Practise Can Approach (But Not Make) Perfect

When I was a psych major at San Jose State, they used to tell us that the earliest of all psychologists were the novelists and romantic poets of the 1700 and 1800s. These guys would get into some really elaborate and extensive character studies, delving deep into a character’s psyche to try to see what made each character tick. The goal here, is to make the characters believable to the reader. If your reader is constantly having to stop and figure out why the characters are doing whatever it is that they are doing, the reader will get confused and tired of reading your story. If your readers simply accept what the character are doing, how they are behaving, then they read past the characters and get into the story you are trying to tell. Writers pay a lot of attention to how people act and why they act that way. It’s part of the writing job.

When I was working in restaurants, we had a little pastime that we’d engage in when times were slow and there were no more napkins to fold or silverware to polish. We’d point out a customer, a couple or a group of customers and we would tell their story. We dealt with so many people so often, we’d pick up an instinct about people. For instance, if a couple is sitting at a cleared table after dinner and they aren’t talking, but simply checking out the light fixtures and the draperies, gazing right past each other, we’d tell you that they were a married couple, long satisfied with each other and comfortably having nothing to say. It was a completely different story if it was a couple on their first date, no matter what the age. You could get so good at this that you could spot an illicit love affair within the first 20 seconds of being seated, their eyes darting around to see if anyone they knew was also here, to catch them in the act. This is another kind of character study, not so much consciously studied as achieved by long exposure and subconscious notations taken by the brain. You just start to notice things.

I remember when I was in the fifth or sixth grade and one of the boys in my cub scout den did something wrong and all the guys wanted to kick him out of the den. The wayward boy was a friend of mine and I picked up a pencil and some paper and I sat down for hours trying to pick his personality apart, so as to convince the other guys

(to continue, click here)