World-building in Collaborators: Add Some Characters

The central inspiration for Collaborators – that individuals respond in a variety of complex and contradictory ways to a situation of occupation and resistance – immediately suggested many types of characters: the rebel, the idealist, the opportunist, the political player, the merchant willing to sell to anyone if the profit is high enough, sadist who exploits the powerlessness of others for his own gratification, the ambitious person who doesn’t care who his allies are, the negotiator, the peace-maker, the patriot.

These are all interesting roles, offering scope for compelling confrontations, but they are not in themselves characters. They’re slots into which characters might fit at any given time, as those characters progress along their own life story arcs. The temptation is to take such a slot, insert a character, and then have him behave in that way and only in that way throughout the story. This is the classic “spear-carrier,” whose only function is to come onstage, carry his spear (or throw it, or make a speech, or die in some plot-appropriate way), and then disappear. He might have a few warts or wrinkles or a bit of backstory, but only in service to his predetermined function.

Effective characters work in just the opposite way. They go about their lives in their idiosyncratic ways, with their own histories and families, dreams and neuroses. Interesting as these might be, they do not in themselves constitute a dramatic plot, only a series of linked episodes. Then something – whether it’s an internal event like a new goal or an external one like an invasion by a space-faring race – catapults the character into a dramatic course of action. The overall problem/crisis/goal informs and shapes the character’s choices, but at the same time the character – her personality, history, viewpoint, relationships – drives the action in a unique way.  So I needed to find out who some of these characters were, both alien and Terran, throw them into an escalating situation, and see what they did with it.

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