alex_beecroft

I may have mentioned before that I’m not the kind of writer who sees a movie in their head and writes down what happens from that. I’m the kind who has a head full of grey fog above a dark and unseen lake of words. I don’t have pictures of anything. If I want to know what something in the book looks like, I have to stop writing, make a concerted effort to visualise and then reach for the words.

And I can do that fine for scenery. Houses, reed beds, dust bowls, Elven spaceports? No problem. But I don’t seem to be able to do it for people.

This is why I now go out and find photos of people who look relatively right for my characters, gather them together in a folder on my computer, and periodically revisit them so I can hold their faces in my mind. Previously I’ve only bothered to cast my two heroes this way, but for Under the Hill I did all of the main cast.

Having done it, I thought I might as well share them. If you don’t like having someone else’s picture of what a character looks like thrust upon your imagination, look away now