Cast Your Novel for the Screen – Who Would You Pick?

Although I’m a fairly visual person, I sometimes have trouble seeing a character I’m trying to build. This is a challenge for fiction writers, and it usually a major character, seldom a minor character or “role player” (there are good reasons for this, and I’ll get into them in another post).

My first option is the mirror technique, used by Charles Dickens (see below), and it usually works like magic. But when I find it’s not yielding gold, other technique I used is to imagine my character played by a familiar movie star.

Who would play your tough but vulnerable hero? Who plays that kind of role in films? Gary Cooper once played them. Later, we had William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. Today you might cast Denzel Washington, Nicolas Cage, Clive Owen.

You can disagree with my choices–that’s not what matters. What does matter is that in your mind, you cast an actor who brings that character to life and inspires rich images you can render effectively in words.

Try it. If it works for you, great–and don’t worry, tbe reader will never know your secret. If you need something else, here’s how Dickens did it….

Dickens knew how build his characters visually, using unique facial details that made them pop right off the page. Thanks to a childhood memory of one of his daughters, we know how found a lot of those details.

The girl was ill one day, so Dickens lifted his normal rule of complete working solitude and moved a little bed into his study so he could keep an eye on her. Then he went to work.

She remembers him trying out facial gestures, like an actor, in a mirror facing his desk. Eventually, he would find the image he needed–an expression that not only looked right, but could be effectively turned into words.

Dickens was an actor. He had been up for a major London stage role very early in his career. He didn’t get it, but if he had, the literary landscape might look very different today. He might have gone on to become a man of the theater, and in that alternative universe, it would be “The Plays of Charles Dickens,” that we read.

That didn’t happen, but clearly Dickens was equipped and motivated, as a fiction writer, to find characters in his own face. All he needed was a mirror.