Lucy - portraits, three ways

I made a face out of a paragraph last month. Heathcliff, from the text, and every attempt was believable. That's worth saying plainly: a believable face is cheap now. Anyone can get ten.

What stays expensive is knowing which one is his.

A face only becomes a character when somebody decides something about it. Which half stays in shadow. Whether he meets your eyes or looks past them. Whether the camera stands over him or under him. Those three decisions are the whole distance between a pretty picture and a person you'd follow into a bad chapter.

So when I build a character from a writer's pages, I don't start with the cheekbones. I start with the paragraph where the character is least guarded, and I light that one.

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