Characters: Names & Personality

Sd, if you upload it to photobucket.com -you'll get a url code www. etc et.c om and then you just put [img] tags in between [/_img]

Thanks for your help, guys! You too, missjulie! You seem to have links to everything. @_@ <3

*Moonlight_Mania* wrote:

Thanks for your help, guys! You too, missjulie! You seem to have links to everything. @_@ <3

I'm secretly a cylon and am bionically connected to the internets. >.>

Thanks for the Mary-Sue test link, Emily. *rushes away before anyone can ask her scores*

MissJulie, are you 6?

missjulie wrote:

*Moonlight_Mania* wrote:

Thanks for your help, guys! You too, missjulie! You seem to have links to everything. @_@ <3

I'm secretly a cylon and am bionically connected to the internets. >.>

._. When doing the quiz, a character that seemed completely not Mary Sue/Danny Stu appeared to be a Mary Sue. o_O That kinda makes me sad. ._. It's like what I tried to make NOT happen, happened anyway. T_T Because I personally hate Mary Sues (well, if they're really obvious) and I thought my character through and it seemed very...not perfect, and the test said he was anyway. >_<; *lost*

emilycross wrote:

MissJulie, are you 6?

SHHH!!!! We're only on Season 2!!!

REALLY??? oh we should start a thread over in the offtopic section

I'll see you over there?

Ok i'm posting this on character threads too, but here is an excellent post by a very established writer (think she's published 46 novels across a load of sub genres) - http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/2009/05/ten-with-character.html its to do with organising stuff for character info, but she gives links to free stuff like evernote - which compiles information and synchronises all your book infor. i haven't done it, but gona look into it when i have time and look at these links too.

what you guys think?

Emily:

Glad to hear you have a site that helps you organize these things. I'm very unorganized right now, but my characters all have names that are more or less products of my imagination, or they're historical characters whose names I haven't changed,or else I used names(slightly modernized) from the period I'm writing about. I tried to make the "made up" names fit the characters.
Anne G

Question: i know lots of you can pick pictures of people who 'look' like your characters for their bio files etc. i was wondering do you find this helpful?

I've tried to do this but everytime i do, it makes me stop thinking of the character as my MC cause i then start thinking of them as 'the actor/model' etc. or i feel sort of boxed in with them?

Maybe its just the way i am, cause when i read a book - and there is character detail i kinda don't 'take it in' - e.g. i never had an 'image' like a photo image of say 'edward' for instance, just i guess an 'essence' of the character as a person and an outline of their looks - maybe my imagination is underactive?

weirdly enough - i'm tempted to just maybe go the 'anime' route or something?

Emily I am with you, I find it extremely hard to find people that look like my characters. Mostly because I just do not have the patience to look through model or actors websites to find the "perfect" one. Maybe someday, but not right now there is too much else to do, at least for me.

Question: i know lots of you can pick pictures of people who 'look' like your characters for their bio files etc. i was wondering do you find this helpful?


For me, I like my details to be details but if I'm looking for just the right "something" from a character--I look for it in pictures. I'm also a photographer--so I just can't run and hide from the photos no matter how hard I try to. But I've found that for me, if I can place a more "real" person in my head with a picture I've seen, my character is even more real to me than ever and it helps me with ways the character would display emotions ect.

P.S. It really doesn't help that I had to take a photo class in college called Photo Illustration where we took words most of the time (we had a poetry assignment at one point) and make a photograph from it. I use photos with everything I do now.

Question: i know lots of you can pick pictures of people who 'look' like your characters for their bio files etc. i was wondering do you find this helpful?

A lot of the time, I just know in my head what my characters look like. I can remember.
Sometimes I'll draw my main characters, just for fun/reference.

I wouldn't know where to start looking to find photos, and I know I can procrastinate for Britain sometimes, but looking for photos of characters that I know what they look like anyway, just seems a bit too far for me. Why spend time doing that, when I could be writing about these characters instead?

Question: i know lots of you can pick pictures of people who 'look' like your characters for their bio files etc. i was wondering do you find this helpful?

Ren got me hooked on modelmayhem.com ... its... horribly fantastic. I also use flickr CC (creative commons) for pics... here's a link: http://compfight.com/

I think its *somewhat* helpful, like for Characters A and B i dont need pictures of them, they look like what I picture in my head. But for perif characters C and D, having pics is kinda helpful

missjulie:

Well, if you can do it that way, that's all to the good!
Anne G

Anne Gilbert wrote:

Gobblegobble:

I can do this with some of my characters; others not so easily. I tend not to look in pictures, because the results are often stereotyped, and I try to avoid stereotyped-looking characters.
Anne G

Yeah, I can see that happening to a lot of characters these days. There are a lot of stereotypes out there. I wish I could draw my characters out--and actually I've tried. Doesn't work. I just can't draw at all. Photography is my art other than writing so that is why I turn to the pictures when I am stuck. I actually try to use my mind so much more on the details but if I get stuck on a description--I love using the pictures for some help.

My first novel I wrote I didn't actually place pictures with the characters until I was about half way through it because someone asked me what they looked like and what I gave them didn't help them for some reason.

gobblegobble:

I just have pictures in my head of some of mine. One of them looks sort of like Johnny Depp in some of his roles.
Anne G

well i was looking at my sisters girl magazine and came across Lily Collins, whom is basically how i imagined my MC to be.

Emily:

Hmmmm. . . .she looks like the sort of character that could be the heroine of a romance novel. But I'm probably wildly off-base!
Anne G

Sometimes I do on IMDB.com and look at the actors/actresses, but there's always something that's different between them and my characters. I guess that's a given, since they're not my characters, but it gets me so frustrated! That's why I really don't do it.

I'll go through Modelmayhem.com to find approx. matches, but usually I can still see the character as how I imagine if I find a picture that's close, but not quite. Mainly I look for pictures to give my friends some idea of what the characters look like.

Moonlight Mania and Novel-Goddess:

I go through a wide variety of sources, including people I see on the street. Every so often, I'll come across someon who looks "right" for the kind of character I'm writing about. One of my characters looks vaguely like Johnny Depp(but he sure doesn't act like Johnny Depp).
Anne G

What I usually do when picking how my characters look is picture their personalities while I draw a quick sketch of them. Like with my character Arrow, I instantly thought of a narrow faced girl with shallow wrinkles on the edge of her lips because of how much she frowns. She also had black hair with a slight purple tint because of her heritage. I made her abnormally tall because of how much she likes to look down on people. I think the only soft things about her appearance are her lips and eyes. Sometimes if I'm having a hard time imagining a look for a particular trait, I look at movies and see who played a character that has a similar personality trait to mine.