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)

Quick solution to the Webworkers local restriction using dropbox public folder

One of the things that Moorsgate Media focuses on is developing code and software projects to support our mission of delivering high quality speculative fiction featuring under represented peoples. As such, from time to time, we come across solutions to coding or development problems while working on those broader goals and we want to share them with you.  

For examples, the Kaizen text analysis app uses a number of software libraries to display infographics about a text selection (like word frequency, adverb usage, and dialog). This analysis uses Google's very capable charting API to produce some of the complex tree diagrams.  Unfortunately, the process of drawing these charts becomes computationally intensive over a certain word limit (roughly 4000 words).
One solution is to use Web workers to speed up some of the regressive processing that is required to look at each word in the text and process it according to our analysis algorithms. 

You might ask, what is a web worker? Well, let HTML5 Rocks inform you:

The Web Workers specification defines an API for spawning background scripts in your web application. Web Workers allow you to do things like fire up long-running scripts to handle computationally intensive tasks, but without blocking the UI or other scripts to handle user interactions.

Web workers are great. Here at Moorsgate, we are using web workers to off-load some of the computationally intensive text processing (looping within looping) to not interrupt the user interface of the  App (unfortunately DOM drawing is still taking awhile). All an all it has shaved about 2 seconds off of the wait time to complete the DOM draw. That is a huge improvement for us. 

However, there is a caveat when developing web-workers.

Again, from HTML5 Rocks:

Restrictions with Local Access

Due to Google Chrome's security restrictions, workers will not run locally (e.g. from file://) in the latest versions of the browser. Instead, they fail silently! To run your app from the file:// scheme, run Chrome with the --allow-file-access-from-files flag set. NOTE: It is not recommended to run your primary browser with this flag set. It should only be used for testing purposes and not regular browsing.
Other browsers do not impose the same restriction

It turns out that our version of Firefox appears to also have this issue. So in-order to get around it, we employed a very simple solution. We developed our webworker code and tested it using the public folder of our Dropbox account. By pushing your test code to the public folder, the files change from local files to remote web accessible files. Presto, no more local access problems. The same thing could be done using your local development server. However, if you don't have a local development server, this is the next best solution.

Now the downside: it can be cumbersome to move your whole app to public folder. For us, it was a good solution since the entire app is client-side and there is no back-end to speak of.  Another issue is,the public folder is, well, public. You might not want to move sensitive tech to the public folder since someone might be scanning your public folder looking for sweet treats.

However, as a solution to our problem, it works and did not require us to change the flag settings in Chrome. That was worth the drawbacks.

Kaizen Update

We are pleased to announce the revised update of our editing and writing analysis software tool: Kaizenmoto. The Kaizen text analysis web-app is up at our mother site, in the code section:  http://www.moorsgatemedia.com/code/kai/index.html It is still a bit slow, but it works well.
 
The goal of the app is to help you in the editing process. See what your average sentence lengths clocks in at. We find that what is needed most in the editing process is a way to quantify styles. Is your dialogue to prose ratio in line with the style you are after (hint, first person ratios are different than third person ones).  Check out your sentence starters, reading complexity, reading time, word count Coleman reading score, and a bunch more metrics. 

Check back often, we are updating and optimizing as we go, but it is publish or perish right. 

[editing software, fiction writing software, word editing, readability software]

Moorsgate Media

Dystopian Monetary Systems

From the title of this post, you might think that we are going to discuss rapacious financial systems that leave bleak and shattered worlds in their wake. However, there are libraries full of critiques of every economic system under the sun, from Marx to Hayek to Piketty. If you want to understanding why the modern world looks, acts and even smells like it does, then a complete understanding of our economic system (neo-liberal capitalism) is a must.

What we are discussing is fictional governments and the economic systems that power them. In the same way you shouldn't trust a work of fiction that lacks a political view (post on that later), you should never trust a work of speculative fiction that fails to have a coherent economic model.

There are a number of hard science fiction stories that detail the economic model of the universe they inhabit. The anachro-capitlaism post-scarcity of The Culture universe, to the Techno-liberalism of Peter Hamilton's Nights Dawn and Pandora Star series and the Ur-libertarianism of Snow Crash.

With the increasing interest (some might say "peak interest") in YA anti-utopian fiction, care should be made to create plausible economic models that support the oppressive government systems in your work.

As an example of a partially detailed economic system, take the Hunger Games series. The economic model of Hunger Games is never explicitly described. However, we do know that it features both low and high-tech manufacturing (and presumably some form of higher and advanced education), as well as massive resource extraction (see districts 12, 4, 3, and 7). Most of these resources appear to be earmarked for the use by the citizens of the capital. While there is some form of income and wealth generation in the Capital, the mechanisms of distribution, both in terms of employment and luxury end-products is murky. Clearly, Panem operates on an authoritarian command economy (equal parts oppressive communist in the districts, and some form of open / limited market in the Capital), but there is no clearly identified private firms or companies. It is possible that everyone in the Capital works for the Capital, at which point it forms a closed economy independent from the rest of the districts, but receives tribute as a form of "Dividend on oppression".

What's the point you ask? The Hunger Games is about a contest (and thinly veiled allegory) of teenagers forced to kill one another for entertainment value, who cares about economic models? Well, arm chair economists for one, but authors and readers who appreciate detailed world building for another.

Economic systems influence political systems, and you can't world build without a political system. You can try, but your characters ( more so if they are plucky teens rebelling against authority) need to have a platform for their views. Why is the Authoritarian government bad? Because it controls people. In the Hunger Games, one of the reasons the Government is so terrible is that it appears to run forced labor facilities all over the country (See District 11, 12 - forced farming and forced shaft coal mining). Forced labor camps only make political sense in certain economic systems. If your economic system does not prize competition and liberty, your political system will reflect that, not vice versa. So in truth, the economic model (cheap labor and resources) informs the political system (massive authoritarian repression), not the other way around.

Conflict, the lifeblood of good characterization, often stems from disparities in economic standing. As another example, the Lannisters of Game of Thrones are wealthy (or so they say ) patrons of the crown based, not on their knowledge of science or mathematics, but their ability to extract gold from the land under their feet. In contrast, the Iron Bank of Bravos yields capital in the form of interest bearing loans on prior loaned capital and merchant marine services. In both instances, their wealth and resources allows them to take political positions that lesser equipped houses and organizations could not implement.

When constructing a world for your characters to inhabit, look to the economic model to explain motivations of not only the government (if there is a government) but the people rebelling against the government.  When conducting analysis or reviewing the work of others, look to the naturalness of the political and economic systems. Is the world resource constrained? If so, the political system will seek to control individuals. If the individuals rebel, what will that rebellion do to the availability of resources? Does the author address the economic rational of the villains, and the economic downside of the protagonists goals? Working through these issues will leave less gaps that must be hand-waived through exposition or ball-hiding, resulting in a tighter work that focuses on plot.

2014 Moorsgate Media (www.moorsgatemedia.blogspot.com)

Chaos Classifieds II

Attention surfers of the Internet:

Deep within the bowels of the Internet, past decrepit Geo-Cities  archives; below Live Journal post regarding your unwavering love for Hansen; tucked in a forgotten corner of a low-baud rate server, there exists a lively classifieds bulletin board.

However, this is no ordinary "missed connections", "soiled futon " market place. This is market for wonders, for forbidden objects found where brave men fear to tread. It is a market for outdated technological marvels, arcane works, eldritch objects from beyond the borders of the ordinary.

The denizens of these boards engage in a brisk trade, seeking to acquire or unload nameless horrors, insane robots from a nightmarish future, hire teams of blind ninja assassins, or just adopt a couple of genetic monstrosities.

The Moorsgate Media Twitter feed occasionally retweets requests that come across our desk. Below is just a taste of the terrifying and degenerate ads that populate these boards. Re-tweets are not endorsements.

Needed: wealth management professional specializing in immortality. Looking for long term relationship .

Needed: user manual for oblivion class doomsday device. #chaosclassified

Needed: #API documentation for Necronomicon. Unable to force quit hell portal generator in IE6. Concerned. #chaosclassified #SciFi #html5

Sale: cognitive enhancement device, side effects; increase in baseline #evil Instruction manual and box included.

Previous ads can be found here:
http://moorsgatemedia.blogspot.com/2014/01/chaos-classified.html