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Five Reasons to Cast Your Novel

Jabrosky

Banned
Fantasy Faction: Five Reasons to Cast Your Novel
At the heart of every great novel are great characters. Love them or hate them, their escapades propel the narrative forward. Readers empathise with them, cheer them on and cry with them. Writers need to know how to make their characters as real as possible. Therefore, in your own writing it’s essential that you are able to know how your characters will act in any given circumstance.

There are many ways that writers do this. Some can conjure characters from thin air, are able to construct the nuances of a fictional person’s life bit by bit, built on research and experience. Some base their characters solely on people they know. And some cast actors and actresses in the roles as if the book was a film. There are as many different methods as there are fictional characters. Each is as valid as the next, dependent on what the writer feels most useful for the project at hand.

But for the sake of this article, let’s consider the last option — of casting your novel with actors and actresses — and why it might be a good idea to break out the imaginary casting couch when you start your next novel.

I agree that it can be fun to imagine what kind of actors would play your characters if your stories were ever adapted to film. Nonetheless, I reckon this exercise would be easier to do if your story takes place in the standard pseudo-medieval European setting since most big Hollywood actors are of European descent. You might be able to find some African-American actors if your story has African influences, but many of these (especially the actresses) will have visible European ancestry due to latent colorism. How many major Middle Eastern or Polynesian actors can you name off the top of your head?
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
Let's see... These are borderline I suppose but the ancestry is Middle Eastern.
1) Teri Hatcher
2) Salma Hayak (known as Hispanic but she is also Lebanese I believe)
3) Jerry Seinfeld - if you're inclined to include Jewish people as Middle Eastern, then we can add a lot of celebrity personalities.

If we did a bit of research, I think we'd find a lot more of Middle Eastern descent than you think. Polynesian actors is a tough putt for me. Can't think of any.

I'd also argue, your constraints for this exercise (which I do employ at times) is easier when the setting is modern. The modern world, especially in urban environments, requires a varied cast. I suppose that's more true for large cities like New York or L.A. than it would be for a city like Tokyo where the culture still harbors a certain level of xenophobia.
 
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Mythopoet

Auror
Well, if you're mostly concerned with how the character looks you can do a google search for "middle eastern actors" and have plenty of native actors and actresses to choose from. I've done that before. Many of my major characters are from an Ancient Egyptian inspired country so I've searched for Egyptian actors and actresses to help visualize them.
 
Hi,

Maybe I have an advantage as a kiwi!

Lani Tupu,
Oscar Knightly,
Jay Laga'aia,
Tem Morrison,
Cliff Curtis.

However you don't really want to use actors in my view. You don't know the actors. What you do know are the roles they've played. So you might instead want to cast a character from a movie. So instead of Tem for example you might want to cast the bounty hunter from Star Wars. That way you don't even need to know their names.

Cheers, Greg.
 
I tend to agree with Mythopoet. My story has African and Middle Eastern looking people and, although more difficult, when looking for references on thew Internet it seems to work quite well to just type in 'North African man' or 'beautiful Iraqi woman' than try to find a specific person to base them off. And, it has the added bonus of giving me a fairly clear contrast between different cultures' ideas and ideals of beauty and attractiveness.

I think you're right, though, it is harder to think of non-white actors, actresses, models, etc. Not sure if it's because there are less of them in general, or if it's that pesky primal racism still hanging around in our brains, but it is a shame.

I definitely should have known who Jay Laga'aia was though, he's from Playschool.
 
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Jabrosky

Banned
Of course it wouldn't be difficult to find visual references for certain characters. However, if you read the article in my OP, it mentions that not only can casting certain actors come in handy when visualizing your characters, but it also helps with other elements of characterization (e.g. mannerisms, speech patterns, or personality). I don't think you could discern too much of those from one photograph of a random individual, regardless of that individual's heritage or whatever.

Then again, putting too much thought into what actors might play your characters sounds like a distraction best reserved for the moment when your story is already written.
 

Mythopoet

Auror
I don't think most actors (most good actors?) have the same mannerisms all the time. They should change their body language depending on the role they are playing. So I don't really see how casting characters helps to visualize mannerisms unless you really want your character to walk just like John Wayne or something iconic like that. Same with personality.

I do however often cast character voices in my head. Usually it just happens accidentally. I'll be writing a character's dialogue and suddenly start hearing it vividly in some voice I'm familiar with. I cast Menes the God of Memory in my world (a character who pops up in a slew of my stories) as Michael Ansara this way. First I kept hearing Ansara's very distinctive voice in my head whenever I wrote for Menes and then I began picturing Menes looking similar to Ansara in his guest role on the tv show Babylon 5 as Elric the Techomage (tall, bald, dressed in black, cryptic, etc.). Incidentally, Michael Ansara was of Syrian descent, but I wasn't thinking about that at the time.

I find it most useful when it happens organically like that. I find it less useful to search for pictures for specific characters, but it does help me if I'm trying to visualize populations or groups.
 
Meh. For personality I find one picture can be enough, and the rest tends to follow fairly naturally. Like these:
Oraine Barrett
Egyptian lady
Blondie

For all three of them I just did a generic search - eg. 'black male model', etc. The pictures are good ones and somewhat artistic, so obviously they're designed to be evocative. If I have a vague idea of a character's looks, I can usually scroll around until something like these jumps out at me.

I know that the blonde woman would be cool and sophisticated, with maybe a touch of snobbery that is actually concealing her boredom of people and her reluctance to connect with them as a result. She would be prone to condescending smiles, and gazing off into the distance as though she has better things to do. If she were a 'good guy' or MC, that might be a calculated impression, one that draws attention away from her intelligence or that gives her the impression of being less involved in things than she really is. If she were a secondary character, I might go the other way completely and say that it's a coincidental habit that masks how ditsy and superficial she is.

If it comes to casting actors as characters, though, I find it can railroad my creativity to some degree. I had a character who was largely based on and inspired by RDJ's Sherlock Holmes in his mannerisms and speech patterns, but because of that it was difficult to picture him performing a fairly vital part of his role in the plot. Eventually, I had to rewrite him. Now he's fairly different, and only a trace of dear Sherlock remains (probably for the best).

So definitely agree, it's the kind of thing you think seriously about after the book is completed.
 
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