Character Spirals
First: sorry this is late! I had hoped to send out a second newsletter earlier but I was in South Korea for work at the end of September, and let’s just say that travel home was complicated and man, jet lag hits me harder than it did when I was a leggy twentysomething. :) (I lie. I have never been leggy.)
This specific newsletter has an essay on what, for lack of a better term, I call "Character Spirals," followed by a FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions).
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Character Spirals
This morning, as I was preparing for a doctor’s appointment, I started thinking about the difference between Shuos Jedao (Jedao One) and Shuos Mikodez from Machineries of Empire, and then about how I generate characters. Not how other people generate characters, or should generate characters; you should do what works for you! But how it works for me, given my limitations.
NOTE: spoilers for EVERYTHING. But, you know; as of this moment, Machineries is currently a closed canon, with no further story material planned, for strategic reasons I can’t get into.
There are people who are really good at coming up with multiple discrete distinct characters. I would love to be able to think that way but it’s never been like that for me. I have a hard time holding more than one to three “main” characters in focus in my head - adding depth to additional major characters usually requires a separate revisions pass. (This makes writing ensemble casts particularly challenging.) When I generate characters, I usually work in a spiral, and it's directly related to the fact that I'm also a didactic writer (not a popular mode; but I'll get to the relevance in a second).
Here's what I mean by a "spiral," for which there is probably a literary criticism term that I would know if I hadn't stopped taking literature classes after high school. I start with a central character, often but not always the one who comes to me first. In the case of Machineries, that character is Jedao. Other characters are then created in reference to that central character - whether they're a shadow in the Jungian sense, or an antagonist, or an opposite, or a double, or whatever. As you spiral outward from that center point, you end up with a kaleidoscope of characters who are meant to be understood in the context of the central character's psychology and strengths and weaknesses and themes.
Note that this is not an approach designed to create "naturalistic" or "realistic" or even "plausible" populations of characters. I am generally sympathetic to the argument that character populations should reflect the real world in terms of representation - the existence of characters who are queer, or trans, or disabled, or poor, or ace, or Black, or whatever you want to name. This approach isn't incompatible with that consideration as such. But the spiral approach does not itself push toward realism (for lack of a better term) in any meaningful sense; you have to sort of add the representation as a desideratum. The spiral is designed to generate characters as components of a symbolic system.
I do this because...well. First of all, have you read any of my books? Mecha dragons and reality-warping calendar magic and tentacly horrors? Do you think "realism" is a major consideration when I write them? A novel is inherently artificial. It can serve as a model of the world; but even a Neal Stephenson doorstopper can only contain so much "world."
So let's look at three characters from Machineries: Jedao, Cheris, and Mikodez. Jedao was the center of the spiral. His problem (well...one of them) is that he genuinely enjoys, loves, and cares about people AND he is completely, single-mindedly ruthless in pursuit of his goal of revolution AND he is distressingly comfortable with and skilled at violence. He also lies like a rug (and is good at it), with a side of suicidal impulses, including suicide by cop (I don't know how else to describe Hellspin), and sexual trauma. This is not a combination of traits designed to produce a stable or happy person. (In case you couldn't tell, I enjoy writing Hot Mess Disaster characters because sticking pins in them is so easy.)
Cheris was derived from Jedao by taking most of his major personality traits and inverting them; I've talked about this before in other places. Jedao has dyscalculia; she's a math genius. Her most significant relationships (before Jedao shows up, and then dies) are not with humans but with robots. She's also a violence professional/soldier, like Jedao. But she's an introvert to Jedao's extrovert (Jedao won't shut up), straightforward, a terrible liar. Conflicted about her heritage, but with a solid sense of self, no sexual trauma in sight.
Mikodez is a refraction of Jedao: he shares some traits, but others are very different. They're both sneaky, manipulative liars who are comfortable with violence in service of their goals. Jedao's approach is more DIY while Mikodez gets other people to do the shooting (Istradez and the assassination of the hexarchs, for instance), but still, I don't suppose it makes a damn bit of difference to the people getting killed. The difference here is, Jedao is morally conflicted about his own methods, and self-destructive, and Mikodez is neither. Mikodez sleeps soundly at night!
I'm not going to make the argument that Mikodez is a "good" or "moral" person--those people don't exist in Machineries--but the facile thing, the easy thing, would be to make Jedao a "better" person because he feels guilty about the genuinely awful things he's done, and to make Mikodez the "villain" in comparison, because he is generally guilt-free. Yet Mikodez accomplishes some "good" things anyway. This is a commentary on, well, the problems with Jedao's approach. I don't know about you but "let's murder a million people in cold blood" plus, you know, all the zillions of people he helped kill/subjugate on his way up to the rank of general??? THIS IS NOT A MORALLY DEFENSIBLE WAY TO BRING ABOUT A REVOLUTION. (My daughter calls this "you made the character too likable.")
Why create characters in this way, beyond the "creating characters is hard and this makes it easier" issue? Because I'm a didactic writer. (If you think didactic writing is horrible, that's fine! Not every book/author is for every reader.) When I write a story, I explicitly start out with the themes and the moral point that I'm trying to make, so that I can intentionally design the worldbuilding, characters, and (if applicable) magic system around the theme/moral. For some people it makes more sense to let theme emerge organically, and for others it makes more sense to, y'know, not write with this kind of moral bludgeoning in mind at all. But this is what works for me.
So, let's be clear: a story like Machineries is primarily crass entertainment fiction. I make no claim to literary value. But still, for me, writing crass entertainment fiction is more fun when it has some kind of guiding moral principle--a spine, if you will. When I put together a magic system, I ask myself, where's the metaphor? So we get "calendars as a metaphor for imperial control" and "imperialism sucks" and "empires create their own monsters."
But in a didactic work, characters are part of the moral argument. I don't think characters in a didactic work necessarily have to be one-dimensional or cardboard or boring, although I may be kidding myself. But a spiral approach, where I create characters who comment on each other, enables me to integrate those characters into the work as a thematic whole.
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
- Are you really serious that there will be no more hexarchate stories? You said something different last newsletter!
To answer backwards, yes, I said something different last newsletter, and yes, I'm really serious. I have Reasons for this, although nothing interesting in terms of concrete news. Sorry to disappoint!
- What are you currently working on?
Still working on edits to the Ninefox Gambit RPG, forthcoming next year from Android Press! I'm basically making some system tweaks based on playtesting (THANK YOU, lovely playtesters), and adding an option to play Liozh. (No servitors or voidmoths, sorry! They would have been out of scope for a very tightly focused rules set. That said, I expect people to house-rule this stuff.)
I'm also gearing up to work on the second book of my YA mecha space opera trilogy, which is very exciting! Alas, I don't yet have a publication date for the first one.
- What's one book that you're reading right now?
Guadalupe Nettel's Still Born, trans. Rosalind Harvey. This is a literary (?) novel by a Mexican author, and it follows the lives of two intertwined women, one of whom chooses sterilization, the other of whom pursues motherhood. It explores feminism and social pressure and friendship, ambivalence and motherhood. I'm finding it a really absorbing read.
- I have a foxy question you haven’t answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I will get back to you!