Write on Wednesdays...think with character

This week at WoW we are doing a pick your own adventure day. I have been wanting to explore some of my characters with greater depth, and I think this is a great time to do it. The exercise involved choosing a character from a previous piece and finding out something more about the character, or creating a new character all together. I decided to make up my own character, because I couldn't find an old character that I really wanted to work with. Some characters are built to be vague, and when I tried to think of how to introduce them, I was at a loss. So I am starting from scratch. Enjoy!


Anne was a quiet kid. A reader, a writer, a silent adventurer.The kind of kid that all the parents chatter about during family gatherings.

"Oh, she's gonna have a big life in front of her. Bet she's gonna end up at Harvard or something like that."

"You'd better get her out of this town before she gets like the rest of us."

"She is awfully quiet though. What have you been doing all these years, letting her listen to Beethoven?"

You see, Anne was a small town girl. This town was one of flannel shirts and forgotten dreams, and from a tender age, Anne wanted out. This was a town of gossiping women hanging out laundry because it dried more natural that way. In this town, everybody knew everybody, and if you didn't know somebody, you weren't anybody. The days in this town were long and hot in the summer, short and frigid in the winter. The men wore jeans in the winter and cut off jeans in the summer, and kept the flannel all year round. The women were stuck in a time long gone, most of them still had a variety of worn dresses in faded pastels that dusted the floor with every step.

Anne grew up in a house full of very noisy people. No one could tell why she had grown up so quiet, though her mother attributed it to the fact that she had been repeatedly dropped as a baby. On sunny days, Anne would head for the hills, sometimes not even coming back at night. The parents considered her a wild child, and told her siblings in hushed tones to stay away from her. The youngest kids regarded her as magic, with her billowing red hair and a beautiful smile for those who were lucky enough to see it. Whenever Anne could, she went outside and wandered aimlessly for hours by herself, savoring the freedom that only solitude could bring. She would read in the branches of a tree, sprint through fields of wildflowers, or befriend the small animals that she found in the forest.

For many years, she was the largest source of gossip in the town. Anne ignored everyone and continued untouched through the path of her life, quietly singing in the crystal voice that no human had ever heard. Life for Anne was lonely but refreshing, until the day that she met Jonathan.