The Things We Think We Know

Now, when you are looking around for characters, ones you know or those in your periphery, there is never a shortage of whom to draw from. We get used to the people around us. We overlook their oddities, their frailties, we don’t see their weirdness as time goes on.

The Things We Think We  Know - what do you see?

Have you ever introduced a friend to someone you have worked with for years.Then your friend says, “wow, what a big nose” or “good grief, is she ever insecure”. And you are surprised, shocked even maybe. Because you have gotten used to seeing this person as a flattened version of whom they are. You’ve picked which parts of them you need to or can deal with and ignored the rest. 


But someone new is meeting them for the first time, they are picking up an energy and an "introduction" that you’ve forgotten. So let your unconnected people meet and then listen for their reactions. It is such a good way to create a character whom you have forgotten. And I will leave it up to you, if you make them a hero or kill them off at the end of the page.

The man I am marrying next week was telling me about a time in his life about 30 years ago when the boys spent a great deal of time trying to meet girls. It seems they played a game of “guess what she does for a living”. An appalling excuse to scrutinize women, I say! But again valuable if you need to write a new character.

Now, of course, we’ve all made up stories of the people who cross our path. We love to think that the prim, pearl-wearing- necklace-person has a stripper pole in her bedroom, or that the big, mean-looking football player is counting down the days until the Christmas movies start on the women’s network.

We make up stories, all the time. We need them to make sense of our world. We need them to understand others, even if the things we think we know are totally wrong.  

We make up stories to make sense of our world. (Tweet This)

The things we think we know can be totally wrong, and they still make sense to us. (Tweet This)