The Look of a Character

I'm not very visual when it comes to people. If you're trying to remind me of someone I have met, describing their appearance to me probably won't trigger my memory. You'll have more luck giving me their name or telling me something about them. Faces don't stick with me very well.

I don't know why that is, but I must not be typical, because novelists spend a lot of effort describing how their characters look. When I read a novel, this mostly just goes over my head, but if I want to write a novel, I'm going to have to pay attention to how my characters look and communicate that to my readers even if I have a hard time visualizing them myself.

I've written about creating Abanoub, the protagonist of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. But what does he look like? Modern technology is a great help here.You can just go to Google and do an image search of Egyptian Men. For better results, perhaps Young Egyptian Men or Attractive Egyptian Men or Handsome Egyptian Men or even Sexy Egyptian Men. The last one is different only in that you get slightly more pictures of Egyptian guys with their shirts off (and pictures of Justin Bieber and Zachary Quinto, for some reason), which for a writer is good, because Abanoub is definitely going to take his shirt off once or twice in the course of this novel.

In fact, I'm doing this for all the characters in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I'm using Scrivener to write the novel, and Scrivener will allow me to pluck pictures out of my Google searches and save them with the novel, filed away by character for future reference.

For some characters, I find a picture on the Internet that jumps out at me as exactly how my character should look, and that's that. But that's rare. More often, I shop around for features, and come up with, say, these eyes, and these shoulders, and this hair, and these cheekbones, all from different pictures. Which is fine. I file them all away in Scrivener, and refer to them as I need to.

For Abanoub, I picture him as tall and lanky, with curly black hair. I imagine him with a relatively fair complexion, by Egyptian standards, with hazel eyes and striking dark eyebrows. There are reasons for some of this. Since he's going to be living in Anglo-Saxon Britain, I want him to look different enough from the other characters that whenever anyone meets him, their first reaction is, "Wow. Get a load of the hair and the eyes." Abanoub definitely stands out in a crowd, but not too much. Just enough to make it clear that he's different.

He's a sorcerer's apprentice, so I imagine him a bookish kind of guy. He's fascinated by books, by ancient learning, and by sorcery. If he were living in our time, we'd call him a geek. I guess that's why I want him lanky and fair skinned, as in, doesn't get out in the sun much. His looks tell you a lot about where he spends his time.

I'm still working on the other project, a science fiction novel, for a little while longer, so no word count here.