How I Cast Characters – Kandy Shepherd

People often ask me where I get ideas for my characters. I find it difficult to answer because they seem like real, living, breathing people to me from the earliest stages of imagining a story.

Yet they’re not real people—they’re purely imaginary and not based on anyone I know. That’s not to say my characters might subconsciously contain snippets gleaned from people I’ve met over the years or even elements of myself!

But when I start a story, I do like to get a strong image of what those characters look like. I have fun “casting” them from actors and celebrities. My daughter is a great help, as she seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of hot stars.

For example, for my March release, Crown Prince’s Chosen Bride, I started off with actor Theo James as my hero, Tristan, Crown Prince of the fictional European principality of Montovia.

For my heroine, Australian party planner Gemma  I cast actress Gemma Arterton.

(To see some of the images that kickstarted my imagination for the book, take a look at my Pinterest board, “Gemma and Tristan”).

But, as always seems to happen, as I wrote the story Tristan and Gemma developed into their own people. Theo James has brown eyes, Tristan’s are a vivid blue. Gemma began to look different to my actress muse, too, with cinnamon eyes and bright auburn hair. By the end of the book, my mind’s eye saw Tristan and Gemma as unique individuals with their own looks and personalities.

Here’s how Gemma and Tristan look on the lovely cover.

Then, of course, the nature of the reading experience means readers get their own images of how the characters I created look.

An early reviewer of Crown Prince’s Chosen Bride sees Tristan as Richard Madden and Gemma as Lily James, the stars of the recent Disney remake of Cinderella. I was delighted, as I loved that movie and those characters and the book definitely has a fairy-tale element to it. (I actually have Lily James as muse for a character in a future story…)

I love it when readers write to me to tell me they think one of my books would make a great movie and give casting suggestions for the hero and heroine. It’s such an interesting experience for me as a writer—because they have never been the same actors I have used as character muse for that story!

When you’re reading a book, do you ever imagine an actor, celebrity or someone you know as one of the characters? Or simply believe in the characters the author has created? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Make a comment if you’d like to be in the draw for an advance paperback copy of Crown Prince’s Chosen Bride. Please include your email address if you want to be in the draw.

Crown Prince’s Chosen Bride will be released on March 1, 2016 and is available for pre-order now.

Kandy Shepherd is an award-winning author of contemporary romance and women’s fiction. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her family and a menagerie of four-legged friends.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

Connect with Kandy on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest

Building a heroine...

To write their story you will have to know your characters intimately. For this, you need to do more than fill out a character worksheet with all their physical characteristics, their birth sign, their place in the family hierarchy, the names of their siblings. — from Liz Fielding’s Little Book of Writing Romance

My new book, started at the beginning of the year, has a ready-made heroine (always a help!) Sorrel is the younger sister of Elle Amery – the heroine of Tempted By Trouble – so I know quite a lot about her before I start. She’s tall, willowy, with dark red hair and a wicked sense of humour that she does her best to keep strapped down.

She’s totally focussed on her career, determined to be a success and to never have to rely on anyone else. To never be poor. (She’s been there, done that…) She was a student when we last met her, taking a business management degree and determined to make her first million by the time she’s twenty-five.

Her sister’s creation of Scoop!, an ice-cream events business, gave her big ideas and by the time Elle is ready to take a back seat and concentrate on being a mother, she is ready to take over the management of the business and propel it out of the local, small business category and into the big time.

But it takes more than a driving ambition to make a heroine. She has to be someone your reader can empathise with, someone with those little failings, weaknesses that we all have. She has to be human.

Sorrel has always had style — she’s an expert at spotting classic bargains in charity shops and wearing them like a model. The budget isn’t as tight as it once was, but she’d still rather hunt down a great “previously owned” find in the local Oxfam shop, or on eBay than shop in the local high street (one of the suits she finds gets her into trouble from the word go). For clothes, that is. 

Shoes are something else and the minute I saw this pair of gorgeous Mui Mui sandals, I knew she would live on bread and water for a month in order to have them.

What heroine weakness would make her your natural best friend? 

What would you give up your lunchtime chocolate bar, your double skinny latte, for?

I’ll put all the comments in a hat and draw one on Monday. The winner will get the book of her choice from my backlist.

Michelle Styles's tips for the New Voices 2011 competition

The Mills and Boon New Voices 2011 Competition really gets  under way next month on 13 September when unpublished authors can start uploading their first  chapter. You can find out more about this brilliant completion at www.romanceisnotdead.com The winner will have her book published in a Mills and Boon series and gets a Mills and Boon editor for a year. And entry is free!

To help get people going with their entry, I thought I’d give a few tips.

1.       Do your research. Decide which series you are targeting and read a few of the debut authors as well as reading guidelines and listening to podcast.  Know the promise each series makes to the reader. Think about what themes you like to write about. Which series can you see yourself writing forty books for?

2.       Make sure you have sustainability. Even though the contest only requires the first chapter, try to write a complete draft or at least a partial. Many times my first chapters change after I have finished the book.  You don’t want to suffer from first chapter contest syndrome and remember you can submit the manuscript through normal channels afterwards. Yoiu want well developed characters rather than cardboard cutouts moving through plot points.

3.       Series books are short and don’t have much room for subplots. Make sure the meet between the hero and heroine (the incident which causes their world to change) takes place in the first chapter. Don’t go for a long set up. Hook the reader with the premise. Make her want to turn the pages and find what is going to happen next to this couple.

4.       Keep your chapter focused on the hero and heroine, rather than adding lots of secondary characters. The reader wants to know who to root for! Everything starts with strong  main characters. Make sure they shine in the first chapter.

5.       Make sure your heroine is empathetic  and the reader wants to spend time with her.  Give the reader a reason to identify with her the very first time she appears.

6.       Make sure the reader will fall in love with your hero instantly. It might take the heroine a bit longer BUT the reader does have to think yum rather than yuck. If your hero needs to be redeemed, show that he is capable of redemption.  Think Richard Armitage in North and South. The first time the heroine sees him, he is beating someone up. But  the viewer knows he is doing it because that man’s smoking amongst the cotton bales endangered the entire factory.

7.       Above all remember they are looking for a NEW author rather than a carbon copy of an existing author.  Work with your voice. Create the sort of characters you love rather than trying to create characters you think the editors want.

Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romance for Harlequin and Mills and Boon. She writes in a wide variety of time periods including ancient Rome, Viking, Regency and Victorian. Her latest book To Marry A Matchmaker was published in the UK in July 2011 You can read more about her books on www.michellestyles.co.uk
You can also find her on twitter @MichelleLStyles