Tip Tuesday #82

Tip Tuesday is a recurring feature where blog readers send in tips for fellow writers. If you'd like to send one in, now's a good time. E-mail me at agentspotlight(at)gmail(dot)com.

Hi guys!! Hope you're all having a lovely Tuesday. I sent off my culminating study for school this morning, and I'm heading out tomorrow on vacation, so I'm feeling pretty great. I have another fabulous tip from Lisa Nowak to share with you today. Please visit her at her blog, The Tao of Webfoot.

Making a Character Collage

Skeptical? I was too. Forget all that artsy-fartsy stuff, let’s get to the story! But after writing four books with the same characters, I was faced with starting from scratch on my latest manuscript. That left me feeling a little lost. How the heck did I do it all those years ago?

Fortunately, I remembered something I’d seen on Stina Lindenblatt’s blog about creating a character collage. She initially wasn’t so hot on the idea, either, but she said it really helped her get in touch with her characters.

http://www.stinalindenblatt.com/2010/10/getting-to-know-your-character.html

While Stina used magazines, I quickly rejected that idea. All I could find were a couple of those muscle rags they slip in your bag at GNC when you aren’t looking and some Road and Tracks my husband was throwing away. Surely the Internet had something better to offer!

I started out by going to stock photo sites looking for a secondary character. I’d been trying to describe him and realized I didn’t have a good picture in my head. After pouring through tons of photos (i.e. wasting three hours), I found one I liked. I used the “print screen” feature to make a copy. Looking at it compelled me to know more about him, to want to write his story. That got me hooked, and I started looking for others. I realized I wasn’t limited to the stock photos, which you often have to pay for unless you want a watermark smack in the middle of the photo. I also used Google Images and typed in traits like “long black hair”.

Once I identified my characters and touched them up in Photoshop to deal with things like the wrong eye color or those pesky watermarks, I started finding images that represented the characters past, hobbies, and traits. I got a piece of foam core and arranged everything on it. (If you want to be really deep, you can mess around with symbolism here. For example, a cell phone represents a special connection between two of my characters, so I made the image of the phone overlap the photos of those characters.) I gave each character his or her own corner of the foam core, with the protagonist in the middle.

Be sure you lay everything out before you start gluing it down. I realized after I was done that, had I positioned two characters beside each other, one of the items that has meaning for both of them could have been used to join them. You’d think I would have learned from that cell phone….

Love this! Thank you so much, Lisa.