In last month’s blog I was discussing the importance of people watching and how observations about others can help bring a scene in your story to life.
It’s such an important element to writing: capturing atmosphere, the sights, the sounds, the smells.
Today I wanted to continue to discuss the value of people watching, and too the value of inner reflection.
Observing Your Own Behaviour
While you’re looking around the café and trying to work out who to look at, begin by focussing on your own behaviour, what are you doing?: blowing on your coffee, wiping your mouth with your napkin?
Is there any noise that makes it difficult to hear, or to focus? Is the noise loud, or merely distracting?
Why?
Look at how you are you holding your cup? What does this convey about your mood, character, or how you want to be perceived in this situation?
Building A Character
Now look at the individual(s) you’re focussing on. What characteristics best sum up the person you’re watching? Which are the ones you would focus on in a line-up?
Character description should only focus in on the characteristics that make the individual distinctive and unique.
Look again, are there any characteristics that give some indication of personality or mood?
Additionally, what about social group? How are they trying to fit in. Or, stand out? It could be a brooch, deliberately laddered tights, a peaky blinders cap, the way they’ve tied their scarf, something in their hair, or the way they’ve styled it – have they done something that appears deliberately conscious, or artfully/artlessly unconscious?
If there is something that deliberately ties them to something, or to some social group and what does that tell you about their character or personality?
See if you can discover their mood from their body language; are they relaxed? Or, bunched up with everything crossed?
How much space are they taking up at their table – what might this tell you about them?
Have they got any ticks? A constantly flicking leg, are they drumming their fingers on the table, playing with their hair, checking their appearance?
Look at the person or group they’re with. Try and read the emotional interplay between them – is this likely to be their usual behaviour? Or, does it relate to the conversation they’re having?
Look at their facial expressions; what clues does this give you? How close are they sitting to each other? Are they leaning towards each other? Are they heavily engaged in their conversation? Or is one, or both, of them distracted? Is the conversation relaxed? Or, heated?
Show And Tell
What you’re doing here is learning all about how to use show and tell effectively in your writing.
For example, you can ‘tell’ your reader that your couple are having a heated discussion, maybe you might use some dialogue, and possibly some punctuation to add weight to your dialogue.
But think about how much this tells your reader about character and how much more effective it would be to show your characters having this heated discussion.
For example:
“Simon leaned forwards, his body rigid and shoulders hunched towards his ears. He jabbed a finger towards Maggie, his coffee slopped over the rim of his cup as the table jarred. He didn’t notice, but Maggie clearly had, she leaned back, her eyes went to the coffee pooling on the table before returning anxiously to his face.”
You can tell from this that Simon is the aggressor, he’s full of pent-up anger and is the one leaning forwards; determined to get his point across and ignorant of his spilled coffee because he is so incensed.
Maggie, contrastingly, is leaning away from Simon. Maybe, to give herself that fight or flight space? Either that, or she’s surprised by the sudden outburst? Additionally, she’s seen the spilled coffee but realises that she won’t help the situation by mentioning it.
No Dialogue
You’ll notice too – there’s no dialogue here, but the dialogue you add will simply have weight added to it by the actions and body language of the individuals.
There’s no need to tag the dialogue. By weaving this action into the dialogue you’ve created a dynamic scene, which adds weight and depth to the conversation they’re having.
Both dialogue, action and body language will help to develop the reader’s knowledge of character.
Developing character in this way means you don’t have to work half as hard as you would if you were telling and tagging your way through your story.
Happy writing,
Lesley.