Sometimes a character I thought of at first as being dark haired and short will reveal himself to be fair and tall. And if I pin him down on a file card, he isn’t free to change and let me know what he really looks like. Not that I don’t take notes on the people who come to me. I do. I think about them for months or years. I write about them on slips of paper which usually get lost. I describe them in my journals. They reveal themselves to me, show new facets.
And sometimes it’s a long time before a character will name himself for me. And until I know someone by name, I cannot write about him with authority. A Stella will respond to a crisis in a different way than an Emily. Matthew will not see things in the same way as Simon. Sometimes I’ll refer to my notes during the first draft of a book, but more often simply the fact of having written them down is enough to have set them in my memory.
But where do these people come from in the first place? Does the writer ever know? Well, occasionally, not always.