Casting Characters

You're lucky you're getting a blog post today. I have been living in a state of constantly refreshing my inbox that is somewhat reminiscent to querying agents. Most of my friends have gotten activated into the beta of Pottermore. I, however, am still waiting. It's rather like being picked last for the team in gym class.

I don't wanna talk about it.

So, instead...here you go. Writing Tuesdays. For the next five minutes, my mind will be OFF Pottermore pain.

I went back and forth between two topics. One I might save for later, when I get more involved in the concept. Today, I'll be talking about casting characters.

To be fair, this is not something I'd ever done before this weekend. I'd always considered my characters to live solely inside my head. I've never been good at finding physical representation of any of my characters, because I have very firm ideas of what they look like to me. Occasionally, I've run into some random person on the street or in the grocery store that I'm like "woah, she/he is exactly how I picture [insert character here]" but even that's rather rare for me.

But then this weekend, something spurred me on to cast my characters. I don't know what this "something" was, but...I came to find out that the project was kind of fun. And I kind of like having pictures of all my characters hanging on my writing board over my desk. It makes them all the more REAL to me (which means, it's all the more REAL to me when I have to kill them off...oops?). My roommates got a kick out of it too. They seem to get a kick out of most of the weird writerly things I do..."a kick" being that they smile, nod, and back away slowly.

An interesting thing I discovered during this casting characters project, however, was how difficult it is for me to picture my male characters. I always have a ton of trouble in general with male characters--I hate naming them, I hate describing them, and sometimes they're interchangeable to me. It's really a problem. So it's was an absolute nightmare trying to find people I thought best visually represented my male main characters in my novel. But, I did eventually get it done. And I'm pretty happy with the results.

(I was going to post the pictures of my cast here...but...I'm technology stupid today and couldn't figure it out. Maybe later.)