The people watcher
People-watching should be made an Olympic sport. If it was I’d be a gold medal winner three or four times over, I reckon. Like anything – exploring Vinyl Packaging for interesting fonts, or looking for an antique I can do up and sell on – people-watching is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Sometimes it is neither, as it’s raining and hardly anyone comes into the coffee shopt to sit down! But what it is, always, is productive. I couldn’t speculate as to how many people have influenced my writings, but I will say this: it is a lot.
If you pay enough attention and are open enough, your characters just walk straight into your field of view. You can monitor the way they hold their coffee cup, the way they look suspiciously left and right while talking on their mobile phone, and countless other things which help you put them in your novel. With enough information and interaction, you get to create a character from scratch, and see them act out real life right before your eyes.
One of my favourite tricks is to strike up a conversation with them as they sit there. I watch how they react – the facial expression and how it changes, and the way they hand me the money for their drinks – and later on I use those notes in whatever I am doing. All of it is useful, and all of it enables me to write more realistic characters, or at least that is the delusion that I am under.
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