Bringing Characters to Life
March 2021 Gimme Five: Bringing Characters to Life
By Jen Collins Moore
We’ve all been there. You have a great idea for a murder, you know who did it and why. But when it comes time to actually write the characters, we get stuck. How do we describe their hair? That expression in their eyes? How are they sitting during a key scene?
This month Lydia (L.D.) Barnes, author of The 107th Street Murders and many short stories, shares her tips on bringing characters to life.
1) Start an image bank
Lydia is constantly looking through magazines for evocative images. She tears out everything that catches her interest and stores them each in a plastic sleeve in a three-ring binder. This becomes her image bank, which serves as inspiration when she sits down at the page.
“Emotion and attitude don’t Google well, and it’s hard to surprise yourself in a computer search," Lydia says. “I’m always surprised by what I find in my image bank, and it makes the story better.”
When she’s writing a character, Lydia searches her binders for someone who matches the picture in her head. The pieces don’t all have to be perfect—she might use ten different pictures to capture a character’s eyes, hair, clothing, expression, and attitude during key scenes—and with those pictures right in front of her, writing a scene becomes infinitely easier.
“Advertisements in fashion magazines have great vignette photographs very artistically done,” Lydia says. “There’s a story behind each one just waiting to be told.”
Lydia notes you don’t have to run out and buy a load of magazines. Libraries purge their out-of-date periodicals frequently, so make friends with your librarian and find out how to collect their old magazines. Doctors’ offices are also often happy to pass on outdated magazines, as are friends and neighbors.
2) Keep a living character bible
As writers, we sometimes forget what we’ve written. A character’s car, hair color, even children’s names might slip our minds. Lydia says the solution is a character bible with inspiration pictures from your image library and a worksheet filled with key facts.
In her prior life, Lydia wrote IT training guides and disaster recovery manuals. “I worked in corporate settings for so long I know the value of the data.”
Don’t get hung up on discovering your characters’ deepest wants and needs before you’ve begun writing (unless that works for you). The bible is intended to be a living document that grows as you learn more about your characters.
In addition to keeping your characters consistent, the bible also allows you to easily spot duplication in your story. Flipping through, you’ll realize right away if you have three janitors or too many brunettes, things you might miss when you’re close to the page, deep in the story.
3) Give your characters a hidden talent
Anything is possible when we’re drafting, and Lydia says giving characters hidden talents is a great way to get them out of a corner we’ve written them into.
Have a dramatic chase scene and need a way into a getaway car? Why not give your hero the ability to break in and then jump-start a car? You can write a backstory that makes it believable, like a mechanic dad who taught his daughter some of the tricks of the trade.
Keep track of these in your character bible as inspiration for future plot points, as well as to make sure you’re not using the same ones over again.
4) Use hard copies
In a digital age, it’s tempting to keep everything on our computers and scroll through files of inspirational pictures or Word documents of character information. Lydia says that’s a mistake. There’s a magic that happens when you flip through a useable book that’s different from scrolling on your computer.
“Flipping through your image bank or character bible, you’ll see connections and opportunities you missed before,” Lydia says. She uses three-ring binders and plastic paper protectors for her books, and keeps a loaded bookcase in her office for easy reference.
5) Think like a movie director
Lydia took classes on filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago and brings that perspective to her scenes. “I’m always thinking about where my characters are in space and how they move through it.”
For Lydia, this involves knowing the mechanics of the rooms her characters inhabit. She writes floor plans so she knows where the windows are, where the doors are, etc. It helps her make sense of how the characters are physically inhabiting a scene.
Lydia also focuses on a characters’ attitudes. A cop might wear a “resting workface” mask on duty, but come to life with her family. Capturing those different demeanors is like directing an actor, and Lydia might have twenty different pictures in her image bank for a character’s different attitudes in the story.
”They can be people of different ages and races," Lydia says. "The point is that your character is going to look different at different times.” The image library helps her bring those changes to life on the page.
Jen Collins Moore is the author of Murder in the Piazza from Level Best Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Masthead: Best New England Crime Stories and Mystery Weekly. She is an officer of Sisters in Crime Chicagoland and editor of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest newsletter.