The forklift driver and the nature of fiction

The forklift driver in “Getcha boots on!" is an eccentric, enigmatic, and attractive character.

Where did she come from? What is her story? What does she talk in that peculiar way? (“Pantaloons”?!)

I have no idea!

I hope we will meet her again, sometime and somewhere... I recycled her picture from "How we refer," a chapter in the meta-rationality book. She appears even more briefly there:

> The forklift operator approaches the building foreman with a load of drywall. “Yeah, put it over there,” says the foreman, nodding in the general direction of an empty bit of the construction site. Where exactly is “there”? What are its boundaries? How does the forklift driver know whether she’s dumped it in the right place? It doesn’t matter. The foreman probably has only a nebulous “there” in mind, anyway. All that matters is to put it somewhere out of the way but easily available when it will be needed tomorrow.

This narrative is a version of one in my erstwhile collaborator Phil Agre's book Computation and Human Experience. It stuck with me, apparently. Now she's shown up in a second place, and I know from experience that means we may indeed see her again.

Writing fiction is an extremely odd business. Your characters do whatever they want to do, and you get little say in the matter. I have no plans for the forklift operator, but I won't be at all surprised if she reappears and demands to have her story told at greater length.