Everyday People
Why writing about a “regular” person can make for a great story
I was just reading on Writers Helping Writers (Facebook Group) about ideas for stories. Credit to Gemma Arnold and Icky Squared for initiating the conversation and adding great ideas around the idea of writing stories about everyday people, in their case, people who work in hair and nail salons.
Everyday people make for the best stories because they could be your friend, neighbor, or someone who you don’t know but who you can easily relate to — at least on the surface.
What makes a regular person so interesting, especially when they let their guard down in a salon setting, is learning about some of the delicious details of their lives.
Maybe there are things that they say that you’ve been thinking about but weren’t confident enough to say out loud? Since I’m a people pleaser, I find myself in this situation a lot. I want to say something but fear that saying it out loud would place me into a bad situation, at least from a psychological viewpoint. But if I hear someone else say what I’m thinking, I don’t feel as silly and feel more empowered to join in on the conversation.
Once that conversation starts, by listening, it becomes easy to go down the rabbit hole and learn about many strange things that happen in regular people’s lives that I wouldn’t have thought about. This can make for great starting points for writing because we’re all regular people with unique perspectives.
