Sometimes when writing fiction, it’s hard to keep a mental image of all the characters involved, and mistakes start to creep in. You get muddled and describe your hero as having blue eyes in chapter two and green ones in chapter six. To get around this problem, I suggest casting your story in the same way you’d cast a movie.

Go through the newspapers and magazines and pick out photos of actors, celebrities, models, or “real” people to represent your characters. Stick these pictures to the wall behind your computer monitor, with the respective character names written on in pen. Not only will this help you keep their physical descriptions consistent as you write, it’ll also help you visualise your scenes better, and you may even find the pictures suggest things you can work into the story, to give your characters added depth, such as facial tics, a preference for particular style of clothes, or an unusual mannerism, such as a raised eyebrow or twisted smile.