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INTRODUCTION
‘WHEN WE write stories, we are always imagining ourselves into other people’s shoes in the sense that we are trying to identify strongly with our characters, what it’s like to be them and to have their lives. But how often do we imagine our characters’ footwear literally, what their shoes look like and how it feels to walk or run or climb steps in them?
Actors sometime use characters’ shoes as the starting point for moving into a new role. British actress Dora Bryan, for example, has talked about how she decided at the outset what kind of shoes her characters would wear: smart or scruffy, comfortable or pinching, and so on. In this way she began to acquire a sense of her character’s overall posture and bodily comfort or discomfort. It makes sense for writers to try this as well. Shoes cover and protect our feet, our very basis, they are our literal platform in the world. Socially, shoes also send signals, often indicating our status and power, whether we are ‘well-heeled’ or not. Or they may just reveal how much we care about status – a rich thrifty person might prefer Matalan to Manolo; a cash-strapped fashion trooper might get her Pradas on credit. Shoes can reveal what we are like or who we are aspiring to be, a pose or persona we are trying out.
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EXERCISES
#1
Shoe portraits
Take one of the following pairs of shoes and imagine their owner going somewhere wearing them. Write a mini-portrait of your character, describing what else they are wearing, how they look, and whether their shoes attract any attention, admiring or disapproving.
Turquoise slingbacks with 4" heels
Pink sequinned pumps
Beige Dr Scholl sandals
Black lace-up flatties
Doc Marten boots
Trainers with glittery laces and perspex bubbles in the sides of the soles
Red feathery Maribou mules
Clean green wellies
#2
Fitting footwear
Now try it the other way round. Take one of the following characters and imagine their shoes:
A social climber
A stalker
An impoverished artist
A medical student
An off-duty policewoman
A mayoress
A celebrity tired of media exposure
Write a few lines in the voice of your character, making sure they mention their shoes once for some reason: for example, they hurt; they look brilliant; they are impossible to run in; they cost a bomb…
#3
Shoe judgements
People often make snap judgements about others on the basis of their footwear. Women’s shoes, in particular, attract some savage verdicts about their owners’ sexual conduct. Think of Germaine Greer’s notorious insult to journalist Suzanne Moore whom she accused of having ‘bird’s nest hair’ and ‘fuck-me shoes’. And in the States, a ‘roundheel’ is slang for a loose woman. (She tips backwards easily, i.e. a sexual pushover!).
In Margaret Leroy’s novel Alysson’s Shoes (Flamingo, 2002), Alysson is a murder victim whose final actions were to resume smoking again after giving up to please her husband, Ben, and to buy a pair of glamorous red suede shoes. Ben interprets these two actions as signs that she was about to leave him, to walk off in her flamboyantly sexy new shoes. Apart from this central symbol, the novel is full of shoe references, often taken as an index to character. Here are some examples:
A psychiatrist’s colleague ‘seemed terribly cool, heavy boots and no bra...’
A drugs firm rep. is summed up in four words: ‘tarty shoes, very pushy’.
A journalist in pursuit of a scandal is ‘some cheesy bloke in grey plastic shoes’.
Inherited shoes
In Jackie Kay’s elegiac poem ‘The Shoes of Dead Comrades’ she writes about how her father wears second-hand shoes, passed on to him by his dead friends’ widows. Here are the middle two verses:
From ‘The Shoes of Dead Comrades’ by Jackie Kay (Off Colour, Bloodaxe, 1998)
On my father’s feet are the shoes of dead comrades.
The marches they marched against Polaris. UCS.
Everything they ever believed tied up with laces.
A cobbler has replaced the sole, the heel.
Brand new, my father says, look, feel.
On my father’s feet are the shoes of dead comrades.
These are in good nick. These were pricey.
Italian leather. See that. Lovely.
He always was a classy dresser was Arthur.
Ever see Wullie dance? Wullie was a wonderful waltzer.
The loving details of the tasteful, cared-for shoes gives a sense of the men themselves and their strong socialist creed. The shoes contain their histories and values: ‘Everything they ever believed tied up with laces.’ The shoes of the dead, or even the discarded shoes of the living, are often such poignant objects because they bear the imprint of the wearer and remind us of all the miles walked in them, the life lived. Their scuffs, creases, and repairs, or lack of them – all seem to offer a story.
Old soles
Find an old pair of shoes, perhaps one that you or a member of your family have outworn. Draw a story or poem from it, focussing on signs of wear and tear, care or neglect and remembering the significant places you or their owner have gone to in them – a new school, a hospital, a dance class, the house of a friend you no longer see...
#4
Shoe story
Write a plan for a story structured around the history of a pair of shoes that get passed from owner to owner. For example, one character might shoplift a pair of designer slingbacks she has coveted for ages but then find that they don’t fit her. She sells them to a friend, who is initially delighted, but gets put off when she detects a tiny bloodstain on one heel. She gives them to her sister who wears them to a wedding where she runs into her ex with his new partner. She dumps the shoes in a charity shop where the director of an amateur theatre company seizes upon them as ideal for the star of A Streetcar Named Desire... Four owners, four linked mini-dramas. Devise the plot for your own ‘shoe story’.
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