Why I think character designs are important to your writing.

If I showed you these two pictures, what do you think you could a write better creative prose on?

Okay. Let's be honest here.You can make up some BS abstract minimalism higher-than-thou crap about how the one of NOTHING expresses more about your soul or something, but you would REALLY just be doing it to try really hard to prove me wrong. It's not what you actually think.

Of course you can write more on the first one. Even if you were just doing the most simple thing prose does - describing it.

Picture #1 you can talk about setting, subject, action... textures, you can guess sounds and imagine others in the picture. In fact, it's hard not to. You can talk about time of day, time in history, location, etc, and it's pretty easy to come up with a hundred different scenarios that lead to this image. Okay. Maybe not a hundred. But you get the point.

Picture #2 you can talk about... how maybe there was a ghost and... stuff. You have to stare it for a while to try and figure out and come up with images in your head without anything visual to go on. There's nothing more than your memory to refer back to for consistent details and such.

So basically the point I'm trying to make is that character designs are stupid amounts of helpful to creating believable, CONSISTENT characters. They give you a face to write for, and they actually help you sympathize with your characters better which makes your writing more emotionally appealing. The same effect is explained here by our friend Jeff from Community:




Gives you some emotional attachment so that when something good or bad happens to them, it flows through you and you can write more realistically.

Of course you can always use yourself as your MC but that doesn't usually end well. Like whatsherface who wrote Twilight. The MC looks exactly like the author and it turned into her wild crazy fantasy land where everything was empty and childish and waaaay too over-excited over-fantasized and started a freaking CULT.



 So personally I think it helps you keep better track of what's going on in your character and gives them some solidity and consistency. Of course not everyone needs this, but I think it can make a world of difference.

Details-wise, it's easier to look back on this:



Instead of this: 




Which is supposed to be a comparison to characters in a drawing or design vs in your head. By the way.