It’s a great trick for screenwriting since …. well, since you’re writing the script for actors to play and not for readers to read. Plus, screenplays aren’t supposed to be as detail rich in the descriptive text as fiction, which is probably why it works so well.

Although I found this a handy trick for writing a few short screenplays, it hasn’t worked for me when writing fiction.

Some of my oldest characters (we’re talking early 1970s) came about from playing with action figures. The moment I was given an action figure I immediately discarded whoever the actual character was and used the action figure to represent my own character. Between my younger brother and me we must have owned close to 30 action figures. All are gone, victims of a curious Great Dane.

The characters I created have, on occasion, retained some element of the features of the action figure — most often hair color, but nothing in regards to the personality of the original action figure itself.

The other place many of my original characters came from was simply from sitting down and writing out sections of the family tree of the characters I had.

I have another post (my first in this website) over on the “Writing My First Novel” section where one would understand why I have family trees. (My stories and characters are all part of a ten thousand year history of 5 royal families, so family trees are essential).

In creating ancestors and decedents to characters I had been using action figures to portray, I ended up developing the relationships and history of the world (well, universe actually) where my stories all take place.

So, while I might find a small physical characteristic from an actor or politician or someone in my own life worth noting for reference, an actual person as a whole becomes more of a distraction for me.

That said, to add to the known authors, Anne McCaffrey has a character from her Pern novels that looks just like Bill Murray. There is a book of sketches of her characters that contains the drawing.

That’s the only sucessful author I’ve heard of who used an actor, however, as a role model.

I heard that Anne Rice used Rutger Hauer as a model for Lestat and that Jim Butcher used a (younger) Jeff Goldblum as a model for Harry Dresden.

Maybe this sounds weird, because I’ve never heard anyone else say something like this, but I see my characters as comic book drawings. The more page-time the character gets, the less detailed the image.

There are endless discussion over ‘organic’ writers or outliners or… Well, any kind of method you can think of. It truly is whatever works for you. The biggest learning curve is making seemingly effortless sentences, just like they do in the ‘real’ books.

I do think that throwing out various techniques is a good idea, because if it’s worked for you, it’s bound to work for someone else. Someone, moreover, who might have been looking despairingly for just that thing to help them along.

Just for purposes of discussion, two very popular techniques don’t work for me: interviewing characters (they live in their world, I in mine, and every time I try to set up a scenario in which we meet, bang! I’ve lost my connection with the worlds and feel kinds, I dunno, like I’m just talking to myself.)

The other one is the pinning of index cards containing plot points all over. No can do: they just remain cards on a wall, they don’t relate to the structure of my story at all.

Elaine