Envisioning your characters

I tend to under-describe characters and let the reader fill in the blanks with what they believe they look like. The important factors are always there, but I never want to give them too many details to piece together. Once they get an image in their head, its more likely to help them relate to characters they had some part in creating (just a personal preference, obviously.)

It also helps battle a personal pet peeve of mine: the over description up front. Ex. Gale spun her head around, golden locks gently glistening in the sunlight as her crimson eyebrows furrowed at the situation before her. Her hot pink coated lips pursed in ----AHHHHHH

That might just be me. Be describing all of these things with abundance up front pulls me out of the story. "Gale was pretty, but in a 'tries too hard' kind of way," would go infinitely further with me as a reader.

 

I think using a little of both is a great method. When you create a character based completely off of your imagination you're most likely giving the reader something he/she has never seen before. When you take personalities from real life it provides a unique and often funny character that is also relatable to the reader.

 

Some of my characters are based on traits of people I know, so their appearances are a mix of people I know.

 

I base what my characters look like from inanimate objects. Which I'm finding a hard time actually committing to, as that's so unconventional it almost seems a vague shade if wrong, or in poor taste somehow, SO, I'm rather reticent to go through with this.

Or I'll think of some unusual trait that is actually quite subtle.

 

One of my main characters, is based on a friend remotely. But thats all.

 

I sometimes base my character's appearances on people in the media but never on people I know. It's for the same reason I avoid naming my characters the same names as people I know, I end up associating them with that real person too much and it makes me uncomfortable for some reason. I do take personality traits from people I know but I mix them up so it's not one person's exact personality that I am using.

In writing I only give brief descriptions of characters' appearances (such as hair colour, skin tone, maybe eye colour if it fits in). It's sometimes nice however to have a full image in my head though, it's hard for my mind to form a totally developed human face purely from imagination so a visual aid is nice.

 

How do you manage to avoid using names of people you know?

 

Well for me I read a lot of sites like 2000names and Babynames. And find names I like a lot.

 

Basically this. I actually have little problem finding names that wouldn't sound odd in society but don't belong to someone I know personally. I occasionally use the names of distant acquaintances for background characters though as that doesn't matter so much to me.

 

I used baby name sites when I first began writing but found that the names I was choosing that way didn't fit them or that I knew a lot of them already. I spend a lot of time in bars and dance/strip clubs and I've moved around a lot (small, coastal towns/big cities/multiple countries) - I know a lot of people.

I tend to let the character "choose" their name rather than picking one for them. I did this with one of my pets, too - he went nameless for a week until I called him "Haru" without thinking about it. In the cases where I do use names I can't match a face to I soon meet someone with it (this happened recently, actually, when my friend gave her son the same name as the love interest in a novel I finished last month).

 

Yoshiko for me, I end up with a name in my head. That races. But they are all based on the names I have read.

I didn't say I chose those names from the site. Only I read them. And selectivity remember the ones that I like the most. And use the most.

 

Again, this pretty much applies to me too