One more excerpt from Ruth Rendell's article, recently republished in The Writer magazine. This one is about how she "finds" her characters:
"Increasingly, I look through books of pictures, the works of old or modern masters, for my characters' faces..it is interesting how a character begins to form itself as one gazes at some marvelously executed portrait. Slyness must lurk behind those eyes surely, cruelty in that thin-lipped mouth, subtlety and finesse revealed by those long thin fingers."
She adds, "I wish I had known of this method when I first began and struggled unwisely to make a character fit the plot instead of a plot growing naturally out of the behavior of the characters."
Now that so many museum collections are online, you don't have to be near a museum or gallery or to spend a lot of money on coffee-table art books--these cruel or sly faces are waiting for you online! And in the meantime, what do we detect in Rendell's face...
(There's lots of good advice on creating characters in my book, "Your Writing Coach," available from Amazon or your other favorite online or offline bookseller.)
