The Beauty of Myspace Casting

For me, writing narrative fiction is a struggle when it comes to writing characters. I don't like typecasting a particular ethnicity for each character, because when it comes time to casting roles, I don't want to be married to a character being Hispanic or Asian or blonde or whatever. Fact is, sometimes casting against how that character was initially envisioned can actually compliment the story, instead of buggering it all up.

Nevertheless, at the writing stage, unless I make some kind of decision about who these folks really are, what they look like, and how they dress, whether they have blonde wavy hair or straight jet black hair... until I see the person in front of me, I can't seem to get inside their heads in order to paint a compelling character portrait. A hundred years ago, without the aid of photography, novelists might have chosen someone they knew well to use as a constant source of inspiration. Nowadays, storytellers have Myspace.

The pictures at left are of people I have never met and never intend to. Because I've never met them, I bring no preconceptions about their behavior or judgements about their character. They are completely new people to me—hell, I don't even know their real names—a tabula rasa waiting for someone to turn them into "real" people. Nevermind that they actually are real people.

So now you've seen the Myspace casting for my feature film Arousal, which is currently being developed into a treatment for my producer at Bad Highway Productions.

Casting with Myspace has been a huge help for my writing, and courtesy of our free information age. I should be so lucky to have my own Myspace profile surreptitiously cast in someone else's novel!