Character sketches

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One of the things I like to do sometimes is go somewhere and watch people. In fact, that's how I developed the characters in the coffee house book.

One of my favorite things to do is to people-watch and then write a scene or story or character sketch based on someone I saw. That's how I wrote a character sketch about the father playing the flute as he walked his son home from school.

Because of the chaos of work lately, I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time people-watching as I would like.

Since work is going to be a bit slower now that we're reaching the end of the calendar year (things will likely pick up again around the second or third week of January), I'm going to take some time to people-watch and get back into writing character sketches.

Do you people-watch when you're writing? Has anything come of it?