Fated

When I visited the parental house recently, a new laptop case was waiting for me. (My mother loves to thrift-shop as much as I do, or possibly more, and she’ll pick up things and stick them in my old room. It’s a surprise every time I come home!) My old one was slowly losing the black faux-leather on the handle to expose it’s soft white-underbelly and it looked very disreputable and piebald, so I was glad of the new case.

Apparently someone forgot to clean out the front pocket before they sent it to the thrift store, though. I opened it up and found exactly what I would have in it as a writer. There was a boarding pass, a receipt for coffee at the airport, and a piece of scrap paper with the corner torn off with notes about restaurants. I found that the most fun, because it seemed not to be directions to one in particular, but rather attributes of several, like “good fish” and “two blocks from the water”.

The best part was several stapled sheets of paper photocopied from something that had been printed in a really ancient font. It was a character worksheet! Obviously I was fated to receive this laptop case. (Alternately, serendipity is fun. Whatever floats your boat!) I don’t think I’d ever actually use it, because it was very clearly meant for a contemporary story (What’s his education level? What job does he have?) and also it exclusively used male pronouns. I write women too, tyvm!

Also worksheets don’t particularly fit into my process, because for me they fall prey to the Ceramic Owls Syndrome. That’s when you have a question like “what are her hobbies?” and you randomly slap in “collects ceramic owls” because you want to fill the hole and round out the character, rather than thinking in a more linked manner, and deciding her hobby is scuba-diving because she’d living on the ocean when we first meet her. I mean, for some people worksheets are great evoking the scuba diving aspects, I just know I’m prone to ceramic owls so I can finish the thing.

(Someday I’ll write a short story with a ceramic owl collector in it, just for all of you, my loyal blog readers…)