Stealing faces

As a writer, I steal faces… not literally that would be disgusting, also illegal, and also murder! Maybe that’s a story for another time, or for another writer! No the faces I still are my memories of actual faces I have seen… never people I actually know, but strangers I have sat opposite to on a train, walked passed in the street, seen near me drinking mint tea in a café, glimpsed from a bus, stood adjacent to in a supermarket checkout queue, seen advertising something, acting in something, singing something… I know nothing about these people, nothing except my memory of them, like a photograph in my mind.

Sometimes I have a character without a face, and then I actively scan the strangers I come across or personalities on TV or actors in films, and when I see ‘the’ face it is almost as if I take a photograph… I can see those mental snapshots right now!

The first time I remember doing this was when I was a child on the bus… quite a young child, maybe seven or eight or nine, and a man cycled past the bus on the inside as we were stopped somewhere, and I thought ‘I’m going to tell a story’ about you’! I can recall him now… it was spitting with rain, he had a brown belted mac on, a white shirt and black tie just showing at his neck, he had very dark hair slicked back (no doubt with Brilliantine or Brylcreem. He was clean-shaven and had an olive complexion and was concentrating on riding his bike; he had an oval, rather regular face with no particularly outstanding features… and looking back at that ‘photo’ now, I guess he would have been in his thirties, or maybe younger. I have never ‘used’ him in  a story… maybe I should!

Sometimes, as I write, the faces change and develop into something else as the character develops into someone else; when I used to collect my children from their infants school, there was a young old, probably about sixteen or seventeen who waited for his younger siblings. He was a pleasant, smiley boy, tall, quite chunky, with a very pale roundish face, teenage acne, and very black hair gelled back. Most of us waiting at the gate were mums and grandparents, so he stood slightly apart from us with an impassive expression. I took a mental photo of him, and some time later, in my mind he grew up, became fatter, taller, no longer smiley but still impassive. My character became far removed from the lad; my character was sad, lonely, awkward, but hid it behind a belligerent and sardonic manner. My character had had terrible acne when he was young, unlike this lad,and my character had a difficult childhood, whereas this boy I knew had a good, happy, caring family. I’m sure this lad, if I could see him now, probably in his thirties, would have not grown up to look like my character at all!

If you read any of my books, and think you recognize someone in them… you really don’t… my characters are all people who have come out of my imagination!