I am a very visual person. I love to color-code. If my desk is covered in clutter I can barely function. And I usually have to see something—either by looking at it or writing it down—in order to fully understand it.
Which often makes thinking up a character out of thin air really hard for me. I’m not looking a living, breathing person standing in front of me. I have to imagine them in 360-degrees. That’s harder than it sounds.
Enter the character collage!
This is a technique I’ve used to make the characters seem more real to me, to give them a face and a color scheme and maybe some objects and accessories. It’s more than just details, it’s about… a feeling. A mood board that, at a glance, gives me a deeper sense of who they are.
When I was writing the triplets in the Sweet Venom trilogy, knowing my characters was especially important since they are genetically identical. But as you’ll see in the collages below, they are very, very different…
Gretchen
As you can see, Gretchen is the tough one. She wears lots of black, likes studded things, and carries a sharp knife in her steel-toed Dr. Marten’s.
Grace
Grace, on the other hand, is the sweet one. She likes bright, cheery colors, wears Chuck Taylors, and is handy with a keyboard.
Greer
If you couldn’t tell, Greer is the posh one. She lives for glamour and luxury and is always perfectly dressed and polished.–
I hope you enjoyed that sneak peek into how these characters came to life (metaphorically speaking).
If you read the Sweet Venom books, you’ll notice that the collages don’t reflect exact images of who the girls turned out the be. Grace doesn’t wear much pink, Greer would probably never wear plaid, and Gretchen… well, yeah, she’s pretty much exactly the girl you see in the collage.
But the collages give me a jump start on creating a character who is more than just a two-dimensional list of traits.
Recently, I haven’t been creating character collages as much. But I do spend hours on the internet searching for the perfect celebrity pic to represent a character I’m writing (the face claim helpers on Tumblr are my fave resource!) and use those in my Scrivener document so I can see it as I’m writing.
If you’re a writer, you might also want to check out these articles about writing characters:
- 7 Things You Should Know About Your Characters
- Why Why Why? (aka Motivation)
- Names I Call My Characters
If you want to go deeper into creating characters, there are a lot of great books out there. Start with these:
- Creating Character Arcs* by K.M. Weiland
- Characters & Viewpoint* by Orson Scott Card
- Creating Characters* from Writer’s Digest
And if you’d like to check out more of my character collages, you can find ones for Oh. My. Gods. and Forgive My Fins on my Extras page.
* I make a small commission on purchases made through these links.
I love these books!
Awwww! You’re so sweet! xoxo