Characters

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.”

Psalm 139:1-4

I have probably lost all readers on here due to the fact that I haven’t written anything in months. The truth is, however, that I’ve still been writing, just not for this. I’ve been writing, or maybe a better term would be “thinking about writing” other things. Stories and stuff. I don’t know, I took a fiction writing class.

I have found, while writing or thinking about writing, that I’m not very good at making up characters. It’s just hard to do. Thankfully though, I go to a very large university that is very diverse, and I have no problem finding characters walking around me everyday. All sorts of odd things stick out to me about certain people, and I like to make a note of these people so I can write a story about what I think their lives might be like.
And this makes since to me. So maybe I’m not the best at coming up with characters. Lucky for me an Author much wiser than I came up with millions of characters, hundreds of which I see everyday. By this I mean, not only did God create people, but he also wrote their character development. It’s easy for me to admit that I could never create characters as his, so I just piggy back off of him and steal the ones he thought up. They’re genius.

Anyway, this main story I’ve been working on lately is based loosely on the life of a person I see very often, but don’t really know that well. I haven’t really talked to him in years in fact. But I see him everywhere.
The one place I’m guaranteed to see him is the library late at night, working on one thing or another. I added this to the top of a list of strange “quirks” that made this character stand out to me. In the library every night.
I pointed this out to my friend Thom, and we talked about how strange of a habit it was and how we saw him there every night and how he was a great character to write about, thank God for writing him in.

Then I thought about this more. Yeah, I saw this kid in the library. Every night. I passed him sitting at the same computer at the same table in the same room as I walked through to the Quiet Wood room on the far end of the library. Every night.
And it hit me, eventually, that as I was writing about a character with this strange habit of hanging out in the library every night, I too was hanging out in the library every night. I had my own table in my own room and my own custom of getting a Bookstack Mocha and a Blueberry Muffin.

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, yes, God has written the character development of every person he’s created, and it’s easy to forget that I too am one of them. Just as much a character as the next guy.
This is actually a relief, because I’m a character written by the the most incredible Author ever.

I must be one heck of a character. Who knows, maybe you’ll see me write a story about me sometime.