Strangers I Meet

*Unlocks phone

*Checks the “all-knowing” Haley’s blog prompts file

*Realizes it was accidentally deleted and has to search through ALL the media in their text thread, laughing at every Mean Girls and The Office gifs to find it

*Resaves the prompts

Good day.

Its night for me right now.

I edit much better in the morning, which leaves the world to be subjected to the creativity that I can only summon when the sky is black.

I promise you, I wish it were different.

But for now, I will edit the greeting.

Good evening.

And it’s at this time in the writing of this post I found the prompt that sounds good.

And let it be mentioned, Haley is new to the entire writing world, (her degree is in marketing) but Tiarra and I are well versed, however, Haley has incredible insight and she amazes me every day. Anyway…

The beautiful wife and I watched the film, The Man Who Invented Christmas, and that is what gravitated me to this particular post. In that film, Charles Dickens wrestles with the tight schedule of producing one the best pieces of fiction ever, A Christmas Carol. Dan Stevens expertly plays Dickens and gives an amazing performance displaying exactly what I do when I “find” my characters.

He (Stevens) walks London as Dickens did, meeting people, and incorporating their personalities and stories told to him about those acquaintances, forms these real people, birthed from real people, into a real world he (Dickens) creates. It’s not enough to form a person, but you need to breathe life into them by meeting real people. As a writer, you can only write what you know, or your readers will see it, laugh at you, and ignore your claims. Characters need to be real people, so you need to meet lots and lots of real people to understand their habits, personalities, and sometimes, put yourself on the train tracks of their reactions to conflict. That is how you can make real characters in my opinion.

In closing, I’ll quote (or paraphrase poorly) one of my friends from college. One night, on a chaotic cruise to Rancho Cucamonga, (don’t ask me why we went to hang out there, but we did, and enjoyed it) he yelled at me, “Jon! You can’t just put people in glass jars and stare at them! It’s not right!”

Fair.

But understanding the Human Condition is something every writer reflects on and wrestles with, formulating a real, breathing character that is completely different from the inspiration that formed them in the creator’s mind. I am not my characters. Any of them. But a little of me, and everyone I meet, is in every one of them.