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You Should Cast Your Characters
It’s not all vanity and procrastination — it can help you write.
Stumble onto many authors’s Pinterest pages, and you’re likely as not to find a folder of “face casts” — photos of models or actors that resemble their characters. (I was no exception when I was working on my first novel, but they seem to have mysteriously vanished from my neglected Pinterest page. Hmm.)
I imagine that, to some, this sounds like a silly fantasy — authors and fans trying to cast a movie that hasn’t been written or optioned and is likely to never exist.
To others, it might sound like lazy characterization — the writer didn’t describe the character well enough on the page, so now they’re forced to resort to using photos of actors to describe their characters.
To the less uptight, it might simply sound like some good, writerly fun to distract from the hours of prose and crippling isolation. There’s definitely an aspect of that, I’m not going to lie.
It’s also an easy way to get other people excited about your writing.
