I already told you about my hero, Andert of Lar Elien. For me, it was always a little difficult to see his face in my mind. I tried to find pics that looked like him. Not much luck. Nobody met my vision of my hero.
Now, I have writing friends who browse actor lists to find their characters’ faces. I’ve gone that way but it usually doesn’t work for me. So I have to do with a vague sense of what they look like beyond color of hair and eye, or any important details like the tell-tale scar Andert acquires in the first novel. (Yes, I think scars are romantic!)
I even have writing friends who draw their characters. My talent doesn’t expand that far, to be brutally honest. I can draw stick figures, and stick horsies, and get a couple of doodles to look nice. Portraits? Hopeless. And it’s equally hopeless to ask someone to draw a picture only I can see in my mind.
And then, quite suddenly, Andert looked at me from a movie poster. My heart stopped for a moment. I had just walked into the local train station (called Main Station, plain hyperbole until a few years ago) which incidentially also houses the biggest cinema in town. Until that moment, I hadn’t planned on watching The Lord of the Rings but then I had to. You see, it was one single poster of Aragorn that showed me Andert. And in fact, Aragorn (and of course, Viggo Mortensen) doesn’t really look like Andert, at least not in the movie. Andert’s face is a bit thinner than Aragorn’s. It was that one single shot that did it for me. And I can’t find it on the web, or I would have linked you up.
So, how do you discover your charaters’ faces? How do you go about visualizing them?










































