Those Rambling, Incessant Talkers!

This is my last entry on real character analysis. Today I’m doing the incessant talker. Do you know anyone like that? More than one?

I have a family member and a friend at church who are like this. They are both precious ladies, BUT unless you have plenty of time on your hands, do not, I repeat, do NOT engage them in conversation.

I am a talker, also, so I understand incessant talkers. But these two ladies will bend your ear about people and things you have no interest in. As in a recent conversation that including the telling of one lady’s daughter’s co-worker getting written up for something. I don’t know this daughter’s co-worker and the story about her getting written up by a supervisor wasn’t an unusual or interesting story, and it certainly had no point to it. But incessant talkers don’t need a point.

I have concluded that incessant talkers are lonely for conversation because they don’t get enough talking, with someone who will listen, at home or from their spouse.

But imagine the scenario with an incessant talker in a novel. Let’s say for instance, a detective investigating a crime scene. One of the people he interviews is a rambling, non-stop talker. He finally sees a break to walk away, or he creates a break so he can walk away, and chalks up the mountain of information he just heard as unrelated to the case.

But he finds out later that in all that rambling monologue, the talker revealed a key clue to the case. Only he dismissed it along with everything else the talker said.

Use your imagination. There are so many possibilities for characters in our writing in the people we encounter all the time. So observe and write, write, write!