Karen H. Richardson, PMP

I shared with you that I now need to go back through my manuscript and add better descriptors for my characters. I know what they look like, but you, the reader, won’t at this point. Every writer has their own tips and tricks to creating character. While it’s impossible to not pull some attributes from real people, you don’t want to fully model characters after a single person.

My characters have been given some characteristics of people I’ve encountered. But no one character is exactly like a real person I know. That being said, I need to give them hair, skin tone, body structure. In order to write descriptions, I needed something to look at. I’m a very visual person. So I spent some time with Google searching for images of people who looked like what I see in my head for Maggie, Dan and the gang. I tried to choose generic images that had no names attached to them. So if you know any of these folks don’t tell me. These images will ONLY be used for me during the writing process, they will not appear anywhere in my book.

When I told my son about the exercise, he looked at the pages on the wall and then asked “what did you Google to find these people?” With that, I will caution you if you try this to be both as general and specific as you can or you may wake up your internet blocker. Adding the word “head shot” in your search helps.

What are your tips to describing the features of your characters?