Inventing characters

When writing a novel, you want to know your characters. To help with imagining them and propelling the story, make scrapbooks for each fictional person. From magazines, catalogs, newspapers and other photo sources, snip visual detail to cut and paste onto pages dedicated to each character. What did your adult characters look like when they were children? Where do your characters live? Who are their friends, relatives, pets? What foods, fashions, and fetishes do they enjoy? How might color palettes convey their personalities? Does your protagonist wear an old t-shirt or negligee to bed? Is her lover a man of mismatched socks? Most of what you discover won’t end up in the prose, but it will deepen your characters and their story. Books on the craft of writing  suggest making lists of character attributes, but I find the visual prompts to be richer. In the example below, I knew enough about a minor character in the story to recognize him at eight years old painting a watercolor at his living room coffee table. I knew he had protruding ears, so I recognized him in a photo as a baby. I was surprised to see him as a teenager with his recording equipment, yet his look of focused attention was familiar and right. All of this was used, not only for his character development and scenes, but also for that of his mother, who was a main character, his father, and his friends, who are prominent in the story.