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Post by veryblessedmom on Aug 17, 2009 13:04:47 GMT -5
I need help. I have a character forming in my head but I need some actual stuff for him to talk about.
It's 1993. The boy's 17 listens to Ugly Kid Joe, watches TNG and Nova, loves Chemistry and Physics. He has a mullet hair cut, wears black tee shirts and jeans all the time and his name is Wayne. He's thin, tall and runs cross country. He has a goofy laugh.
He sees a new girl at school and has a friend who has a class with her introduce them at lunch.
He's not good with social situations and does not follow normal conversation protocol. He starts speaking scientific facts to her to impress her. He just pulls those topics from the air.
Here's the problem. I don't know any facts for him to talk about.
Any ideas?
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Post by JenLenaMom on Aug 17, 2009 14:02:04 GMT -5
In Chemistry and Physics?
Let's see the Buckyball was around then, first discovered in '85(described the site I grabbed isn't great on the history facts)-a sphere made of carbon atoms as opposed to the sheets of carbon rings that graphite is or the crystaline structure of diamonds, but the scientists didn't get the nobel prize until 96 (Kid "I just know they're gonna get the noble prize one day!")
or maybe he just starts rambling about the physics/chemistry of the fluorescent lights or some other random occurence in the caf.
Have you ever seen the CBS show "Big Bang Theory"? Yeah the name stinks but it's a really cute comedy about a group of youngish proffesors. All are very smart have PhDs at kinda young ages but they vary in their social skills with "normal" people. Most of them are Physics professors. The characters on the show have some pretty strange conversations. You should be able to find old episodes on Hulu or CBS.com.
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Post by veryblessedmom on Aug 17, 2009 17:42:09 GMT -5
Thanks JenLenaMom. You really helped. Sometimes bouncing ideas around with others get my braincells moving.
I'll probably look up some random information and just let him go with that.
My BFF told me about The Big Bang Theory. I'll have to watch that.
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Post by JenLenaMom on Aug 17, 2009 20:07:35 GMT -5
I think I like that show so much because I knew people in college who might have ended up that way, lol. I was a premed biochem major, oh yes lots of nerds.
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Post by metalikhan on Aug 17, 2009 21:27:26 GMT -5
Something I've noticed about people like the character you describe is that some of their conversations begin in the middle of what they're thinking about; but the persons they talk to have no clue about the silent, internal conversation preceding the spoken words. Also, when they talk to someone who shares their passions, an eavesdropper might hear a curious leap-frogging conversation that seems to have a lot missing.
Another thing is that people like that often do not see a dividing line between romance and their passions (passions as in the interests that really rev their hearts and brains, not just hormonal passions). They woo with their minds rather than chocolates and flowers. For example, maybe your character finds out the girl is interested in holistic health and likes herbal teas. He might tell her about the experiments with calendula that showed the herb accelerates collagen production at the site of a wound or about the chemical reasons cloves and white willow bark have analgesic properties. He flexes the muscles of his intellect rather than his biceps to impress her.
He sounds like a nice kid — I hope the girl is worth the wooing. If not, I hope he finds one who is.
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Post by veryblessedmom on Aug 18, 2009 7:16:59 GMT -5
Something I've noticed about people like the character you describe is that some of their conversations begin in the middle of what they're thinking about; but the persons they talk to have no clue about the silent, internal conversation preceding the spoken words. Also, when they talk to someone who shares their passions, an eavesdropper might hear a curious leap-frogging conversation that seems to have a lot missing. Another thing is that people like that often do not see a dividing line between romance and their passions (passions as in the interests that really rev their hearts and brains, not just hormonal passions). They woo with their minds rather than chocolates and flowers. For example, maybe your character finds out the girl is interested in holistic health and likes herbal teas. He might tell her about the experiments with calendula that showed the herb accelerates collagen production at the site of a wound or about the chemical reasons cloves and white willow bark have analgesic properties. He flexes the muscles of his intellect rather than his biceps to impress her. He sounds like a nice kid — I hope the girl is worth the wooing. If not, I hope he finds one who is. Oh, I will be good to him. He's modeled after my big crush in high school. I have sweet memories of him. He was my type but not the one That will be the case here, but I will give him a dream girl too. My friend in high school would tell me about the telescope he built or explain how impossible a certain aspect of Star Trek was. |
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Post by JenLenaMom on Aug 18, 2009 7:50:35 GMT -5
LOL, oh yes a lot like people I knew in school. I got mixed up with a group of Trekkers (Ok I admit it I was one too). We had parties to watch the season premiers and endings. We even had plans to film our own fanfic film. A couple of my friends (Ok my boyfriend and his brother) wore black armbands the day Gene Rodenberry passed away.
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Post by fluke on Aug 22, 2009 16:10:39 GMT -5
"Frank, major error in TNG this week. If you recall the second season episode, XYZ, and what they said last week near the middle, you'll see those things can't work!" (Actual conversations at my lunch table started out this way.)
My friends and I were nitpickers long before the Nitpickers Guides were published.
Here's a random question I might **ahem** Wayne might have asked trying to impress a girl. "Do you think Star Trek is overusing the Borg as villains?" or "If Worf is head of security, why can't he ever win a fight?"
A friend of mine from college was allowed to stock his high school chem lab's chemical closet. He might have approached the situation like this. Wayne: "Want to see what happens to sodium in water?"
Target babe: "Salt? It just dissolves."
Wayne: "Not sodium chloride. The element sodium. It's so volatile, it has to be shipped suspended in oil and explodes on contact with water! Even water vapor in the atmosphere* will start the reaction. Mr. Walker let me stock the chem lab this year. I even scored some lithium. There's cool stuff you won't see any other time. That is, if those geeks haven't wasted it all yet."
*Not air. Atmosphere.
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Post by veryblessedmom on Aug 22, 2009 18:58:45 GMT -5
" Wayne: "Not sodium chloride. The element sodium. It's so volatile, it has to be shipped suspended in oil and explodes on contact with water! Even water vapor in the atmosphere* will start the reaction. Mr. Walker let me stock the chem lab this year. I even scored some lithium. There's cool stuff you won't see any other time. That is, if those geeks haven't wasted it all yet." *Not air. Atmosphere. OMgosh. This is exactly what I needed and happened with my group at the lunch table. One guy stole some from the chem lab and my friend had to get it from him by promising to divide it up among the group. Only he had more sense than to give it back to them. My characters plan to blow up toilets around the school. Now I know how to help them. Cool! |
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Post by torainfor on Aug 23, 2009 8:30:36 GMT -5
A friend of ours blew up his middle schools toilets (yup. all of them.) just by flushing cherry bomb.
But that's more punk than nerd.
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Post by Kristen on Sept 7, 2009 21:19:59 GMT -5
He's not good with social situations and does not follow normal conversation protocol. He starts speaking scientific facts to her to impress her. He just pulls those topics from the air. OK, I just had a flashback to 1984. I went to school with guys like this. Heck, I was probably like this. These were also the kind of guys who emulated Jobs and Wozniak by building computer gear in their garages. by '93, this was a lot easier to do. "I'm going to daisy-chain five 20-megabyte hard drives into a RAID-0 array to make a striped drive. That's a HUNDRED megabytes!" Ah, the good old days... |
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Post by tris on Sept 12, 2009 10:27:50 GMT -5
instead of blowing up toilets have them blow up soda bottles. Yes, I admit, I'm a mom that lets my boys make bombs instead of drinking on New Year's Eve. The boys got together with their friends (including one girl) and filled empty soda bottles with water and dry ice. Toss 'em and you've got a great smoke bomb with a loud bang. McGyver would be proud.
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Post by Cully the Swamp Walker on Sept 12, 2009 15:35:36 GMT -5
I picture your character with a tic. Some odd little facial movement that he just can't control, particularly in social situations.
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Post by waldenwriter on Sept 13, 2009 0:49:16 GMT -5
I picture your character with a tic. Some odd little facial movement that he just can't control, particularly in social situations. Yeah something like that would work, or some other strange habit. In a series I saw called Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, there was a character who started hiccuping whenever he was around a girl. |
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Post by tris on Sept 14, 2009 8:33:14 GMT -5
Don't load the poor boy down with too many awkward physical items. It's hard enough on a boy to be around a girl and actually talk to her without the other stuff getting in the way. Youngsters are already hard enough on themselves.
Maybe his brain just runs faster than his mouth and what comes out is more garbled than he'd like (or to refer to an earlier post) only part of what he's thinking so it doesn't make sense.
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