Gabriela Santinero was a woman with a critical stare you be hard pressed to forget. Her five feet height would let anyone else disappear easily in a crowd but she is feisty, thinking nothing of climbing peoples backs to see above the crowd. Her jet black hair and green eyes give her a striking look that few would not notice yet she was not beautiful by usual standards. Even so, her husky voice turned heads. It was why she kept a weapon close to her chest just in case.

Picture © The Open University

Exercise 12 was quite difficult for me as I’m not used to creating characters before I create a story.  I’m used to finding the characters as I write the story.

For this task, I was asked to create a character using a character sheet, then portray that character in four different summary ways.

 

This was over a couple of days and the speech took a bit of time but here’s my effort.  Meet Gabriela Santinero in four different ways.

 

Summary:

Gabriela Santinero loves to bake in her spare time.  She loves it so much in fact, she has a degree in the art.  And for Gabriela, it is very much an art form.  It is her way to unwind from the stress of her day to day role masterminding criminals into doing what she wants them to do and showing them how not to get caught.

 

Appearance:

Gabriela Santinero was a woman with a critical stare you be hard pressed to forget.  Her five feet height would let anyone else disappear easily in a crowd but she is feisty, thinking nothing of climbing peoples backs to see above the crowd.  Her jet black hair and green eyes give her a striking look that few would not notice yet she was not beautiful by usual standards.  Even so, her husky voice turned heads.  It was why she kept a weapon close to her chest just in case.

 

Habitual or repeated action:

Gabriela Santinero was rarely nervous, but on the odd occasion when she was, she developed two idiosyncrasies.  The first is a cough.  An annoyingly small cough brought about by a mucus drip at the back of her throat.  It only seemed to happen when she was nervous but it annoyed the hell out of her.  The second idiosyncrasy is an uncontrollable twitch in the form of a winking left eye.  Gabriela tried so hard to stop it from happening but to no avail.  And out of earshot, the people who knew her laughed at the unfortunate circumstance.

Gabriela stood by the motto ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.  When cooking, she always made sure her books were in the perfect place and all ingredients laid out in order of use.   She was a meticulous planner which is what made her so fantastic at stealing others’ wealth.  She simply never put a foot wrong, even with a nervous cough and winking eye.

 

Character Speech in a scene:

“What dya mean you can’t do it?  Look, I if you can’t do this then leave.  I don’t have time for failures.  I have better things to do with my time!” Gabriela kept her voice and anger to a minimum.  She was in a room full of people watching her newest protégé try out pick-pocketing.  A simple enough task but he was somehow finding it difficult.

“give me ten more minutes and I’m done.” He responded through his hidden earpiece. She missed the response though distracted by the…

“So what better things do you have to do then?” a guy. A tall dark haired, blue-eyed man rising above her with muscles and chest.  She coughed and he said again.  “What could you possibly have to do that’s better than this?”

She coughed again. “cook dinner.  Now get outta my face!” she responded, then winked at him.

He grinned ‘did she just wink at me?’  she winked again. ‘there, she did it again!  Looks like a tough one here.  A challenge.  I like challenges.’ “maybe I could cook for you sometime?”

Gabriela was trying to concentrate on her student and this man, however he looked was getting in the way.  ‘Hold on, did he just offer to cook for me?’  “what part of get outta my face did you not understand?”  She winked again, this time coughing at the same time.

“If you change your mind, here’s my card.”  He pulled out a business card from his inside jacket pocket and offered it to Gabriela.  She took the card out of his hand and placed it in her purse.  She looked up at him, smiled, winked and then kneed him in the groin and walked off.  Putting her full concentration back to her student, who’d successfully stolen two wallets during her distraction.