Romance and Movie Stars

I've started to sketch out my next novel. I don't know everything about it yet, but I've decided my heroine will look like Julianne Moore.




Beauty, brains, and all that self-confidence - I only hope I can do her justice.

Of course, Ms. Moore is in her early 40s, and as ageism is alive and well in Romancelandia, I'll have to make my heroine younger. I think one's 40s are quite awesome and I'm looking forward to them myself, but the next book will be another historical when lifespans were shorter. To make it that far with all your teeth and no puerperal fever was a decent achievement.

Here she is again:




Why is it so common for romance writers to use actors and actresses as character models? It's extremely frequent - most of us who blog about writing have mentioned it at some point or another, some writers even posting pictures over their computers to keep them inspired. But why?

I think part of it is that we're writing about people who fall in love. A large part of falling in love is physical attraction, and if the writer doesn't have a sense of the character's physical attractiveness, she can't really bring it to the reader. A convincing sex scene needs some hot people, even if they're only in the writer's mind.

We get so much of what we consider attractive from the media. Television has the advantage of seeing a gorgeous character over time, episode after episode. Movies are larger than life - we see the actors in big situations, their faces 20 feet high. We can't help but respond to a face in a situation like that, be awed, be inspired. Fall in love.

It rarely comes through to the reader, what actor or actress was used to inspire a character. It doesn't really need to. It's enough that we know who we were thinking of - whose picture is over the monitor. And whether we admit it or not, we all do it, sooner or later.