Free Writing, ect.

I should point out that the writing exercise in the post below is pretty much 'free writing'. My prof is obsessed with it. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I cleaned it up a bit before I posted, but, yah, still free writing.

I'm not really qualified to lecture anyone on anything -- except, maybe, why Metallica and Rhianna should never, ever be played back to back -- although I do sometimes rant, but whatever. So, I think I'm going to do more posts like this one where I bring forth a topic that kind of interests me and then let whomever is reading this take from it what they will and leave it kind of open ended.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how people play different roles for different people or maybe play different roles at different times in their lives. Now, despite using the word 'play', I don't mean that we're fakers... just that one person is many things to many different people at different times in their life. Also, context matters a whole lot. Take these two examples:

I once saw k.d. lang in the grocery store. Now, I've always thought of her as a feminist-lesbian-vegetarian. That's just what she was when I pictured her in my head. When I saw her at the grocery store, she was wearing jeans and a striped shirt that looked pretty much like something my non-feminist-non-lesbian-non-vegetarian mother would wear. She smiled at me and we both carried on our ways with no rants over the Grade A Canada beef in my cart. It occured to me that it was a little silly of me to expect her to be a feminist-vegitarian-lesbian at the grocery store. That might be part of who she is... it might be what we see on TV... but that doesn't mean that's all she is.

Example 2. I'll use a bit of a personal example for this one only because I'm pretty sure everyone has 'this person' in their lives. The first person who broke their heart. Let's call my 'this person' C. C and I struggled through a whole lot for many, many years before deciding that it just wasn't working. I actually moved to live close to him at one point. I know we loved each other and I know I worked really hard to make things work and I'd like to think that he worked really hard, too. But, sometimes working really hard isn't enough and I ended up with my heart broken into about a billion pieces. To me, he'll forever be the person who broke my heart for the first time. But he's also someone else's best friend, someone's brother, someone's son.

I know I said I'd leave this open ended... but I will say this... do you ever feel that you trap your characters within one person's view of who they are? Do you sometimes forget that maybe the person who broke someone's heart in whatever you're working on is also someone else's something else?