When I am writing, I tend to cast actors in the roles of the characters. This could be because I come from an RPing background, but I know I’m not the only one that does it. Which is new, because usually I am just throwing my weirdness into the void and hoping it doesn’t scare the horses. At the moment I am just starting work on a new novel and I was casting the main characters – and my usual stable of ‘these are hot guys’ had failed me. So I was brainstorming with a friend (OK, I will admit it, I was mostly avoiding starting work on plotting out the book) and it was interesting what worked and what didn’t in the ‘nummy’ stakes.

Everyone has their own personal aesthetic, of course. I have been loyally handing over cash money for anything with Colin Farrell or Marc Pellegrino in for some years now. What I am talking about is the character/actor combination that creates that perfect rawr reaction when you read about them. Or, because it would get creepy otherwise and give you way too much insight into my knobbly little pysche, think of it as how in a novel the outside DOES matter.

I mean, you wouldn’t think it would. When you are reading a novel, we knew these people better than their own mothers do, and if the two protagonists find each other sexy isn’t that enough? Well, no. It really isn’t. Like everything else in life, we bring our own preconceptions along with us and, frequently harmful though it is, we attach a moral judgement to everything. As a writer, I have to work with that to imply certain character traits and flaws in the character – either because they are there or they aren’t and I want to skew expectations. And I have to find ways to make the character appeal to a whole swathe of people whose ‘I would’ list runs the gamut from Tom Hardy without the beard to Tom Hardy with the beard*.

So, I can’t just say that he was blond, hot, and looked like David Beckham – because for everyone out there who goes ‘yum, David Beckham’ there are three people who go ‘ew, his tattoos aren’t artistically cohesive’. Instead, I have to manufacture ‘hot’ using a recipe that combines physical traits, personality, and luck.

Take my WIP protagonist. He can’t be classically handsome, because he is a self-serving, kinda promiscuous, user. So if he looks like Chace Crawford, it all comes too easily for him. Rough him up a bit, make him bony and angular, give him glasses – and now the reader knows that he has to work that bit harder to charm people. He is still a dick, but now you are more inclined to accept him as a charismatic dick rather than one who skates on sheer physical beauty.

Now, as a writer I can’t hang my hat on that and say job done. These are first impressions only, I have to build on them to keep the narrative engagement running – but that first meeting between character and reader is important. It does set the stage.’

Give a character glasses and you add a touch of vulnerability. A scar can veer into either Beauty and the Beast pathos or make them into a hard man, while if you are writing women the general reaction to a scar is sympathy rather than fear. Give a violent temper to a physically intimidating character, and it is harder to approach them as a romantic lead for the reader. At least, it is for me when I am the reader, since it is the sort of person I have been conditioned to be wary of. If  you cast Zac Orth as a character who is a ball of issues held together by a fraying rubber band, he is vulnerable. Cast Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, that is more of a dangerous dude.

This makes it sound like I am less of a seat of the pants writer than I am. I – and probably most writers – do this stuff on the fly based on our ideas of the character and of what is hot and not. I am just picking it apart because I sat looking at pictures of Kit Harrington and dismissing him for having ‘sad, spaniel eyes’ – and it made me think about how I do build characters physical appearances in my head and where that interacts with who they are as people.

Plus, I am still putting off doing that plot outline.

*i am not a fan of the beard.

*Couch by Robert Huffstutter