JP’s Java has, in my opinion, the best black coffee in Austin. I worked their for six months this year, and know the high drink quality the baristas maintain. It’s also an environment conducive to creative writing. That’s my plug.
I wanted to create a character. So I looked around. Then I wrote. I made some of my thoughts his thoughts, and I borrowed friend’s dreams and made them his. My process was fluid, but perhaps too much so. I realize I didn’t describe his appearance at all.
How do you create characters? Do you make a list of traits first? Do you create fictional counterparts to real people? How do you introduce characters into a larger body of work? Do you start with appearance?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and processes. This is my crack at creating and introducing a character:
{August 17, 2009}
The old man brought his head low to drink the oily black coffee. Steam rolled up around his face as he sipped, pursed lips expecting the sharp heat. Dark jazz notes sauntered through the place, half-convincing the young, would-be intellectuals they were somewhere cultured. Like Paris. But they were in Ashford, Connecticut, and their notions of Paris were a fabric of borrowed memories and artbook photographs of Picasso, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.
The old man dreamed like them once. He had believed he would teach at Oxford, and had since he was six years old. He had wanted to be a Great Mind. He looked now with some disdain at the students around him, though it didn’t show on his face. Not much did anymore. He quietly mocked their unkempt hair, worn Birkenstocks, thick glasses; tables cluttered with paper, books, pens, calculators; one table showed six demitasse cups between two people; even their beards, he thought, are contrived neurotic tendencies meant to portray academic zeal, as if they pursued knowledge at the cost of personal hygiene! They know nothing of the cost of becoming a Great Mind, the old man thought.
Quite unfortunately, however, he did.
