This is part 5 series of blogs that will run through how I take an idea and make it into a story. This is my process and it might not work for everyone. It might not even work for me on my next project. The one thing that I've learned is that my process will (and has) changed over the years. Sometimes drastically.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Despite being exhausted after a long and stressful week at work, I knew I wasn't getting to bed anytime soon. If you recall, this is the day that the tornadoes swept through the country and Atlanta was in the sights of a series of storms moving in from Alabama. Nasty storms with a history of tornadoes, hail, and high winds. Storms made me nervous in Minnesota where we generally don't get the violent tornadoes like the ones that go through other areas of the country. And in Minnesota, my house had a basement. The place I'm staying at in Atlanta? No basement.
So I was nervous, anxious and knew it was going to be a good long while before I would be able to sleep. I put the nervous energy to work for me. One of the things I did was begin looking for the hero to the WIP (Work In Progress).
It actually didn't take too long to find a guy that looked like my hero. Kind of. I ignored the kind of whispering through my brain and saved his pictures to my hero file. He's not exactly right, a little voice said. I assured it that I would take a second look at the pictures on Saturday and make a decision after I'd slept.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
It only took a quick look while I was drinking coffee to know the guy I'd found wasn't going to work. The good news, though, was that he was very close to my hero in appearance. I also took another look at the heroine's pictures. I waffled. Again. I decided I would look for women's pictures, too. Maybe I'd find the right model or maybe it would convince me once and for all that I had the right image of my heroine.
The hero didn't prove too difficult to find. That's not to say I found him immediately, but I've had searches that have lasted forever and I'm happy to report that I found the right guy within a relatively short period of time. For the record, he's not that similar to the original, Friday night man, but there's a sort of similarity.
I resumed the heroine search. I had tab after tab after tab filled with modeling agencies. I opened up even more tabs with models I wanted to take a closer look at. Most of them weren't right. My heroine is fairly young and I was able to eliminate some because they looked too old. Then there were the models that looked as if they were thirteen. I crossed them off the list, too.
Finally, I had four or five models I wanted of whom I wanted to see more pictures. One of the models' names was Lauren something or other. When I did a search of the modeling database, a Lauren came up that wasn't the one I was looking for, but she looked like my heroine. Potentially.
As I went through the photos and culled out the models I wanted a closer look at, a certain pattern began to develop. They all looked very similar to the original model that I was waffling over. That made me confident that I knew what my heroine looked like, it would simply be a matter of finding the one that really fit.
After more study and consideration, the final choice came down to the original model and the Lauren model that I wasn't looking for, but found anyway. It took tabbing through their pictures a few times and putting them next to the picture of the hero, but I finally knew I had my heroine.
It was the Lauren that I found accidentally.
