Dropping Eaves

Writers watch people. It’s just what we do. We watch, we listen, we eavesdrop, and we write others into our stories.

We watch people so we understand people, so we’re better at writing them, writing about them, and creating realistic versions of them. As for myself, I’ve been a people watcher since I was a child (and since I can read lips, also quite a bit of an eavesdropper). It’s helped me to create better characters, to know how people move and what they do while they’re talking. It’s also helped me to know how people talk when they think no one is listening.

            If you don’t people watch, I highly recommend that you start.

            This is one of my favorite exercises for people watching:

•  Sit in a public place and watch those around you.
  
• Try to pick out two or three people who will be there at least a small amount of time.
• Watch them very closely, and try to think of how you would describe what they’re doing.

           If you want, you can write while you watch (though I’ve never quite mastered the art of hand-writing while watching something other than the page, and I’m a loud typist so I don’t like to type in public). 

• Now, try to turn their actions into a scene of your own. Use the same or a similar setting, and set up the dialogue to match their actions (this also helps you learn how people act while they’re speaking, especially if you don’t know what your “victims” were saying). Pay attention to how they’re dressed, too. This can give you an important clue as to how they would speak (i.e. men dressed in suits tend not to speak with valley girl slang).
• Name your people, decide what they were doing, and give them lines. Think about the way everyone was behaving, and try to match their words as closely as possible to how they acted.

            For example…

            Let’s say you’re watching a couple.
            They're roughly the same age. Maybe a few years difference, but not enough to tell.

            Let’s say the woman neglects to look the man in the eye, but that she regularly looks out at the crowd around them.

            Let’s say that the man keeps trying to get her attention, but that she looks like she’s avoiding him.
            They're sitting on a bench, in a public place, where there are dozens of other people. 

            Let’s even say that the man has tried to take her hand at least once, and that she’s pulled it away.
            Let's also say that it's loud, that it's hard for even them to hear what's being said. 

            We’ll thrown in that the man is wearing casual clothing, and that the woman is dressed in a business suit.

            What do you think they’d be talking about?

            Maybe they were in a relationship, and she’s trying to break it off. Or, maybe he’s trying to blackmail her, and her nervous gazes are a cry for help. Perhaps she's a teacher and he's her student, and she's watching everyone else to ensure no one she knows has seen her there. Or maybe she's been acting strangely from the very beginning, and the man is only there to ask her what was wrong.

            It all depends on your perspective, your creativity, and your willingness to get funny looks when you’re caught staring people down.

            I recommend sunglasses at all times.

Thanks for reading! Happy Wednesday, everyone!

{Rani D.}