Things to Help with Creating Character Names

Briam Klems's 7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters.

Use the search engine at Behind the Name to find the origin and meaning of a first name.

The Character Name Generator will help you generate a name and a personality for your character (you can also customize with several ethnicities and birth eras.)

To figure out who your character is (which can help you come up with a good name for them) try Rick Hamper's Character Profile Sheet.

How writer Mervyn Love uses maps to name his characters (which has historic roots in actual, real-world naming.)

Need a name that means something secret or mysterious? Here you go.

Find out what your naming personality type is with this name quiz from Name Nerds.

Seventh Sanctum has twenty-four different generators here to help you name everything from an angel to a vampire.

Try my telephone book name game here to exercise your character profiling skills.

Find names from all over the globe at YeahBaby.com.

Character Trees

Family Echo is a free online generator that allows you to create simply family trees:



To give you a closer look, the individuals in this mock-up I made are color-coded pink for girls and blue for boys:



You can also customize your tree listings to show birth names, photos, personal details, etc.:



This is not only fun to do for your own family, but writers may find it useful when creating family trees for their characters or tracking character groups while writing series stories. According to the site FAQs you can also back-up your trees if you register with the site (also free.)

Story Improvement

I get some of my best story ideas at the local home improvement store, where I always make a point to stop by the paint department. Paint manufacturers have some of the most creative marketing people of any industry, and they're always finding new ways to not only name colors but also combine them into palettes that reflect a certain trend or mood.

On this trip I was simply looking for color inspiration for a character who so far has been resisting my efforts to properly visualize her. Sometimes putting together a personality-type palette helps me make that jump from knowing the character to actually seeing the character in my head. We didn't have a lot of time for me to stand and stare paint chips, though, so I collect some of the idea folders and brought them home to brood over.

Olympic paint has recently done some marvelous things with their color line: they've created little color palettes with removable, stick-on chips you can transfer from the idea folder to something else. I've always cut out the chips and clipped, stapled or glue-sticked them into my novel notebooks, so this was super convenient for me. It also allowed me to mix colors from several different collections into my own custom palette. Valspar's latest idea cards show a four-color palette next to a room where they've been used, which can be very helpful when you're trying to create a setting. If you're not crazy about recombining colors, these cards can give you some ready-made palettes to use for characters, too.

Olympic also has folders with design and decorating ideas to reflect a certain lifestyle (creative, easy, global, serene and techno are some examples.) These folders contain eight-color palettes (with more of the removable, sticky-backed paint chips), rooms in which the palettes were used, as well as textures and ideas that make them work. These are worth picking up just to see some of the amazing rooms they put together.

I also found a new resource on this trip that is going to be extremely helpful to me personally; a folder of paint chips showing Olympic's line of semi-transparent wood stains. For some reason describing variations on the color brown are especially challenging for me, and after writing fifty books I feel sometimes that I've used up every creative word that means brown. In this one folder there are 48 chips for different shades of brown, and while some of the shade names are not new to me (russet, mushroom, black oak), others (weathered barnboard, clove, driftwood) are. Seeing all of them together gave me the push I needed to think about the color brown differently.

Anyway, back to my image-resistant character. Once I was home and could play with the paint chips, I built a palette for the character that simply felt right -- two shades of blue, two shades of warm whites, a vibrant rose, a dark violet and a cool brown. I then kept that palette in my head and went through my character idea folder with all the body- and face-model images I've been collecting as possibilities for this character, and there she was -- an image I almost didn't put in the folder because it's almost the exact opposite of what I assumed the character would look like.

This character is dark, troubled and very conflicted inside, but building the palette helped me see her from the outside, where it doesn't show. I already knew everything about her is kept hidden and silent, but I didn't think about how that could be expressed (and camouflaged) by her appearance. She looks like a creature of light and mystery; delicate, vulnerable and even a little helpless -- which she certainly is not on the inside. This character's palette doesn't reflect who she is, but rather who she wants to be. That was something I needed to learn before I could see her properly.

Using color palettes to build characters forces you to rely on your writer instincts, and allows things that may be lingering in your subconscious emerge. That's the most valuable aspect of playing with colors; they connect to us on different levels and inspire us to take new directions. They can also help us discover things we know but we haven't yet put together into a cohesive construct. So the next time you have to pick up something for home improvement, stop by the paint department and see what stirs your imagination for story improvement.

Character Journals

The University of Chicago is blogging about a very neat journal mystery:

Yesterday we received a package addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.”. We sort-of shrugged it off and put it in our bin of mail for student workers to sort and deliver to the right faculty member— we get the wrong mail a lot. Little did we know what we were looking at. When our student mail worker snapped out of his finals-tired haze and realized who Dr. Jones was, we were sort of in luck: this package wasn’t meant for a random professor in the Stat department. It is addressed to “Indiana” Jones.

This included a handwritten journal penned by Abner Ravenwood, the father of Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark (and you can read more about the mystery and details of what else came in the package at UChicago's Admissions tumblr blog here.) That someone would go to all the trouble of creating a journalistic homage to a fictitious character doesn't surprise me; writers do it all the time. That they mailed it off to a real university is part of the mystery, as in the film the college Indy worked at was completely invented. My guess is the creator might have once been a UChicago student -- and (obviously) a huge fan of the Indiana Jones movie franchise.

Creating a character journal is much like keeping one of your own; the difference is that you write in character, as this enterprising soul did as Abner Ravenwood. Your dates are your character's timeline, either in backstory or the present (you might even want to explore their future by journal), and any photos, sketches or other visual additions should be character- and story-appropriate.

This kind of journaling can be fun, but it's also serious practice with POV. When you write as your character you have to see things through their eyes, and it can help you understand their thoughts and responses. Before I wrote Evermore I created a poetry journal and a sketchbook for Jayr, my female protagonist, so I could work out her feelings for Aedan mac Byrne, the male protagonist. The project became part of the story, inspired the title of the novel and some of the poetry I wrote in character is actually published in the book, so it was not only immensely helpful, it actually became part of the story.

If you don't want to commit to a project as sizeable as a journal, try writing a letter or a blog post in character. The more time you spend in your character's POV, the better you'll get to know how they think, and like me you may even come up with some fun and valuable story material.

Character Art

To get to know my characters better I often make portraits of them. I wish I could say I always do that strictly by imagination, but alas, I'm not that talented.

My trick is to convert photographs of real people into digital sketches, parts of which I transfer as line and perspective references while I'm working on the art. Recently I've been revisiting my old love from high school, pen and ink, so I'm using that for all the portraits of my crew from Taken by Night (as you see here, clockwise from the cute guy at the top: Chavez, Kim, Ara and Deuce.)

Most of the writers I know collect pictures of faces and bodies they find inspiring or interesting. Unless you base a character on a real person from the very start, however, it's almost impossible to get an exact match to how you envision them. Sketching, painting or inking your characters allows you to make those adjustments.

If you'd like to try this, start with a clear photo of your character model that has strong lines and good contrasts. Here's one wallpaper I found of actor Matt Bomer at a fan site* that I'm going to use as a character model for James Brand:



Enlarge or reduce the photo to the size you want for your character portrait, convert it to a black and white sketch or outline in your photoshop program (if you don't have photoshop, there are lots of photo-to-sketch freewares and generators online you can use.) Erase what you don't want to transfer (the handsome Mr. Bomer here looks a bit too scruffy and hollow-cheeked for my character, so I airbrushed away those shadows), and print out the result on plain bond paper:



Take some erasable tracing or transfer paper and put it between the printout of the photo and a sketch pad, and trace the lines of the features you want to duplicate. I use red transfer paper because I can't do a portrait in one sitting, and the contrasting color makes it easy to see where I left off. Once you've done that, trace very lightly the features you want to alter. Once you've finished you'll have a foundation outline of your character portrait (and you might first scan or print out a copy of it so you have an extra one if you mess up and want to start over.) Here's the transfer of my photo:



Starting with the lightly-traced features you want to alter, sketch in with pencil your changes. You are allowed to erase whatever doesn't work. Once you've done that, use the medium of your choice to detail, colorize and complete the portrait, like so:



I like filling in negative space (the empty parts of an image) to suggest things like hair, nose shapes and other hard-to-draw features. It creates a kind of wood-block print look that I think is neat, too:



One of the side benefits of creating character art is increasing your knowledge of and familiarity with their physical appearance. Now that I've inked Matt Bomer into James Brand I know that face from his cowlick to his square jaw. I hadn't decided on his exact eye or hair color until I drew him; now he's definitely green-eyed and silver/black-haired.

Character art is created for you, so you don't have to make it perfect or show it to anyone. You also don't have to use traditional supplies or techniques to make your portraits. I once made a character portrait using bits of old junk jewelry and broken necklace chains glued to a piece of slate. If you're a scrapbooker, try using cutouts from your favorite papers to assemble a collage portrait. Art quilters often "paint" portraits in thread, which I'm going to have to try someday myself.

However you choose to make character art, just have fun with it. You'll always enjoy it, and you may end up surprising yourself.

*Image source URL: http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/20700000/Clarity-matt-bomer-20714313-1280-1024.jpg

Inspired By

Mental Floss has an article here about ten famous literary characters who were or who may have been based on real people. Creating fictional clones of real people is a time-honored writing tradition; it's one of the subversive ways writers make characters more realistic.

When I want to use living people as character inspiration I usually make conglomeration personality constructs, or build my character based on two or three different souls I know. Cherijo and Duncan from the StarDoc books are two examples of this; both are based on several real people I've worked with or folks I've admired from afar.

My favorite repository for character ideas is antiquity and folklore; I love loosely basing characters on historic figures and then embellishing them with how I imagine they'd be. Robin of Locksley is one character I adapted from legends; I've always wanted to write my version of Robin Hood, and finally got the chance with the Darkyn series. You can conglomerate such inspirations as well. Lucan from Dark Need is based on two of my favorite historic figures (heavily shaken and stirred, I might add.) I've also borrowed from history's mysteries for character inspiration. Matthias from my novel Shadowlight was based on a very cool mystery man; he and some of the details of his backstory were directly inspired by Ötzi the Iceman.

Some things to consider when you base characters on real people:

Is the person providing your character inspiration likely to read the story? If so, consider their reaction. Your Great Aunt Mildred may be the perfect model for your antagonist, but after she reads herself in your story will she ever speak to you again?

If the real life person might be offended, consider using a harmless reference versus making them a character in the story. I used to name inanimate objects like starships and cocktails after other writers; I've also paid homage to my writer friends by having my characters mention their books.

When you are going to write a real-life person into your story, be true to them. My dad was a tremendous influence on me throughout my life, and before he passed away I took the chance to write him into my novel Dreamveil as himself, changing only his name. I was also careful to show him as he really was (in the kitchen, all business) so every time you read a scene in that book in which Lonzo appears, that's really my dad on the page.

Hide your character inspirations like Easter eggs in the story. This requires a little deviousness on your part, but it can be done, especially if you use the real life person as a very minor character, mention them in passing in dialogue, or otherwise hide them in plain sight. To date only one sharp-eyed reader found one of my Easter egg characters, but he was right on the money, probably because we both deeply admired the same person.

From my POV it's an honor to be used as a character inspiration (and I have been Tuckerized more than once by other writers.) It's also a little disconcerting to find yourself in a story without any warning, so you might consider letting your inspiration know in advance. Just so they don't freak out. Also, if you want to borrow a real life person's unusual first name or surname for one of your characters, it's probably best (and courteous) to first ask permission.

Have you ever based one of your characters on a real-life person? How did you handle it? Let us know in comments.

(Link for the Mental Floss article found over at The Presurfer.)

LEGO® Logic

Whoever invented LEGO® blocks understood that there is a little world-builder in every kid, one who needs only a simple but intriguing set of materials to create something amazing. Anyone who has ever built a LEGO® creation knows how satisfying it is to fit those pegged blocks together while figuring out the construct. The best part is the creation never has to be permanent; you can use the same blocks over and over to make new worlds.

The same is true of storytelling. Words are our building blocks, and they can be sorted and combined and recombined to form an infinite number of characters, plots and worlds. Because we all build according to our imaginations we don't need a new set of construction materials every time we start a story. You can give the same set of words or story ideas to ten writers, and you'll get back ten different creations.

Today I'm going to apply some LEGO® logic to our characters. As with everything in the story, they are created from a series of components that when fitted together form a person. Here I've put together a little male protagonist, aka Our Hero. At first glance he seems like a happy if somewhat fashion-challenged dude. Irish, likes green, needs a shave. We'll call him Lucky, which he really won't be.

Lucky is made up of very specific parts: physical characteristics, personality, personal talents, intelligence, experience, etc. If we were to sort these character components into four major groups using the word LEGO as our inspiration, we might call them this:

Liabilities -- the flaws, limitations and other aspects of the character that in some way handicap or hinder.

Extras -- the assets, talents and other aspects of the character that in some way help or facilitate.

Goals -- any or all of the character's desires and ambitions.

Obstacles -- that which stands between the character and the goals.

Naturally characters are much more complex than this, but to create them you can use these four categories as a starting place or foundation on which you can build. Let's look at Lucky again and sort him out according to our LEGO categories:

Liabilities: he doesn't blend in too well in our world. He has problems relating to other people. He seems over-confident, probably because he relies on magic to deal with his problems.

Extras: he's cute, which makes everyone think he's harmless. When people see him they think they've found a treasure. As long as his magic hold ups, he's financially independent.

Goals: Lucky wants to hang on to his wealth, meet a nice Irish girl and settle down somewhere at the end of the rainbow.

Obstacles: Girls don't take him seriously. Everyone else thinks they're entitled to his gold and are constantly hunting for him. The magic that he's always taken for granted is about to fail him.

Lucky wouldn't be much of a protagonist without some challenges, so he needs this guy: our antagonist, Gruesome. As dark as Lucky is light, Grue is a scowling, black-hearted fully-armed disaster waiting to happen. Grue doesn't much like Lucky, and he'll be happy to relieve him of that beanpot of gold, his hat and, if Lucky stands still long enough, his head.

But why is Grue such a bad guy? He's made up of the same parts as Lucky; his are just different:

Liabilities: Grue has an attitude problem, a rotten temper and a terrible case of perpetual halitosis.

Extras: He has a sword of unimaginable power, a lair filled with minions, and black magic.

Goals: Lucky's gold, Lucky's magic and any girl Lucky manages to snare.

Obstacles: No one is ever happy to see Grue. His armor is one size too small. The minute he opens his mouth everyone runs.

Lucky will have to deal with Grue, but he may also have another character running major interference in his life. For some of us that's a secondary protagonist like Hilda here. Don't let her easy smile or silly costume fool you; she's a tough chick. As the third side of a story character triad Hilda brings her own personality to the table. She may be Lucky's polar opposite, but you can be sure that on some level she has a bond with her fellow protagonist -- even if the only thing they have in common is not liking Grue.

I'd sort out Hilda like this:

Liabilities: Hilda's had her heart broken so she doesn't trust anyone. Her suspicious nature borders on paranoid. She's so broke she's agreed to wear a silly costume and dance on the side of the road to make rent money.

Extras: Hilda is honest and compassionate. The costume she puts on endows her with magical abilities. Using her last buck she buys a ticket that has the winning numbers for PowerBall.

Goals: To get over herself, find a nice guy worthy of her trust and get season tickets for the opera.

Obstacles: Grue's lust, Lucky's gold, and her own fear of commitment.

Too many main characters muddle a story, so to flesh out your cast you're going to need secondary characters. Our girl Fanny here is one of the support cast that make up the other people in the story. Because she's not created to occupy center stage she won't own as much of the story as your main characters, but she's surprising adaptable to any number of roles; she can be anyone from Lucky's ex-squeeze to Grue's minion. She may be in the story to be Hilda's best friend or worst enemy. The key to figuring Fanny (and the rest of the support cast crew) is to build her according to your main characters' and story's needs, using the same LEGO logic to figure out what her components are.

Liabilities: Fanny has no self-esteem. She uses hostility to hide her vulnerability. She has terrible taste in men.

Extras: She's smart, resourceful and loyal.

Goals: She wants to be loved, respected and cherished, first by Grue and then (after he dumps her) by Lucky.

Obstacles: Grue's evil plans, Lucky's gold, and her BFF Hilda, whom she's never really liked.

No matter how you build your characters, or how many you put into your story, there is always one who is in the middle of everything. One who calls all the shots, finalizes all the decisions and makes or breaks the story. One who knows everything about the characters including the stuff no one else knows. Your first reader, your first editor, and your storymaster all rolled into one. A presence that should always be there but never be noticeable: the storyteller, you.

Body Double & BAM Haul

I was reading an article about how we see our own body size that included a link to My Body Gallery, a site that shows photos of real women's bodies (not nude or lascivious in any way, just real-life gals.) The cool thing about it is that you can search the photos by height, weight, pant size, shirt size and body type (pear, banana, apple or hourglass) in order to find photos of women with a matching body type. This could be helpful when you're writing a female character whose physical stats don't match your own or anyone you know. With this site you can get a good look at real women who are a body double of your character, which will help you write more accurate, realistic descriptions.

Now if they only had one for real men . . . .

Yesterday I cured a minor case of the blues by making a run to BAM and finding a half-dozen books I wanted: two books as gifts for friends (which I'm not naming or showing you because both read the blog and they're just going to have to wait until the party), and four new releases for me: Mary Balogh's The Proposal, Gail Carriger's Timeless, Sofie Kelly's Copycat Killing and Shiloh Walker's Hunter's Rise. Should keep me curled up and happy through the weekend, which proves there is no better way to shop for prezzies and shake off doldrums at the same time than a visit to the bookstore.

Have you guys picked up any new releases you've been impatiently waiting on? Share some titles in comments.

Unveiling Your Characters

A new theory about a hotly-debated religious relic recently popped up in the news (and the news item will remain unnamed in this post so as not to attract any attention from the flaming sector of debaters). Since I once extensively researched a similar artifact for a story, a friend e-mailed me the link. Then, because my friend believes the newsy relic is authentic, we ended up debating it:

Me: It's a fake. It's an excellent one, and the artwork is really convincing, but it's a fake.

Friend: No, it's real. They've done all kinds of scientific tests on it and they can't explain how it was made. It might even date it back to the time of Christ.

Me: Okay, so they faked it in the time of Christ.

Friend: You're going to burn in hell, you know.

Me: Undoubtedly. But it's still a fake.

Friend: How can you say that? You weren't there. You don't know.

Me: I know just from looking at it.

Friend: How?

Me: Let's agree on two things first: I know fabric, and I know how to drape, yes?

Friend: Those curtains you made for the livingroom are pretty awesome. I agree.

Me: Let's also agree that [the relic] contains a perfect image of the Holy One's face, right? Eyes, nose, mouth, chin, it's all there. Every detail.

Friend: That's why it's real.

Me: Sure it would be real, if the Holy One had been a paperdoll.

Friend: What?

Me: Unless they're the victim of a total facial smash, or their family tree only had one branch on it, human beings generally have three-dimensional faces. Wrap or drape a face with cloth -- even a mystical one that has the power to magically transfer an image of what it's touching -- and at best you'll get contact impressions from the highest points on the face: a blob in the middle for the nose, maybe a blob under that for the chin, and two vertical ridges for the eyebrows. The eyes won't show. Also, when you flatten out the cloth it will distort the image.

Friend: But--but--

Me: The relic's image is complete and perfectly flat. Like a paperdoll's. As if it were rendered by people who sucked at realistically portraying dimensional objects. Like, say, medieval people who faked stuff.

Friend: I hate you.

Me: You're welcome.

When you're writing about your characters, you generally need to describe them to the reader. Beginners do this like a laundry list: He was six-foot-five with shoulder-length pitch black hair. His eyes were gold, his nose was patrician and his mouth was sexy. His cheekbones were sharp. His jaw was hard like concrete. His chin was dimpled (the big tip-off that you may be laundry-listing is the endless use of was, was, was.)

Even after a writer improves enough to get past the wases, there's still the tendency to describe all of the character's features at once to the reader in hopes of giving them a clear visual.

I think it's more interesting to scatter character description through the story. When you look at someone, what's the first thing you notice? Eyes, hair, clothes, body frame? I've tested myself and I tend to look at their clothes first, probably because I really do love fabric. Also the colors, patterns, fit and style of clothing choices offer interesting hints about the person. This is also why many of my character descriptions begin with what they're wearing.

Rather than listing details for the reader, I try to portray them by seeing them through another character's eyes and working in their impressions of who they're looking at from their POV. We all have some sort of emotional reaction to what we see, especially when it's other people, and those emotions help paint a more dimensional portrait for the reader.

Writers, how do you approach describing characters? Readers, what sort of character descriptions work best for you? Let us know in comments.

Signature Colors for Characters

While I was reading the April/May 2012 issue of Quilting Arts magazine I was tempted by their reader challenge to create a "signature color" piece. Making an interesting monochromatic quilt takes some imagination, especially if your signature color is dark like mine (violet), but it wouldn't be a challenge if it were easy.

I like building color palettes for my characters, and color also plays a major role in my storytelling, so I wondered if any of my characters have a signature color. Jayr from Evermore came immediately to mind; I used bronze and violet and tangerine in her color palette, and when it came time to suggest a color theme for her novel's cover art I went with violet because it was my favorite of the three. Violet is definitely Jayr's color. Green played an integral part in building Gabriel's character in Night Lost, as did scarlet when I put together Lucan's world in Dark Need. I never consciously picked out one color for signature purposes but I often gravitated toward one in the process of telling the story. Certain shades of the same color can be used for very different characters who share the same connection, which is probably why royal blue will always remind me of Valentin Jaus while ice blue makes me think of Thierry Durand.

You don't have to pick out a signature color for your characters, of course, but if the idea intrigues you then you can almost let the character make the choice for you. A happy-go-lucky soul is probably not going to have black as their signature color, just as a dark and brooding type would likely not surround themselves in sunshine yellow (maybe if they were being tortured.) Colors have associations for all of us, so let the character's personality and preferences guide you. Also keep in mind that colors can be like armor, and the colors we show the world are not necessarily the colors we use in private. A goth who always wears black and projects a tough image might have a home bedecked in pink velvet and poufy white lace, as I discovered when I was writing Nightbred and got to know Christian Lang.

Color doesn't have to be the character's signature, either. I've used signature scents for all my Darkyn characters, for example, and signature tattoos for all my Kyndred people. Signature = symbol, so the possibilities are really endless.

Playing with Polyvore

Artist Sheree Burlington has an article in the Spring 2012 issue of Somerset Digital Studio magazine that practically called my name: Designing with Polyvore: Learning to color outside of the lines.

According the Sheree's article, Polyvore is a fashion shopping site that has been gradually inhabited by all sorts of artistic subcultures, thanks to their online editing tool that she and many others use to create collages using keywords to bring up online images.

At first I was a bit dubious -- I'm about as fashionable as the Amish, and shopping sites are usually very limited as to what they can offer the average writer -- but after glancing through the article and reading about how much Sheree had done with it I decided to go and see what I could do.

I was interested in building some character collages, so I familiarized myself with the easy to use, drag-and-drop editing tool, and within a few minutes I put together this collage using random images and a provided template (these are simply screenshots):



I also built this one:



I decided to forget about the templates and just start stacking images, which produced this:



And this:



I did only the most rudimentary keyword searches and simple resizing of the images I dragged and dropped into the editor; you tech-savvy writers out there will likely be able to do a lot more with it. The images are pulled from various sources on the internet (and links to the originals are provided with each image) so if you decide to play with Polyvore's editor I'd advise you employ it only for personal use to avoid copyright issues.

Scrabbling Ideas

I've been playing Scrabble® since they tried to teach me how to spell in elementary school, and after chess it's my favorite board game. It's an excellent way to spend an unplugged evening with the kids. We regularly have Scrabble® nights here at Casa PBW, and (when I can get a couple of teams together) the occasional Scrabble home tournament. Last weekend Mom and I paired up and kicked everyone's butt all over the board.

I also have an electronic version of the game that allows me to play against the computer. A game takes about ten minutes to play by computer so it's the perfect mini-break past time. I usually win about half the games I play up to the expert level, at which point I always lose, but I do try to be graceful about it. Plus one of these days I am going to beat it; I just have to figure out how to make a word out of Q, J, K, X and three Is (I swear, the expert mode always sticks me with the worst letters.)

A Scrabble® game can be used for other things, too. Tonight while I was playing against the computer these were the first three words that landed on the board:



I arranged the words in my head -- Lost City Loot/Loot Lost City/City Lost Loot -- and realized I had three different basic premises for a story: Someone finds treasure from a lost city; a lost city is discovered (and looted); a city loses its treasure. While I probably won't get story ideas from every game I play, from now on I think I'm going to be paying more attention to what lands on the board.

At the moment I'm putting together a trilogy proposal, and I needed six names for the protagonists. My usual methods weren't producing much, so on a whim I took out my hands-on Scrabble® board (Diamond edition, naturally) and started playing with the tiles. I had the first four names I needed in a couple of minutes, and after switching out tiles for a while I hit on the last two. I even got a bonus in the process; the name of the character who brings the final two protagonists together.



Although the limited number of letter tiles can seem restrictive, I find it's actually a good thing. I think in some cases too many choices can be overwhelming. I had to do some creative thinking while I was working with the letters versus using as many as I wanted, and that helped me focus on what was important. If you want more letters, you can make your own from squares of cardboard, or pick up an extra game from a thrift store just for the tiles.

Other ways you can use a Scrabble® board:

Set up keywords and rearrange them to find new ideas for titles, settings and other named story elements.

Work with the tiles to coin words for world-building purposes.

Sort out the names in your story by first letter and eliminate sound-alike given names (this prevents your cast from sounding like a new branch of the Duggar family.)

Have you ever used a Scrabble® board to work out something with writing? Are there any other ways you can think of using one to help? Let us know in comments.

Collecting Characters

At the market the other day I was fortunate enough to get in line behind an elderly woman using an electric cart. She had a corona of curly white hair, wore a lovely floral blouse that matched her lilac trousers, and from her size had to be six feet tall or better standing.

I zoomed in on the details about her that interested me most: large hands laced with ecru age spots; on the left she sported a thin gold wedding band and modest diamond engagement ring that still sparkled. An old, chunky man's wristwatch (her husband's?) with big, easy-to-read numbers hung a little loose from her wrist. She gave off an aura of genteel perfume that I couldn't identify but reminded me of the Chantilly my mom likes to wear.

She had a full cart of groceries (I noted a gorgeous eggplant, three containers of fresh strawberries, and a gallon fat free milk.) As the clerk bagged everything for her in brown paper she gave direction on what was to be bagged together. She also listened and nodded as the cashier gave her an easy shortcut recipe for eggplant Parmesan, and then told her a funny cooking mishap story involving turkey gravy and peanut butter.

The lady had a strong, deep voice with a beautiful northeastern accent, maybe New Hampshire, and laughed out loud at herself several times with a big woman's booming, hearty laugh. Each time she did it tickled me, inviting me to laugh along (but I kept quiet so she wouldn't realize how closely I was eavesdropping.)

At some point during their exchange my order was also rung up, but the cashier and I had to wait as the lady's bags were loaded up in another cart. I paid in cash instead of using my card so I wouldn't have to ask the lady to move (her wheels were actually blocking my access to the card machine). All this took about ten minutes.

As soon as the lady left the cashier immediately apologized for making me wait, and I told her not to worry about it. "She's ninety-three," the cashier confided, shaking her head. She wasn't complaining, she was smiling.

So was I. Standing by that lady had been a privilege for me, not an inconvenience. It was like being in the presence of royalty; I was completely dazzled. Even as I write this a day later, I can still recall perfectly the sound of her laugh and the smell of her perfume. I also have no doubt a version of this magnificent creature will show up in one of my novels.

Observing strangers contributes most to my character collection. A chance encounter, like the one I had at the market, allows me to gather just enough information to start my imagination rolling. I need a little mystery to jump start the storytelling, and not knowing the name of the lady at the market, or where she lives, or any of her personal history gives me the room I need to invent. Finding out one small detail, like the fact she was born in 1919, gave me just enough to build on.

Imagine what this woman might have seen in her lifetime: the Great Depression, WWII, all those presidents, so much history. Was she a USO girl, or maybe a Rosie the Riveter? I bet she was. Does that old watch belong to the same guy who gave her those rings, or did it belong to her dad, her brother, a long-lost love? To still be shopping for herself -- and laughing -- at the age of ninety-three speaks of who she is at the very heart: strong, determined, dignified, joyous.

Every time you go out in the world, you have an opportunity to collect story elements from real life. People are walking characterization treasuries, and if you pay attention, you can borrow some of that personality gold and reinvest it in your fictional cast.

NaNoWriMo Prep II: Stand Out Characters

Instant Recognition

Last week we went out of town to a band competition to see the high school kid perform, but didn't find the place until her band was already on the field. We got inside in time to see the performance from about half a football field away, but when I looked out I saw my kid playing a standard flute, which was the wrong instrument (for band she plays the picolo, which is a tiny version of the flute.)

"That's not her," my guy said when I pointed her out. "She's over there, in the back."

I told him that no, he was wrong, and started taking pictures. Throughout the entire performance I snapped shots of this girl while he told me I was mistaken. I insisted I was right. Finally he admitted he couldn't tell which child was ours because to him they all look alike in their uniforms.

After the show we caught up with my daughter, and I asked her why she'd been playing the flute. Turned out she'd lent her picolo to her section leader, who had accidentally left hers behind and had a more difficult musical part to play (and my daughter had studied the parts for picolo and flute, so she could switch to a spare flute on hand at the performance with no problem.)

Later my guy asked how I had been so sure that the girl with the wrong instrument had been our daughter. One is always tempted to claim maternal privilege, aka "a mother always recognizes her child", but I don't think recognition is always instinctive (even for moms.)

Instead, I relied on what I know about my kid. For example, I've seen this show lots of times so I know her exact position on the field. While her helmet covers her hair and shadows her eyes, and most of the girls in her section do look alike in uniform, I spotted the shape of her ear (which she inherited from her dad) and her mouth (which she inherited from her aunt.) She's very serious about marching, so she never slouches or fidgets, and she always holds her instrument in the correct position. Finally, I zeroed in on her movements, and while she was perfectly in step with everyone else, I knew it was her by the way she looks when she moves.

Now, Back to the Mountain

Yesterday I introduced you to the mountain of work that is writing a novel and talked about starting your climb. Today we're going to look at who you're taking up with you -- the imaginary friends of any storyteller, also known as your cast of characters.

You'll often hear writers talk about their characters as if they are real, living, breathing people. They have conversations with their characters, listen to them, believe in them, cheer them on, take their advice and even go shopping for them. This is of course a lovely fantasy, and one of the primary reasons people think writers are so strange.

Yes, I know for a fact that my characters are not real, but to me, they have to be as close as possible to real, living, breathing people in order for me to write them. So I do odd things like sketch them and play songs for them. I write poetry for them. I visit the places where I want them to live or work or find themselves handcuffed to a naked stranger (about whom I know everything, too.) I give them birth dates and bad habits and big problems. I know what they love, what they hate, what annoys them, what they want, what they don't want, what they think they want. And yes, occasionally I hear them talking to me in my head.

It comes down to this: the more I know about the admittedly imaginary people who are going up the mountain with me, the better and faster I climb. Since I don't like to dawdle, I pretty much try to know everything about them before I start up. And what little I don't know, I will find out on the journey, because I'm annoying that way.

Who Do You Take with You?

When you're building a character the natural temptation is to make one that conforms to a popular archetype within your genre: the tall/dark/handsome romance hero, the tough tattooed urban fantasy chick, the strapping fantasy warrior, the girl-next-door freckled heroine, the Captain Kirk or Luke Skywalker SF protagonist, the vampire brotherhood musclebound dude. While there's nothing wrong with using an archetype -- some novelists have built very successful careers while writing the exact same cookie-cutter characters over and over -- there's nothing particularly memorable about them. To offer a character that your reader will remember, you need to craft a character who in some way stands out in a crowd.

Every writer has their own attitude about what needs to go into creating characters. My personal philosophy is this: if I'm going to spend weeks climbing a mountain with the same bunch of people every day, they can't be ordinary, shallow, two-dimensional interchangeable, nothing-special characters. They'll bore me off the mountain. I need unique, interesting, absorbing characters, not only to provide the reader with a great book but to keep me motivated while writing it, too.

As many of you know I begin all my characters by asking my infamous three questions: Who are you? What do you want? What's the worst thing I can do to you? For me, the answers have to be fascinating, thrilling, and definitely something I want to explore at length. Since I'm doing the asking and the answering, that also means putting everything I've got, all my writing mojo into the character construct.

For NaNoWriMo, you're going to be spending a solid month with your characters. You don't have to use my three questions; make up your own -- or use another method to build your characters that works better for you (see the links below for some interesting alternative approaches.) But once you feel you've built your character, ask yourself this: If they were standing among a big group of other characters, all dressed alike, and you were half a football field away, could you spot them? How? Answer that question in enough different, interesting ways, and you will probably know your character well enough to write them for thirty days.

What problems are you having with your creating characters? What methods do you use that help you build the best? Let us know in comments.

Character Creation Tools: Evernote freeware ~ Greg Knollenberg's Web Resources for Dveloping Characters ~ Karen Lotter's Character Development in Fiction ~ The Lazy Scholar's How to Create a Character Profile

Also, from PBW: ABCharacter ~ Character Trading Cards ~ Know Thy Character Ten ~ The Complete Friday 20 Index, with lots of questions and my answers about characters.

Image Credit: © Gina Smith | Dreamstime.com