A word on character

I looked up at about 4pm today and noticed a streak of blue sky disappearing into the impending sunset. A wave of panic seized me as I realized I was about to entirely miss the one moment of sunshine this week. Torn between the need to be productive and the need to be in ocular range of the sun, I decided to sit for awhile in my local coffee shop – yes, it’s still indoors, but the windows are bigger and have a general view of the western sky. I have now been sitting here for about an hour and a half. My decaf coffee is long gone and I keep expecting someone to glare at me, but as I check over my shoulder to see if any of the aproned staff give a shit, I notice another woman who was here when I got here – her laptop plugged in and typing away without a coffee cup in sight. So long as I’m not the only one.

So as for my writing, I have been thinking a lot about characters. Not really how to find them…they’re everywhere…but how to hold on to them and follow them through a piece of their lives. I heard many writers speak on the subject at the writer’s fest this year, and it seemed that most of them were viciously against the idea that a character has a life of its own. I suspect the ones who thought otherwise were cowed into silence by the sheer volume of these opinions, but still, this seemed the majority view. Which, I have to say, does not make it easier to think about these things. I like the idea that a character comes along, states their name and age, and then proceeds to tell me a story. Now that it appears I am the one who has to tell the story, I am altogether cowed.

Oh, I have to interrupt myself to eavesdrop on the conversation in front of me. A guy in his early 30s has been sitting on the couch in front of me for about 10 minutes, clutching a take-out cup of coffee, trying to look relaxed…or at least I think it’s likely, in retrospect, that that is what he was doing, but I wasn’t really paying attention at the time. Then this girl of about the same age walked up from the far door and held out her hand to introduce herself. Any bets that this is not the first date of an on-line dalliance? He is wearing dark framed glasses and a retro brown and cream jacket. The best part, though, is his goatee and handlebar moustache. She’s your classic Main Street chick – mod hairdo, rolled jeans, white boots. Cute. After perching for a few minutes on the edge of the couch beside the guy, she has now removed her scarf and jacket and leaned back a bit. He has his arm slung over the back of the couch when he’s not gesturing rather wildly. I hope he doesn’t smack her in the head by accident. But they seem to be chatting in a fairly consistent way and haven’t looked around vaguely yet, so there’s hope.

So back to characters. I have been practicing by writing out descriptions of people that I see on the bus. I have noticed that novelists often say things like, “By the way he walked, she could tell he was the type of man who hesitated before making even the smallest decision”. So I have been trying to notice these kinds of things. The trouble, I find, is that in real life, people are always surprising me. So as soon as I have made a vast generalization about them, they go and do something that surprises me completely. Take the hesitant decision maker. All of sudden he will mutter to himself, “oh, I feel like a cup of coffee” and jump off at the next stop to fulfill his impulsive desire, and only then will I will realize that the hesitation in his step had nothing to do with indecision, it was only that he had stepped on a piece of gum and was trying to scrape it off.

Ah, the new couple have left on their date. They walked north on the Drive and it is about 6pm, so I’m going to hazard a guess that they are going for dinner. I do hope it goes well, they would make an amusing couple. Actually, maybe it was just that moustache that was amusing…