Yesterday, I was at the Theatre Centre here on the island because my husband and a few others were doing a benefit for the Gaza victims. We were talking to actor/director Antony Holland before it started and he’d given me a script and asked me to read a bit of it after the intermission with a few other actors. The idea was to give the audience a little preview of the reading we’re doing later this week.

At the intermission, Antony jokingly asked me if I had my character ready even though I’d only had time to read it through two or three times. And my husband, who thinks he’s funny (and is, sometimes), said, “Do you know what shoes you’ll be wearing?”

He was teasing me because whenever I do a play, I always start building my character from the shoes up. It’s really important to me to know what kind of shoes my character wears and then to wear them throughout the rehearsal process. So…get this! Today I was listening to a radio interview with Glenn Close and they were discussing wardrobe. The interviewer said, “You know, Laurence Olivier always said that he couldn’t play a character until he knew what shoes the character wore.”

HA! So there! That’s right…Sir Laurence Olivier and I use the same technique!

So what does this have to do with writing? I have recently started applying it to the characters in my books. Even if it doesn’t come out in the story, I always know exactly what kinds of shoes they would wear. It often does come out in the story though and now that I think about it, shoes often play some sort of importance in my plots.

Do you know what kind of shoes your character wears?