Three things overnight and into this morning combined into this posting. In class, I was faced with the fact that my obsession with Yolanda was born out of a personal current experience, that I not only felt an empathy with her but that she was a part of me that I was living.
When I drove home from class, I passed six police cars lined up on the dark road around the corner from my house. On the eleven p.m. news I found that they were there for a possible murder/suicide.
The Professor posted about a forthcoming entry on character development for his series on writing in hypertext.
Where do our characters come from? Inspired by people we know or have read about, sure. But the feelings we impart from our own experience is what makes them real. Yolanda is an elderly, overweight Mexican woman who has suffered through domineering husbands and a tough life to relax and accept her fate. Now I’ve been blessed with an inherited metabolism that has always allowed me to eat like swine at a trough and not put on a pound. New plateaus were reached as the decades went by, but the scales went from ninety-five to a hundred pounds over all that time. Since I’ve stopped smoking, I’ve put on about ten pounds. Only once twice before in my life had I reached somewhere close. Ten pounds ain’t much, but when its all settled in one spot and is ten percent of your body weight, it’s noticeable.
So that’s where Yolanda’s bulk comes from, the feeling of being more than what I’m used to. Of taking more space than I’ve been into for so long. There is a discomforting feeling that I carry with me, and a shock when I first saw my new self in a mirror. Since it was such a fast change over a short period of time, the bulging of belly over waistband and the heaviness of getting up from a chair or walking across a floor is a sensation that one is aware of as a difference in comfort zone. Yolanda likely sprang from this awareness.
So how do we recognize a pattern developing in a character? How do we relate to someone so entirely different from ourselves? How do I know what a Mexican sun feels like, or how one "settles into" a rocking chair at dusk?
As I noted yesterday, we have two rocking chairs in our garage–with the recent family dyings we’ve had to clean out a few houses. We have two more rockers of our own in the house. One more down the cellar. Somehow, without conscious recall, all five gathered and became the one on Yolanda’s porch. The peppers are obviously from my own gardening background; I have strung ristras and ground dried hot peppers into flakes many times. I’ve felt the sun burning its way into my skin from summers laying on the sand of beaches at the Milford shoreline.
We don’t purposely call to mind these things; they are a part of our makeup and as we write, they likely just come in to fill in the sense and sensual portions of the story of a complete stranger. A stranger with whom we connect and if we look closer, recognize as a part of ourselves.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology