A Writer's Device: "interview" the character you'll write about.

There is a lot to the old adage about Write What You Know. This is easy if you are writing about things, and places and documented times. It gets harder when writing about a character, and hardest when writing *as* them. Some stories allow for copying someone real into your fictional telling, just changing the name. Unless that is you, you might not still really know them. It's a bit more challenging the further into a created character things go. Composites can have traits you-the-writer know about, even if their total perspective has to emerge. Outright fabrications are the biggest risk, as you need to keep a very good record of everything you have them think or say. There is a problem for many fiction writers with that, though:

If you are too busy filling notebooks with "what's inside their head" for every character that you'll write as a point of view, then what you likely are not doing is actually writing your story.

So, how to keep a balance to it? There are lots of ways, and lots of people with weblogs and books about "how to write" with opinions about the ways. I won't even try to address all the techniques, but I did have one that was useful to me. I "interviewed" the main character, as if it was years later... about the general and specific things that led to him doing what he did. Got it written down as if he had a diary, or more properly a memoir like he'd use as a basis for an autobiography.

Here's a sample, not directly related to the telling in Remember When, but probably something fitting to post here the day before I put up the Character Study about him. The person being interviewed you know as The Roomie:

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About The Project...

The other thing they seemed to select for was a bit further off standard. They looked for a particular personality of the candidate. Now, almost every job search ever looks at personality at some point. In the civilian world, fairly loose checks for compatibility with the established group or department happen. The more rigorously selected professions often add focus, concentration, or confidence to the list, but also often do the selection as a part of a lengthy training that attrits away the unsuitable. Major League Baseball recruits a lot of pitchers who can throw 90 miles an hour; they then toss them into the Minors to see if they have a "Major League Head" to go with that arm, and most fail. Special Forces in the U.S. military select for equanimity; the ability or nature that stays level headed no matter how bad things are. This project seemed to want to get all of the above in a candidate, and one more thing. A feckless ability to lie to themselves, so convincingly that they projected into whatever they were saying or doing a confidence in the "truth" of that lie. For those of you keeping score, yes, that is borderline dissociative behavior. On the first pass through the list, they found about thirty or so, both from candidates and currently serving personnel. Sixteen made it to being fit to deploy.

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I've used this as a way to both know more about how self-aware, if only in hindsight, that character is of himself, and am one step closer to know how he would choose to express himself.

What works for you when you write, or story-tell, or just imagine?