4 Interview Questions your characters should be able to answer.

The original listicle (mobile app version)

The Internet provides the aspiring writer with a vast array of tips and tricks for crafting strong plots, exciting resolutions and fleshed out characters. A cursory look to your twitter feed (Ed. - you are on Twitter...right) will uncover articles and listicles aplenty that discuss ways to develop solid characterization for every hero, villain and stalwart ally in your work. This post does nothing save expand on that growing body of free and unsolicited advice.

We suggest interrogating your characters to get at the heart of their characterization, what makes them tick. As an aside, what we mean by characterization is habits and mores of your characters. This is different than the actions of your *tagonists. That, it bears stating, is plotting. Characterization is something that informs the plot, guides the plot, but it is not the plot. Your story is but one of a character's life experience.  Therefore, characterization does not change with the plot, but the plot can be a useful tool to reveal something interesting about your character's character.  Why does this matter?  Because a problem arises when the author cannot quite match the character of the hero with the actions of the hero. When this happens, the characters feel flat. Worse, poorly fleshed out characters become plot puppets. The heroes and villains only exist to advance the plot, and are animated only by the elements in the story. When they are not the focus of the story, they are in cold storage, just waiting for the next thing to happen. Inactive characters are boring characters and boring characters make for boring stories.

There are numerous ways to flesh out your characters. For instance, you can make note cards that list their primary attributes (name, age, sex, eye color, height). These character notes are great for keeping your descriptions of the *tagonist from drifting in the story. (e.g. on page 12, Captain Harwood has piercing blue eyes, but on page 45 our protagonist gets lost in his emerald eyes).

What we propose is a character interview. Take your character out of the story, and place them on late night television, or at a local public access television show. It does not matter if your characters are goblins from the Razor Mountains, or a synthetic construction bootstrapped into sentience from a collection of hacked animatronic squirrels. Your characters don't have to be able to answer these questions, but they have to have a reason for not being able to answer them.

Here are just some questions you can ask your characters to flesh out how they exist outside the story you are telling.

1. When did the character lose their virginity? "Hey!” you say. "This is a young adult novel, no sex allowed."  O.K., well, lots of teens and young adults have sex. Why is your character different from your typical sex having teen? It is O.K. to have your character be a virgin, or neuter, or unable to have intercourse because they are from a species that does not engage in intercourse per-se etc. Nevertheless, there has to be a reason why your character cannot answer the question. You will find that even if you can't build character using this questions, you can fall backwards into world building by having explanations for why you can’t answer the questions.

2. What Social class does the character belong, what race , what ethnicity, what religion. This is Jane Austen question. Your work does not have to be explicit on the nature of the characters social standing, but as an author, you cannot lie to yourself. If the character has access to goods and services not available to large sections of the population, has access to political elite, etc, then your character inhabits an upper social stratum.  It is O.K. to have rich protagonists; they usually have access to more resources. (ED Game of Thrones is nothing but the 1% fighting the 1%) but what does that do to the expectations of the character? Do they expect that they will have an audience with the Grand Marshall? Are they cowed by authority, suspicious of it?

3. What does the character do with a thing of immense value that they come into possession of, which clearly does not belong to them?  "Huh?" You say. Well knowing what someone does with an ill-gotten gain teaches you plenty about the character. If you have been trying to position your character as a roguish bad boy, but you can't picture him buying a Ferrari with money he found in a suitcase floating in the ocean, it might be that you are approaching his character wrong. Alternatively, if your street-wise protagonist would never take a bag of cash left in the back of her favorite dive bar, maybe it is because she knows that things of value usually have owners who come looking it. So that implicit knowledge is a good flag of her character. It is not that she doesn’t want something for nothing, but that she knows that free is very rarely ever that.

4. Sympathy for the devil. Characterization shouldn't only be applied to heroes. If you want a compelling, non-simplistic villain, the antagonist of the tale needs as much heft as the protagonist. The essence of drama is conflict, and a fleshed out hero against a stick figure villain makes for weak conflict. Have your villain name one individual that they have justifiably murdered, disappeared, converted into a mechanical bear. Whoa, you say there is never a good reason to turn anyone into a mechanical bear. Well, true, but that isn't an excuse to avoid walking in their shoes for a bit. If nothing, it prevents your characters from becoming psychotics whose only will is to watch all the cities of the earth burn. Sure, there are scenarios where your villain is a nameless horror from beyond the doors of midnight, but not every story needs to have antagonist who can’t articulate some measure of reason and compelling justification for their actions.

Taking time to think about how your characters answer these questions can help your craft deeper, more consistent actors in the plot. Rich virgins who would never take a gold bar they found on the street react to scenarios of conflict different than poor street-wise Lotharios. The author should know well before the reader, how your character will react.

MM (2015)

[ssf] The Ca$h Ninja Grant

[ed. it has been a while ]

Title: The Ca$h Ninja Grant
By: Grant Chambers
Image Credit: KDA

To: Descendants of Counter-Inversion Veterans

It is neither our intent, nor desire to cause controversy. However, history provides little insight into the early life of the war hero, Antoine Clark, aka ‘Tha Ca$h Ninja.’ Contemporaneous records re-inflated from submerged computronium memory cores indicate that he was, at best, a middling third age hip-hop troubadour. Like other members of the genera superset, Tha Ca$h Ninja existed in a fragmented entertainment space deeply riven by notions of sub-genera purity and domain exclusivity. Pre-Inversion Artists frequently eschewed popular appeal, and Tha Ca$h Ninja was no different. For most members of various crews, clans and assorted musical combines, the widespread acclaim reached by classical artists (e.g. B.I.G., The Notorious) was considered a betrayal of artistic integrity. Musical balkinization resulted in flourishing, if not necessarily lucrative, hyper-local music scenes.

History should not judge the Tha Ca$h Ninja harshly for his lack of commercial success, both for his later contributions to the Second Refactoring of the Western Convergence, and the fact that artists who did achieve some measure of cross-genre appeal usually did so through a combination of exploitative cultural appropriation and deployment of unregulated memetic-catalyzed Langfordian Syrens. Given the gross storage and algorithmic processing requirements necessary to deploy such vectors, Tha Ca$h Ninja, despite assurances regarding his personal net worth, would not have been financially able to support such domain violations.  

Instead, Tha Ca$h Ninja’s core support grew out of a loyal fanbase cultivated from the dense urban conglomerations doting Bayou Country.  He innovated a fork of ‘southern’ hip-hop that incorporated  الدحية  and full VR simulacrum of mundane events and various prior sexual conquests engaging in Dabke-style erotic dancing. To wit, his seminal hit “Ca$h Ninja is günna’ Ninja that A$$!” featured amelodic, and at times rambling, exposition on the nature of ontological empiricism paired with bass loops and FVR recordings of interactions with surgical and germ-line modified gender-fluid individuals and constructs.

As our hypothesis (attached) posits, etho-phrenol recognition shows that many of the exotic dancers were likely Greco-Syrians recruited from the large populations settled in and around Mobile after the Burning Sands War.  If conclusively proved, it lends an explanation as to why the later incarnations of the Tha Ca$h Ninja Mercenary organization contained analogous command structures with various Levent-originated ‘Free’ forces.   

By Tha Ca$h Ninja’s own statements, he was an avid and enthusiastic student of both Bushido and Wing-chun. While other historians take these statements as boastfulness in keeping with the hyper-masculinity of the genera, we aim to prove these claims. What is not in dispute is that Tha Ca$h Ninja did exhibit considerable proficiency in light energy weapons during the Reclamation of Texarkana from Class 2 autonomous, non-metabolizing carnivorous forms.

During the later stages of the Inversion, when the Silicon Lords retreated to western Rockies, Tha Ca$h Ninja Mercenary was one of the first outfits commissioned by the Distributed Republic to halt the advance of Semi-sentients across the Mississippi. Though apocryphal, it is said that Tha Ca$h Ninja, accompanied by his most loyal retainers "These Amazonian Bitches!", could be seen battling amphibious-mechs on the river bank, his white mink coat trailing behind him and his crisp athletic shoes caked with red mud.

We hereby submit this grant to the Descendants of Inversion Veterans and ask permission to excavate the sites indicated, and recompile any imprinted data structures such that a complete understanding of the Second Battle of Vicksburg can be had.

The Politics of Character

While reading a work, be it short or long form, one character attribute that should become immediately apparent is the political stance of that character.

Whoa, you say, politics? I am not writing some political work, I am just telling the tale of a simple space marine who battles hyper-intelligent alien bees trying to invade our dimensions (Ed: Yes, please, tell me more...). 

Authors, especially the new or under-read, have a tendency to argue the studious un-political nature of their work. The reasons may vary. Perhaps they do not want to upset potential readers and customers. And why not, Orson Scott Card went from beloved author to homophobic bigot in a lot of minds based on religious beliefs that informed his political position. (even this criticism  pales in comparison to the amount of real and digital ink spent on the fascist nature of Ender's Game itself.) 

Alternatively, perhaps an author has a general uncomfortableness about speaking on political issues or a genuine desire to write tales having an apolitical affect. 

However, it is impossible to write good, character driven, para-fiction without having those same characters take a political position. It is impossible to build a successful world for your characters to inhabit without having a political position.

Situating a character into the world you have built requires more than just placing motivation in her head and obstacles at his feet. You have to ground your characters within the philosophical framework of the world they live and the options they have available.  In the same way that it is impossible to ignore the economic standing of your character (try reading Jane Austen and not come away with a useful understanding of the rentier economy of Georgian England), it is impossible to untangle the politics of a character from their motivation.  

Politics includes more than where one (the author or the character stand) stands on the hot button social issue of they day. Politics means a political outlook. A particular view of the world as it is seen through the character's eyes (if it is a first person narrative) or multiple character's experiences. The political view of the character does not need to be endorsed by the author, but the author does need to explain the political position of the characters. 

Is your hero battling a dystopian government? Why is the government horrible? Is it the fault of the government, or some outside agent that is causing grey skies and sad people. If it is the government, why is it doing this? Sometimes in the rush to have people battle on post-apocalyptic roof-tops, authors forget to do the hard work of building the foundations of conflict. If only America has fallen into ruin, Why? What was it about the politics of America that caused this downfall? What policies does the government implement that make it evil, or good? Unelected dictator? So your hero is a pro-democracy advocate? Elected counsel of evil Corporations?  Complete Anarchy and Individualism and ultra-property rights? Collective action, Forced Community? It is impossible to have your characters stand against something without also standing for something else. 

To build great characters, you need to build a political dossier along with a physical and economic dossier. Once you character has a stance on the issues, not of your day, but of her day, then the conflict from those stances becomes easier to envision and capture. 

Moorsgate ((c)2015)