If you are a writer of fiction [and I’ll state here for the record that what I have to say doesn’t really apply to poetry or nonfiction], do your characters come to life on the page for you? Two of mine did just recently.
By “coming to life” I mean more than just seeing them in my mind’s eye as I’m writing. Of course they do that; I wouldn’t be able to write their story if I couldn’t visualize them going about their assigned tasks. But that isn’t the same thing as “coming to life” where they appear not simply as characters of whom I bring to life on the page and give them names, histories, a job, a friend or two, a lover (if necessary), and a few distinguishing characteristics so the reader can tell them apart from the other characters. That’s the bare minimum. But now, I see the two main characters in my third science fiction novel (titled “WARRIOR”; out soon) as more than just people on a page. Something happened to bring them fully to life.
As one of the facets of self-publishing a book, I have to get artwork done. I hire a professional artist because though I have a few rudimentary art skills, I never developed them fully enough, and couldn’t do a cover or interior artwork for a book for world-wide publication if my life depended on it. And a few days ago, the artist submitted to me her first proposal for the cover. In color. The lives, the characteristics, even the personalities of these two characters jumped out at me much more fully formed for the first time. As I stared at that image on the computer screen, I began to see the two characters as real people for the first time. Always before, I had seen them in my mind’s eye, yes, but now that I look back on it, they were more in black and white than color. Oh, I’d given them identifying marks in color, sure: hair color, skin color, eye color, etc., but those identifying marks never stood out like they did when I saw them in color on the screen for the first time. Now they were real, people I could get to know, people who could actually do in a far more visual way what I had written them to do, not simply go about their business in a plain, B&W ordinary way. Now I see more than just the few identifying characteristics I gave them, I see the characteristics the artist gave them. The shape of the face, the chin, the shape of the eyes, the lips, the hair in a much more realistic way, their stature, what they look like in the clothes I developed for them to wear. All that adds up to a fully formed person, not merely the cluster of a few individual characteristics.
Of course, a few changes will have to be made to the cover art to make it come more in line with the story line, but I want to keep the artist’s impressions and version at all costs. I can only hope the cover art gives a potential reader a much more emphatic starting point as he/she watches the characters make their way through the story. Even begin to imagine the other secondary characters in a more complete way, too.