Several months ago I joined Pinterest. If you haven’t heard of it it’s basically an online bulletin board. You add images to groups and other people can “repin” them to their own boards. It’s hugely popular (as in, the marketers have noticed it and are trying to figure out how to use it), especially among women.
I haven’t been doing much with my account. I’ve never made physical collages, so making virtual ones doesn’t have much appeal to me.
But. I’m planning a book and decided to try to figure out what the characters look like. Usually I just have vague ideas, and scribbled notes about build and hair color. This time I decided to do what so many of my writer friends do and cast actual people in the roles. Then I’ll have photos to refer to when I need to describe someone.
Enter Pinterest. Since I can see what other people pin, I can search for photos of people. There is a “people” category that I’ve been browsing, trying to figure out who looks like various people in my books.
There is one big problem though: my characters do not look like celebrities or models, and they don’t have perfect hair and makeup and clothes. I’m going to have to broaden my image search. Any suggestions?