Nothing to write home about

Writers are people watchers - it goes with the territory. How can you create realistic characters without a deep understanding of what motivated people, what makes them tick, what their hopes and fears are?

I’m often interested in characters who are their own worst enemy - people who sabotage their lives when something is going really well. Or those who take the difficult path when they could make things easy.

Right now, I’m studying the character trait of indirectness. I’m being polite here, there are worse words for it, but you know what I mean. People who will not tell you what’s on their mind. They go behind your back and tell other people instead and sometime later it comes back round to you.

Or they back off from telling you something, only to let you know 6 months or 2 years later that they hated the way you always used to take the cream from the top of the milk. Or leave your dirty dishes in the sink. Or use use a single capital letter or full stop in an email.

My mother waited to tell me that I had hurt her feelings the day I left for university, by referring to it as “leaving home.” By the time she told me 20 years later, I had no recall of that day let alone the conversation. I couldn’t even remember if there was anything to apologize about.

However you deal with the situation at hand, as a writer it can make a great opportunity for a character study.