Picking Up Men...um, Women, er, Characters

[Peg Herring]

Sometimes a character just walks into my life and I think, "He/she has got to be in a book!" Questions arise like "How many times did she dye/perm/heat that hair to fry it that badly?" or "Does she really think everyone else loves that irritating dog as much as she does?" Answers to the questions provide fodder for a secondary character with depth and dimension.

People-watching garners tidbits of human nature that add salt to a story: the man in the restaurant who speaks to the waitress as if she's dirt. The clerk in the gas station who spreads cheer like cream cheese. The parents of many small children who work as a team, without need for discussion.

The sad thing is that I often forget these little gems unless I capture them quickly. To prevent that, I carry a small tape recorder and talk to myself, adding them later to a file called "Bits and Pieces" in my computer. I transcribe the random thoughts into it and then I can visit periodically to get ideas.

With so many people in the world, I'll never get all the interesting ones into a book, but as Sally Bowles says, "...I do, what I can/inch by inch, mile by mile, man by man."

[Peg Herring]

It's all to the good, right?

[James R Moreton]

The exact opposite happened to me the other day when a man walked in to a barber shop who was a doppelganger of a character I created not twenty four hours before. He was even wearing the same working clothes and had the bald patch and identical head shape. ' A dome not much smaller than the grand mosque'.

[Dana King]

These are the kinds of things that will place the reader more securely in your world. A lot of time should not be spent describing minor characters, but you want to create an image in the reader's mind, if only for a minute. Little things like you mentioned above serve this function very well.