The writer watches
One of my favourite pastimes is watching people, I do that everywhere. I watch how they move, how they talk, what they do.
I observe strange things, like the guy I saw in the underground once, with the word “fate” written on his forehead.
I observe others, and give them stories.
The guy with fate on his forehead becomes a guy who is in the underground to meet up with a wizard, who will take him to a different world so he can find his father.
The crying woman running through the train station is late because her mother is in the hospital.
The man shouting at a street vendor, gesticulating, is mad because the street vendor refuses to sell the thing the man wants because he isn’t a mage.
The girl on the park bench giggles uncontrollably because her invisible friend is telling jokes.
I don’t often write those stories down.
That is because they are practice. They are me training my writer mind, observing.
Sometimes they slip into stories of mine, these characters I build in fleeting moments, and I know exactly where I saw them and when, as if they become full-grown characters in the back of my mind, somewhere.
This act of observation and storytelling is essential to my writing practice, not because it gives me character building blocks, but because it feeds my imagination.