Would she have taken care with her clothes, or
just thrown any-thing on without even seeing if it was
ironed or not?
All these things may seem like small,
unimportant details, but they are important clues to
the character and personality of the women, and the
more you can include, the better feel the readers will
get for your character.
Apart from the externals, there
is the role that a character plays as the spokesman
for my own internal ideas and philosophies. What happens
to a character in a book or short story is not just
a random sequence of events and circumstance. It is
a carefully planned, well-thought out drama of which
I am the director, writer and producer. The things that
a character thinks to himself or herself may well be
thoughts and observations that I have had myself as
I go about my day. I keep several notebooks and journals,
both in the computer and on paper, in which I capture
ideas and reflections and theories about how the world
works. These ideas inevitably make their way into my
work somehow.
For example, in Where
They Dream in Blue, Karim, the main character,
helps Abdullah, a small boy who begs around the shrine
of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, escape his life of begging and
poverty by taking him from the streets and putting him
into the As-Salam Home for children. The seminal ideas
for this book is based on something that happened to
me: I used to go to work by a certain road, and on that
road every day I saw a small boy selling small trinkets
on the street for a nominal sum. Somethingabout that
boy’s face touched me, and I always fantasized
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