People-watching can help pass the time when you’re alone or with a group of people that don’t interest you as much. Decide the parameters of your people-watching. Visit her blog Writer’s Patchwork for more writing tips and author interviews.1. She has been a guest columnist for the Beacon News, script writer for CBH, and has had articles and children’s stories published in various periodicals. *Editor’s Note: Has people-watching ever led you to write something you would never otherwise have dreamed-up? What are your favourite spots for people-watching?Ĭindy Huff is a writer and speaker, member of the Christian Writers Guild, and president of Word Weavers in Aurora, Illinois. Potato Head of possible fiction characters. It gives you a storehouse of character components-a Mr.When your mind has lost its creative edge, you can read over your notes for story ideas.Jotting down your observations does two things: Many phones have a note-taking application. If you happened to be sitting in a Wi-Fi hotspot, it’s easy to just type your observations, and no one is the wiser. People-watching can be done anywhere, so have a notebook to jot down your observations. Watching a mother interact-or should I say not interact-with her child as he skated around Wal-Mart got my mind ruminating. Absorbing the sights and sounds around me as I watched the game, and feeling cut off from those around me because of the language barrier, led to my ponderings over how it felt to be an immigrant. Sitting in the bleachers surrounded by Hispanic parents who cheered and chatted in Spanish was a new experience for me. I remember watching my son’s neighborhood league baseball game. People-watching can create metaphors and similes that drive a point home in an article or piece of non-fiction. People-Watching Stimulates Creative Juices for Non-Fiction
#PEOPLE WATCHER FULL#
The security guard’s mind is full of fantasies about the girl at the front desk, as he counts his steps before pacing the other direction. The elderly man stretches his aching body as he walks home to his bamboo hut, greeting his neighbors along the way. Perhaps the little boy is climbing up the cabinet in search of forbidden things. My mind pictures them in different places. All of them have unspoken thoughts and desires that I can bring to life as a writer. The set of the guard’s face changing from deadly stern to a friendly smile as he opens the door for the hotel guests.Įach of these people could be the basis for a character in a story. The hotel security guard dressed in black, toting a large shotgun as he paces across the front of the building.Moving his feet ever so slightly, he clipped the grass to look like golf course turf. The gentlemen squatted with his backside inches from the ground. The elderly man whose job it was to the cut the grass at the resort with hedge clippers.If he wasn’t pushing his toy car across the floor he was pushing a plastic chair across the church. The 3-year-old boy who can’t sit still for a minute.Three of the images I captured on film come to my mind: Some, I got to know intimately others I noticed in passing. I interacted with so many people the three weeks I was there. I just returned from a trip to the Philippines, where my mind and my camera captured many interesting characters. Real people make your characters more believable. Maybe another character is a compilation of a brother’s bullhorn laugh, an old math teacher’s comb-over hair style and a politician’s voice pattern. Our mental camera brings to mind that too-thin woman who moves like a gazelle as she washes her windows, the autumn wind almost blowing her over. My mind creates struggles and scenarios involving these strangers that pass through my life for an hour, a minute, or a nanosecond.Ĭharacters in fiction come from real-life people. Because I don’t know them personally, I can imagine a whole life for them. I find the way people walk and the clothing they wear-even how they carry their cell phones-fascinating. People-watching is an essential part of being a writer. I look forward to sharing the most promising articles with you during November. I received more applications than I could have imagined, and had the enormous challenge of narrowing down the list to just a handful of very talented writers. The recent search for two paid contributors to Write It Sideways has yielded wonderful results.
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