October 21, 2008
Farming for parts
I am a very mentally visual writer. I see WIP scenes in a movie reel type range. This has freaked out more than one person I know–I even see my dreams as such…
In WIPS, I can picture everything to the most minute detail with one exception–faces. Some of this, I think, is due to whomever the heroine is, I always sorta picture myself (in my books or ones I am reading–unless I don’t like her–LOL). And the hero is the hottie de’ jour that I am fixated on at the time–been the same guy for a few years now. So when writing the H/H, I see me and he and have to make a conscious effort to write in a varying look from book to book.
I have heard of different ways writers get H/H inspirations. I have tried keeping magazine clippings or whatnot–the people are never quite right and you end up w/ noses, eyes, mouthes and that smacks creepy to me.
Or I may try to infuse a celeb head on there, but then enevitably they do something stupid and it makes all the tabloids and again the creepy factor rolls in. I even bought The Sims hoping I could manipulate it to give me what I thought the characters would look like, but unless I did it wrong, it actually didn’t vary that derm much from one person to the next. They were all the same height and well… I gave up on it. I did once find a “face” creator of sorts. You could pick from various facial features and make your own person.
By far, that type face making was most suitble to my foibles–however if was a Russian site and it gets closed down every little bit and I have to troll the internet looking for it again–so reliability is at a minimum. Ideally, I’d like a police sketch artist program for my computer. I don’t know if you can buy one or not, but I reee-eealy want one (or a police artist flip book of sorts).
How do y’all get facial inspriration for your works? Hey, I will try anything once {snort} well almost anything…. 
The scenes run through my head like a newsreel too. The faces are vague to me as a writer, and I like them to be vague as a reader. Just the basics would be nice unless the character is supposed to have a very distinctive feature. I can fill in the features for myself as a reader, rather than read three pages of what, after a few sentences, usually seems like a police report.
I get that movie thing too, for scenes. As for the H/h. I don’t bother with the model/actor pics because most of the time it’s a they kinda look like them in this specific picture but not in this one. My H/h’s faces are always softly out of focus as I’m visualizing scenes. If I try to focus on one part of their face to describe it, that part comes more in focus, but the rest of their features become more blurry. Weird.
I’m pretty vague with facial features. Essentially, I want my readers to get their own vision of what the hero and heroine look like. I give the basic details and often go for generalizations. In my current WIP the heroine is a fairy and extremely beautiful. I go into a great deal of detail with her because she despises her appearance and all that it means. All my heroes look the same in my mind.
LOL… Bernard… maybe it’s a good thing I dont’ have a police sketch artist book
Exactly Vanessa!
In my mind’s eye I know the “feeling” the face makes me feel–if that makes sense. And when I get the cover art, the faces are NEVER what I had in mind even if they nailed the deatils to a T… it’s all perspective
I think when you have characters that aren’t neighbor-type people like a fairy, it’s probably a little more fun to go into detail…
But yeah as a reader unless there is a remarkable facial feature like a scare of something I don’t pay too much mind to it
I get that movie thing too, for scenes.
Ditto.
But I try to leave a good bit to the readers’ imagination.
I use movie scenes, movie actors as well as models. I have a ton of model head shots that I use for various characters. But I mostly like to use real actors to help with characterization.