Cats & Characters

Seuss & Muffin on alert

I have 2 cats. They are both rescues. One lived under a porch for the first few months of his life. He’s a very nervous guy. Runs when the doorbell rings. Runs if there’s a loud noise. Runs if you make eye contact for more than half a second. (And he hates being photographed, dahling.)

The other cat was actually born on the floor of the kids’ bathroom. He’s grown up with our family. Our house is a safe and happy universe—full of food on demand and large hairless cats, clearly put here to do his bidding.

My cuteness is irresistible!

“But I want to walk on the counters!”

“I want to eat that butter!”

“I’m hungry NOW!”

Sometimes, I think my cats represent a real life psychology experiment: “Effects of early childhood on personality.”

This got me thinking about my characters. I spend a lot of time working out what’s going on with them within the time frame of a particular story, but I realized, I didn’t always take time to understand their childhoods.

So one day, when I was feeling kind of stumped, (procrastinating? Nooooo, not me!) I decided to imagine the main character's childhoods in detail. Who held them as a baby? What food did they eat? Turns out, the image I found most useful was picturing them around the age of 6 or 7, the age when you first start to have strong memories. I personally think that’s when your sense of the world gets firmed up.

Muffin supervising productivity. 

Wow.

I got some really interesting details out of that bit of procrastination. And it helped get me over the hump. (Off the stump?)

Anyone else ever tried imagining a character’s childhood? What's your go-to childhood image--a toy? A food? What age do you see when you think of childhood?