What a Character

I'm in the habit of coming up with really funny but realistic dialogue or one-liners without a scene or context to accompany it. (Usually the lines allude to what the conversational context is but there's no actual scene.) I don't always know which characters say what. My favourite OC of the moment is my Primeval character, Naomi, whose characterization was built largely on these one-liners. Sometimes I just can't find a good place or person to use the lines, and it frustrates me.

One thing I think I'm fairly good at is coming up with characters just interesting and unusual enough to be interesting without being unbelievable or idealized. Naomi specifically is a pretty good example of a character who has a lot of very weird traits and experiences but also believable flaws and shortcomings that make her accessible, human, and balanced.

Though I'm not religious myself and am usually pretty flagrantly anti-theist (outright against religion), for some reason I really like specifically indicating a character comes from a Jewish background. Not because I think being Jewish is weird somehow, but because it's a trait that's just uncommon enough to be interesting but still completely plausible.

Today I came up with a line that has to do with this, but unfortunately have nowhere to put it. Naomi can't be the speaker because she only fulfills part of the requirements. The line is this:

"I'm an Irish Jew. Who the fuck am I going to marry that won't send my mother into fits? There are only eight other Jews in Ireland and I'm related to all of them."

Naomi is, of course, Jewish, but not Irish. She comes from good New York City working-class Jewish roots, which is a big part of her characterization. So she couldn't have said that.

I also had to look up how likely it was that there were Jews in Ireland. There can't be any more than a few thousand of them in the entire country. Everyone else is Catholic.

Kind of a shame, in the end. It'd be pretty freaking funny to have a character with such an unlikely combination of backgrounds.