Do you "cast" your characters?

Do you "cast" your characters?

Maybe not -exactly- like a movie character, or a celebrity of a sort, but somewhat? Maybe even someone you know?

And if so, do you do it deliberately? Or accidentally?

I create the backgrounds for my characters, and I go into deep detail, but sometimes it helps me with dialog, and actions if I see my character as, say McGyver (okay, bad example, but you get my drift). Not necessarily someone who can use string, duct-tape, and a swiss army knife and come up with a small explosive to get out of a trap, but someone who is resourceful, and relatively non-violent.

Two of my current characters are inspired by two dear friends, who are wonderfully open people, so it's safe :rollin Yes, they know they've been "cast", and they're taking it with good humour...and not interfering, unless I have a technical question to pose to them.

But there is an occasion where the character becomes inspired by someone known, or known-of, purely by accident. This is my current situation. In fact, the character in question wasn't even -planned- for in the first place, but he became the MC. I sorta just gave in, and ran with it. But how do the rest of you handle it when it's not planned?

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

I never do, but I get the feeling it's very common.

Rather accidentally, though, I was watching tv and there was a new up-and-coming actress who could fit the image of the protag beautifully.

More often I'll be watching a movie and the actor will give a certain look, make a certain move, and from that little action an entire scene will develop.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

Real people are too complex, too disorganized, too unmotivated to make a good character. Any given person can give me a dozen plus characters.

I'll take an aspect of a person, motivate them, focus them, discard such things as petty jealousies, dysfunctional habits, and create a character that works.

As for their pasts I know very few of the petty details about them. I stick to the major incidents in their past that caused them to react to the current situation the way they do. Most people do not react to a new situation without referencing some incident in their past, therefore they are reacting as much or more to the incident in past as they are to the current situation. Therefore I want to know as much about that past situation as possible.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

I guess I do cast characters in a sense. All my major characters are people I really know, usually very well. This means I cast them in appropriate roles.

Not quite like casting a movie star, but it' pretty much the same thing, I think.

Though I will say it's sometimes more effective to cast against type. Casting an soldier as an soldier can make things too easy on the character. But sticking someone who doesn't know a thing about soldiering into a role where only good combat skills can save his life can really build tension.

I think it's a chracter being forced to face his weaknesses that really builds conflict, and casting against type can help this happen.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

I like to give birth to my own characters, but, once they are created, i find myself looking around for people who could BE my characters, at least physically.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

My characters are usually composites of people I know (including myself). I don't "cast" them with any actors or people in mind, though, but some may resemble people I actually know.

But once the thing is done, I'd try to figure out IF it were ever made into a movie, who could play what. I had readers actually tell me, "Hey, I think so-and-so would be perfect as X if they make a movie of this." It's interesting.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

Some of my characters are analogues of real people I know, but these are only minor characters. If I try to use a real person as a mold for a major character, it places too many restrictions in my mind and hampers me.

That being said, in my recent screenplay in progress, I have a character who's intentionally modeled on George Foreman, whom I imagine as playing in my highly successful and very profitable feature film, when the screenplay is greenlighted! ha ha.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

I'd never ever cast characters based on people I know. First of all, to understand characters, it seems (to me) that you must know their history, because every action they take today will be prefaced by their histories and the actions they've made in the past. I can't possibly know a friend's history inside and out, not like I know my created characters' histories.

Second, I don't like the risk. Yes, people may be flattered that you're writing about them, but if they've not read what you've written...and then they do, well, that's problem situation number one. And if they are reading, then they're influencing your character - it's no longer taking their personality as premise, but it's modeling straight off them. In that case, just do a biography of your friends.

That, and I keep thinking about of a book being recalled on the grounds of privacy infringement (err, the Brits have a name for it, that I can't recall now). Apparently the author did amalgamations of people around him and combined them into characters, but one person claimed that a specific character, and several situations, were based on him & his experiences. He'd known the author quite well, the character's behavior was almost identical to his actions in a similar situation.

Although who-knows-how-many people like me would read it, not know, and not care, it mattered to this guy - enough to make a stink about it, and get his name in the papers (and not just the pseudonym the author had allegedly given him). I do recall an article by the author, who was shocked and confused, and didn't expect the reaction at all.

The book was re-released about five or six years later, with the offending sections removed, but apparently it took something like that long for a) the case to wend its way through the Brit courts, and b) the story to be rewritten with that character's parts removed.

Obviously, caveat writer.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

Sometimes I do "cast" characters, sort of. I don't deliberately go out and look for actors or pictures that look like that character. But then, I'll see someone on a show and say "Oh, he could be Merik!" (In that case, all it took was a line drawing of a lord in a book on Medieval costumes.) For some reason, having an image helps me get a better grasp on the character, although I guess that only works because I already know a lot about the character by that time. Maybe seeing the actor simply helps drag it out of me, or maybe it just helps to have a clear image to go along with the internal knowledge of the character. After all, even if you know everything about how that chracter thinks, you can't describe the character as a brain walking around on little legs, unless you're writing "Lloyd in Space" fan fiction.

As an example, I was once writing an SF novel based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Although I had started an outline-ish thingie, I had a hard time getting into it. Then, I saw Ian Holm in the movie Dreamchild, and something about his intense performance helped jumpstart the story. I guess this was because his performance gave me insight into one of my main characters (my version of the Angelo character), even though Ian Holm didn't really resemble the character.

Definitely, but...

I definitely will find that a character in my stories will have a template. But generally, when I begin to write, I don't start that way. Rather, sometimes I'll just see a particular person as the story unfolds, and then they become the template.

In a sense, it's the same as taking Mel Gibson's character in Lethal Weapon, but seeing that person in a different setting, with the same manerism, but in a completely different neighborhood under completely different circumstances, having the same neurosis, but having a different job, perhaps as an ice cream vendor.

Re: Definitely, but...

*pictures Martin Riggs as an Ice Cream Man* :eek

:rollin

Yeah, that's kinda what I do, when I "cast" my characters. But you described it so much better!

Re: Definitely, but...

I'm not sure people follow their stories like I follow my story. I'm never that far ahead of myself when writing, that I'm never "in the moment".

For instance, when I have people falling in love, in that moment it isn't so contrived. I'll actually be responding almost in real time, because I won't over-think what I'm about to write.

But I'll often have a mental immage of real people, and the emotional interplay. And I think that makes their passion seem more real. I'm not a romance writer, but I love adding romantic elements to most of the stories that I've written.

Re: Definitely, but...

I do the same, actually. I have an idea of what I want to accomplish in the story, but I 1) Prefer to let the characters tell it, and 2) prefer to be, as you said, "in the moment". I think that the feeling of "discovery" at the same point the reader will get it, is what would make the story richer.

But, that, and $1.25 will buy you a cheap cup of coffee

That and a cup of coffee

Nah, people like to watch people falling in love. It's just so much more convincing when you are drawing from tensions you've felt, whether it was reciprocal or unrequited.

I'm not a "romance" writer, but I feel that a little romance is natural.

In most of the stories I've written (unpublished-never submitted) there is a romantic undercurrent, whenever attractive people are thrown together, sharing the same challenges. That is simply life.

In the story I'm hoping to eventually submit, one of the proof readers simply fell in love with certain characters, and she was rooting for them to fall in love, and to be together. She let me know that she hoped they'd be together in the end. Sorry, life doesn't always work like you want. But I'm glad she felt their sexual tension, and rooted for them, because that was the response I wanted.

Well, in story one, these two are brought together, and not under the best of circumstances, with presumptions, and anything but a romantic setting. She is a widowed princess, who ran away from her past, and an arranged marriage, as a teen, and settled into the life of a pauper. He is the man who has dedicated his life to find her, on behalf of her father...and circumstances finally bring them together.

But by the end of the scene (part of the chapter) she has realized that she completely misunderstood him and misjudged him.

Well, he's the kind of guy that any woman would fall in love with, a type of Aragorn meets Captain Jack Sparrow, dangerous, yet deeply committed, and devastatingly delicious by any woman's standards.

So, in reality, being that he is in a position of risking his life to rescue her, although she wounds him, thinking his intentions are to harm her, once she realizes she misjudges him, being emotionally available and vulnerable, of course there is a sexual tension so thick you can cut it with a knife.

Does that mean he falls in love with her, and she with him? Well, the reality is that you know it is possible. But then again, she is not the only woman he rescues, nor the only one he feels this tension with. And yet, does he end up with either one of them? Only the story tells that answer.

But there are those moments when you are so close you can smell the other, and his hand incidentally brushes her skin and he feels the silkiness of her hair, and they are drawn in, emotionally vulnerable. And as a spectator, you are drawn in with them, rooting for them, hoping...yet...circumstances...a knock on the door, the approaching enemy, and all you are left with is wondering if circumstances will bring them back together.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

I "cast" my screenplays. I usually write a screenplay to fit a particular actor or actors in mind. I don't like to typecast actors though, so often when I write a screenplay for an actor, the character could be something familiar, or like no role the actor has done before, but somehow works...hopefully.

I agree, though, people are really complex, but then again, so are my characters. Nearly everything I write is character-driven, although I demand plot. I don't base a character on just one person. A character is usually a combination of traits borrowed from several figures. Most often I start with Types, but, hopefully, by the time the credits roll, the character has grown beyond that. Aspects of myself are probably in all my characters, as with all writers.

A lot of my work involves me taking people I know and getting them in some impossible situation. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I always make sure to tell people though. People are cool, as long as they know in advance. I made the mistake of not telling this one guy, and well, things are cool now, but for weeks we were speaking through our mutual friends.

Re: Do you "cast" your characters?

No. Most of my characters are aliens, so "casting" my characters wouldn't work.

Re: That and a cup of coffee

Nate, that story sounds GREAT! I'd love to read it someday.


As for the thread:
the "casting" of my current WIP has developed after the fact. I started with a general idea of who needed to be where, doing what and then gradually they have slipped into more recognizable "roles" so does speak.

Though it's set in modern times, there are a few warrior types - knights I guess they'd be. There is a definite "princess" - though she doubles as a kind of sorceress. Likewise, the "prince" doubles as a wizard. The villains all have their own perspectives that seem to justify, or at least explain their actions. Nobody is pure and undistilled. The heroes all have flaws, the villains have certain charms and virtues. Some are caught in the middle. None are completely aware of themselves.

Sort of along the lines of "Aragorn meets Captain Jack Sparrow" - the "prince" has that priority of reclaiming a lost throne / stolen ship. Only in this case, it's a city he's keen to restore to it's former glory.