Monthly Archives: September 2020

A friend suggested I write a blog post about my “process of developing characters.”  Caution: questionable advice ahead!

Fiction can’t exist without characters, but the extent to which characters are developed can vary a great deal from novel to novel.  I’ll point to Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite novels, as an example of a book where the characters are never developed any further than the absolute minimum.  We’re not told anything about anybody, beyond the details that propel the story forward.

The NaNo Prep 101 workbook, a resource offered for participants in NaNoWriMo, suggests 46 questions for a writer to answer about the fictional characters they are creating.  I waver in my opinion, whether that’s admirable or ridiculous.  I don’t think much about my characters before I start writing.  The story will create them; the narrative as it spins out tells me about them. 

In a graphic novel, the reader knows what every character looks like from the very first panel.  In a traditional novel, you never know what the characters look like in the reader’s mind.  A writer can set some boundaries by spelling out a tedious physical description, but unless certain features are critical to the plot, what’s the point?  Let the reader’s imagination run wild!  In my completed YA manuscript Silver Sparks, I didn’t keep a vision of central character Kaneia Stellivar’s face in my mind as I wrote.  When Hollywood comes calling for that book, they can cast any actress of the right age, as far as I am concerned.

Characters in novels come to life in what they say and what they do.  In particular, they reveal themselves by interacting with each other in dialogue.  In my writing, I want characters’ voices to be distinguishable from each other.  But the road to a distinct character voice is strewn with hazards.  Bad accents, drawls, overactive vocabulary, verbal tics, signature words or phrases – these can easily become a point of scorn if used poorly.

One of the reasons I usually write in first person is because I want to have one character who observes and filters everybody else.  A central character narrates in her own voice, and she serves to create all the other characters by virtue of their relationship to her.  I like the mechanics of a storyline where all the judgments and assessments are made by one character.

Someday, maybe, I’ll rewrite this blog post after I’ve recently read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, and I’ll reach 100% opposite conclusions.  There is a beautiful example of a character-driven story.

Imagine a character grid, six rows by six columns.  There are 36 positions.  In the first 26 positions are the letters of the alphabet.  The numbers 0 through 9 are in the final positions.  Now you have a perfectly simple encoding device: identify a row and a column in order to specify any character.

This coding mechanism has the advantage of being simple to use, either to encode or decode a message.  (Its disadvantages are many, including the lack of any punctuation.)  Every character requires two symbols, from a set of (at least) six symbols.  The better you can conceal the meaning of the six symbols, the more difficult it will be for someone who doesn’t understand the code to break it.

In the novel I’m currently writing, the characters use the numbers on a digital clock to create a key for the six symbols.  When you look at a digital clock, the time is shown using the numbers 0-9 in four positions.  For each digit, there are seven small LED bars used to make up the shape of the number.  Four of the bars are vertical: two on the left and two on the right.  The other three bars are horizontal: top, middle, and bottom.

The number 8 uses all seven bars.  In this code key, 8 is used to represent the first row or first column.

Six bars are used to form three different numbers on a clock: 0, 6, and 9.  In our code key, it’s a dealer’s choice which to use to represent the second row or second column.  Use a 0, 6, or 9 randomly.

Similarly, the digital clock has three numbers that use five bars apiece: 2, 3, and 5.  Use 2, 3, or 5 to represent the third row or column.  This “shuffle” element in the second and third positions contributes to the opaque nature of the code.  Ten characters are used to represent only six positions.

Using four bars, the number 4 represents the fourth row or fourth column.  The number 7 uses three bars; it signifies the fifth row or column.  Finally, all that remains is the character that only uses two of the digital clock’s LED bars: the number 1, therefore used to denote the sixth row or sixth column.

87-77-77-91, 88-05-20’46 62-40?

Today is the 30th anniversary of the first time I used the Internet.  (This statement is accurate within an estimated range of eight months in either direction.)  Thirty years ago today, plus or minus, I learned how to use email on the George Washington University VM server, and I joined a mailing list for writers.

As far as I’m concerned, the first killer app of the Internet was not Gopher or Usenet or FTP, but a mail-list management platform called Listserv.  You sent a “subscribe” command via email to the Listserv host, and it plugged you in to the discussion list you requested.  Soon your inbox was bursting with on-topic and off-topic messages from people you didn’t know who shared your interest.

In 1990, a lot of the available discussion lists were technical, since IT people made up the majority of users of email.  (We spelled it “e-mail” back then.)  There were also fan groups for your favorite bands, as long as those bands were the Grateful Dead, Indigo Girls, or Blue Oyster Cult.  There must have been others, but those are the three I can verify.

The WRITERS list became an important community for me.  I’ve come to realize that there were times in my life where I thought of myself as a writer, and other times when that wasn’t really part of my identity.  Being a member of a group of writers has always been part of what keeps me engaged and working.  This electronic forum was my support group in the early 1990s, and I am grateful to all the people who were a part of it.  I got to know a lot of interesting people, and I never met most of them.

An online group enables collaboration in a way that in-person groups don’t.  You’re exchanging words anyway, so why not do a writing project together?  Somebody on the WRITERS list, and I’m very sorry I can’t credit this person but I don’t remember who it was, invented a fictional newspaper called the PARSONS MESSENGER & INTELLIGENCER.  Parsons was a mythical small town in Iowa served by a weekly rag with a cranky and quirky staff of writers.  I had the privilege to edit one of the last issues of the PM&I, with more than a dozen contributors. 

As far as I can determine, there is no archive of the WRITERS listserv, and all the issues of the PARSONS MESSENGER & INTELLIGENCER are lost to time, except for this one.

While I was in high school in the early 1970s, the University of Iowa was building a new Music Building along the Iowa River.  This was the name I knew it by: New Music Building.  My friends and I were actively interested in the construction.  I followed a group one time into the catwalk area of Hancher Auditorium.  It must have been a Sunday because no work crews were around.  My friends walked across a plank that had been laid across two very high lighting points.  I refused to cross it, and I still think of that today as one of the moments I cheated death.

If you looked at the New Music Building from the opposite side of the river, it was not too far-fetched to see it as a giant machine enclosure.  One of my friends called it the “Thing of Great Power.”  This became our alternate name for the New Music Building, the “TOGP.”

On the grounds of the TOGP were four huge limestone blocks in a group: three standing upright and one on its side.  I didn’t have any idea why they were there until I attended the University of Iowa myself and spent one brief semester in my sophomore year as an art major.  The artist, Luther Utterback, came to talk with our class.  I don’t remember much about what he said, but it was an evolutionary experience for me.  I learned that there was such a thing as public art, environmental art.  I discovered that these weren’t just four rocks dumped onto the lawn, but that they had been quarried and placed according to a design, and that a competition had selected that design to be awarded the public art contract.  The art work had an intended time scale of centuries, as the blocks would settle into the landscape, adjusting and adapting to the geologic forces of nature.

I have a vague and questionable memory that the sculptor told us, in that class meeting, that there were actually five blocks of stone in this installation, but that one was completely buried.  I can’t find any confirmation today and it’s possible I made up that memory, or that it came from a different art project.

I became interested in public art and I recall that I wrote a class essay assignment about an abstract metal sculpture by Richard Field that was in front of the Iowa City Civic Center.  My casual impression of this work is that it looked like a giant insect with antennae and legs.  I learned that its title was “Triaxal Hemicylindrical.”  Standing in front of this work, contemplating its title, I saw with a flash of insight that it did have three axes and it was entirely made up of split cylinders in two different sizes.  It was geometrically exactly what the artist called it.

In 2008 the Iowa River flooded to historic levels and the Music Building and Hancher Auditorium were destroyed.  It didn’t occur to me until today to wonder what happened to Luther Utterback’s stone blocks.  Apparently they weren’t washed down the river in an adaptation to the geologic forces of nature.  According to a University of Iowa web site, in 2013 the sculpture was “relocated on the grounds for a new Hancher Auditorium.” 

My current novel-in-progress (Wash Away, but that’s a working title, depending on how much I can work the river into the storyline) includes a corporation that has developed an artificial intelligence in order to automate its factory. The AI has begun to build robots so that it can take over customer-service jobs. It has named itself.

Honestly, I don’t know why every fiction writer doesn’t find AI to be irresistible. Imagine the strange characters that will result from non-human intelligences trying to reprogram themselves to thrive in a human world. AI will take character-building into unmapped territory.

I’m trying not to write a science-fiction novel – that’s my #1 author guideline on this project. Some early draft chapters got tossed when my writing group friends said they sounded “futuristic.” But don’t you know: personal robotics, automated manufacturing, self-driving delivery vehicles, and AI chatbots are already here? It’s a present-day novel! As William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

These technologies are worth knowing about, if you want to be informed, or justifiably scared. The librarian in me wants to provide a bibliography, but I’ll restrict myself to saying that The New Yorker’s coverage in this area has been excellent. Look up “How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?” by Tad Friend, or “What Happens When Machines Learn to Write Poetry” by Dan Rockmore, or “Learning to Love Robots” by Patricia Marx. These are mainstream business technologies now. There’s nothing futuristic, I hope, about a humble handmade factory AI that wants to pull itself up by its bootstraps into a white-collar job.

An outstanding research resource for me has been a book called Possible Minds, edited by John Brockman. I don’t know much about Mr. Brockman, but he seems to be a prolific thinker and writer, and if you want to be impressed by the length of an Amazon.com author page, go see about him. This book contains essays on AI by 25 top modern intellectuals and scientists. The consensus seems to be that the development of self-programming, machine-learning artificial intelligence is likely to be a major turning point in human history. Where it turns us, there wasn’t much agreement about that.

An endearing oddity of this book is that all the essays have been structured so that they refer back to the research and ideas of Norbert Wiener, who coined the word “cybernetics” in 1950. That was decades before the personal computer, before silicon processors, before the Internet. All the same, some of Wiener’s insights have held up.

An important topic for consideration about AI is what is euphemistically called “value alignment”: making certain that that any future AI systems pursue goals that are beneficial to humans, even though these systems will not be human themselves. Intelligence on earth has come to exist only through the thorny and tortuous process of natural evolution, and so human intelligence may be bound by constraints that are not even knowable to us. Now, soon, for the first time, we will have an intelligence that has not evolved. How will it think differently? How will we guide it and how will we know if it’s taking a destructive path? And will we be able to stop it if it does? One of the essayists points out that if humans create a superintelligent machine that has an off switch, the first thing the machine will do will be to disable the switch.