I have an active imagination; it’s why I became a novelist. (Well, it’s one of the reasons.) One of the ways I feed my imagination is to observe people going about their daily lives, creating stories out of the ‘unfiltered’ material I’m observing, or overhearing. I like to do this to entertain myself at a café, say, or when I’m on a walk. How a person carries themselves hints at how they see themselves. For instance:
Are they brimming with self-confidence, and walking with purpose?
Are they sluggish, or reticent?
Are they animated, talking hurriedly because they’re excited, or because they’re in the company of someone who interrupts and they’re racing to finish their sentence before they get cut off (again)?
What kind of language are they using?
What’s their tone of voice?
Do they have a strong ‘regional’ accent, or speak with ‘received pronunciation’? (In fairness, the only people I’ve heard speak with ‘received pronunciation’ are politicians, and actors-in-training. But then, I’m from a place where most people speak with a ‘regional’ accent.)
The answers to these questions, above, sow the seeds for creating characters; they give clues to what’s going on in someone’s life at a particular time. For example, if a relationship is flourishing, or on-the-rocks; if someone is nervously trying to impress, or if they’re comfortable in each other’s company, and at ease in themselves. Then, when the person I’m waiting for arrives, or I reach where I’m going to, my attention moves onto other things and my mind ‘files’ my observations away somewhere, for use at a later time. (There are times where I’ve had to scribble an observation down somewhere, either on a piece of paper or in a Notes app, otherwise my mind ‘tugs’, like a dog with a bone, until I do.)
Something I often do, is to try to see things from both sides. (It helps in finding a central conflict, and a common ground.) And to do this, I had to learn how people ‘tick’. Nothing happens in a vacuum. There is always some dynamic at play; a cause and an effect. So, I studied psychology, morals, ethics; spirituality and comparative religion; group dynamics. You know, all of the things which influence our philosophies, and make up the stories we tell ourselves.
The books I found most useful were:
The New Peoplemaking, by Virginia Satir
On Becoming a Person, by Carl Rogers
Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, by Daniel Siegel
The Conquest of Happiness, and Authority and the Individual, by Bertrand Russell
Justice, by Michael J. Sandel
The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith
Humankind, by Rutger Bregman
Designing Buildings for People, by Derek Clements-Croome
In expanding my frames of reference, I widened the scope of what I could write about. Anyone can do this. (If you really want to understand a place, it’s people, or yourself, pick up some travel narratives, some nature writing, and a cookbook.)
If you’re writing fiction, and you’re finding it difficult to get into your characters’ heads to write believable dialogue and you’re uncomfortable with observing people in a public setting: go to, or join, an actors’ studio or workshop, and watch how they bring a play alive. If you can’t do that, you can read Uta Hagen’s 6 Steps for actors to do just that, here.
If you’ve got a question about this post, you’re free to comment, below. If your question is about anything else, you can ask me anything.
Got something to say?