@orionkidder

How do you, personally, make characters?

Do you design them to interact with each other?

Rarely. Design is a squishy word. Do they show up on stage for a purpose? Yes. Randy showed up for May Ri when she was required to marry someone. (It was in the contract she signed along with a one year time limit.) We soon learn he was supposed to marry May Ri's friend, but he agrees. Streak Carryingaton and Thorn Rose appeared together, from a reference in another novel to a pair of astronauts. I immediately decided they were a couple, because their very existence needed to disrupt an entire lost civilization. I guess that's "designing them to interact," huh? Not like I'm taking out a piece of paper and writing a character sketch or list...

Do you flesh out their backstory before you start writing?

Pretty much never. Backstory generates itself. As people interact, I end up asking myself why certain details matter. Why did Randy mean to marry Reina not May Ri. Why was he on Mars? Why was this guy especially nice? Turns out he was a woman's rights activist at a period in time, like now, when reactionary forces put the hammer down. Lots more came from that. That sorta thing. I've been caught showing such rich generated backstory that I've been called out to write that story. My first published novel was the backstory in another novel I never finished as a result.

Do you discover them as you go?

Yep. As above, I find characters when I need them to fill rolls that pop up.

Do you decide on race, gender, religion, sexuality, and all that ahead of time?

With Streak and Thorn, I knew I was writing a feminist parable of the 1960s moonshot years, detailing the prejudice and the sexism, but also poking religious fanaticism in the eye. Streak and Rose need to be different, so I made him a day angel and her a daemon. (Mind you, they're both entirely human and their "types" are inherited from other stories, so the angel x daemon thing is a serendipitous matchup.) Their people distrust each other in this time period; essentially (NOT physically,) he's black, she's white, and they're a couple. Defines their sexuality. The concept of religion doesn't apply. And that's the thought process I started with. The rest flowed from action in the story.

Sometimes sexuality is important. Cloud Dancer is gay because I wanted to have him talk with the main character about what that felt like, and to help flesh out the society they live in. Other characters made my gay-dar antennae twitch, which eventually led to me writing a gay romance side story for them. All discovery while writing.

Do you divide them between heroes and villains?

People show their true colors, but when certain people show up on stage, I know their purpose immediately. When one of the board of directors for EM Mars Corp shows up in May Ri's habitat, ordering the women congregate in one dome, stating they're redistributing women's labor to put them to better use, and names "being married" one criteria, it becomes obvious something's wrong. He becomes a recurring villainous antagonist and he's helping me now advance the plot. He's May Ri's nemesis. She regrets not letting him die the time she could have done that.

Do you "see" and "hear" them in your head?

I can't visualize people in my head as some people can. My type of shy often makes me not look at people, to avert my gaze, especially when I was kid and I suppose one learns this type of visualization. I can take a thing, like a plush toy and rotate it in my head to see all sides, so I think it is learn it or lose it. In any case, I can only tag people's attributes in my head.

I try not to describe people except vaguely, like eye color and height, so readers can relate to them better. Half way through Mars Needed Women, all we know about May Ri is her daughter has dark hair like she does, and that she's physically fit, and better than average height. That's it.

On the other hand, I assign characteristics when I think it will enhance other characteristics. The first person born on Mars has red hair and freckles, but asian eyes. Since she's treated as something of a big sister and a princess by all those born after her, I wanted pretty. The asian eyes got her the title Onēsanue (O - honorific, Nēsan - Big sister, ue - higher, special) and Japanese ancestry, which got her the surname Īto, which in turn helped describe her mother, one of the Directors, etc.

In another story, when it became important that a woman could sing, she got a soprano voice. The voice of the main character, who is the daughter of a famous opera singer who died, is only described as singing her mother's songs in the shower, and crying at the same time.

Lots of process here. Hope it helps!

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