Where to Find and Develop Characters

[pmark23]

Thanks to "social media", there's plenty of ways for people to unknowingly make fools of themselves and give a glimpse into their psyche and private lives.

Right now my favourites are:

Twitter
Overheard in New York
and
Ask Metafilter

A gander at these sites gives lots of ideas for quirks and peculiarities for characters, making them more lifelike and realistic while being over-the-top at the same time.


Do you have any go-to places for character ideas?

 

[Randall_Oelerich]

The airport. Grab a coffee and hang out in the waiting area for boarding planes, or in the restaurants there-- lots of characters with international mixes from all over the world depending on the airport. I used to go to the international airport in Mnpls just to walk around and see people coming and going from all over the world, coming and going from exotic locations. Me and a friend would sometimes pretend we were people we were not, bullsh&t talk with accents, etc., LOL.

Thanks to "social media", there's plenty of ways for people to unknowingly make fools of themselves and give a glimpse into their psyche and private lives....Do you have any go-to places for character ideas?

 

[Aschu]

The Airport seems like a great place. I don't have anywhere close that is that diverse here, but I like to go to the coffee shop downtown to people watch. I often extract quirks from my own friends, but the key is finding them after you have been so used to the way they are for so long.

 

[Batutta]

Go to a college with a really international student body. I ran into enough oddballs from other countries during my college years to last me a lifetime.

 

[wcmartell]

Look in the mirror.

- Bill

 

[pmark23]

I used to fly a lot internationally, and spent a lot of time in airports waiting for connecting flights -- mostly Schipol (Amsterdam) and Frankfurt.

I would spend a lot of time in the departure lounges of flights going to far-away places, eavesdropping on conversations. One that sticks out in my mind was between two teenage girls who bumped into each other and then spent the next 10 minutes talking about absolutely nothing at breakneck speed. One was German the other Italian or Spanish, and they were speaking -- no, twittering like birds -- in delightfully accented English.

In that 10 minutes only the barest scrap of information was conveyed (about a mutual friend that got pregnant), but it was done in such a roundabout way, each nugget of information released sparingly that made it almost an aside yet kept you waiting for the next morsel. It was a cool "trick" and in hindsight I saw that great screenplays do this very thing to deliver information or plot-points to the audience without them being aware of it.

Sometimes I would take the train into the city and sit at a cafe for a few hours and watch people and again eavesdrop. I have a couple notebooks filled with bits of dialogue and observations that I still use.