Seeing the Stories in People

I'm curious - how many of you deliberately observe people around you so that you can use them (or aspects of them) in your writing? Whenever you come across someone interesting on the train or in the queue at the store, do you surreptitiously pull out a notebook and start jotting down things about them, or do you file them away mentally for future reference?

I do this all the time. I have a little black notebook that I always have within arm's reach, and it's filled with scribbled scraps of dialogue, ideas for short stories, snippets of overheard conversation and lightning descriptions of quirky, interesting or downright odd people that I encounter on my daily commute.

Like the guy who sat in front of me on the train the other day who looked perfectly well-groomed and neatly turned out with a snappy suit and freshly scrubbed, pink face that was nearly hairless, but who nevertheless reeked so viciously that he singed my nostril hairs. It was an actively aggressive, sour stench - as if he'd bathed in every evil, nasty sin he'd ever committed and trailed them around with him like a cloying miasma of pain and guilt.

Or the sweet little old lady who sat across from me (again on the train), soaked and bedraggled from the rain. She stared hard at the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper on her lap, frowning at it, then she shakes her head almost imperceptibly and says "fuck" under her breath.

Or the red-headed guy with the vacant smile who works at my local grocery store and who must have been pushing carts around for at least the past fifteen years - I'm sure there's a story there.

My point is stories are all around us and that people - even ordinary-seeming people, are often deeper and more surprising than you'd believe. Be they villains, protagonists or extras, they can all have a part to play in your developing story.

Print versus Pen

I've always been as fascinated by the process of writing as I am by the end product. The "how", "when", "where" and "why" of it is as important and interesting to me as the "what". So recently I got to thinking about typing versus writing in longhand.

It's pretty much a given that if you're serious about getting your writing published (versus scribbling for your own pleasure), you'll need a digital version of your document saved somewhere so that you can make multiple copies, print them off, edit them painlessly and send them to agents and publishers. But there's something so very viscerally satisfying about a crisp, blank notebook and just the perfect pen.

The stationery nerd in me has amassed an embarrassing collection of blank and partly-used notebooks in all shapes and sizes, and my desk drawer is filled with enough pens to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower. From simple, spiral-bound jotters to elegant, leather-bound works of handcrafted biblio-loveliness, fountain pens to fibre-tips, and humble roller-balls - in their own way they're all inexpressibly and rather worryingly beautiful.

But writing longhand seems inefficient to me - it's harder to organise and edit my work, and I know that I'll inevitably have to transcribe everything into a digital document at some point anyway, so I'm just doubling the amount of work I need to do. And yet the thought of finally filling an entire notebook with page after painstakingly handwritten page of lovingly crafted story makes me smile in a way that a printed manuscript in 12-point Courier just can't.

I'm sure I can't be the only one.