FUNDAMENTALS OF CHARACTER CREATION: HOMEWORLDS
Some characters have to sell themselves as characters, have to protagonize, on the fly. These types are embroiled in the Conflict from page one, caught in the Story’s jaws from jump, and over-determined by it. Perfect example of this is Lilith from Octavia Butler’s Dawn. She spends the entirety of Dawn imprisoned by the alien Ooloi, and because of this every bit of Lilith’s characterization occurs within the Conflict. We never experience Lilith before the Conflict, are never shown scenes of her time before the aliens.
Contrast this style of character creation with the approach Butler uses for the protagonist of Kindred. In the novel we spend quite a lot of time with Dana before the Conflict (Time-Travel-Plantation). We learn about her character, her habits, her hardships and aspirations, her morality, and indirectly, her extended family, her spatial and social world. And then when the Time-Travel-Plantation Conflict kicks in we learn who Dana becomes under that pressurization.
(And what about stories that start in media res — aka in Conflict — but flash back repeatedly to the time before the Conflict? Stories that alternate between Conflict chapters and Time Before chapters? I consider these to be Conflict-leaning hybrids because the Time Before is being unfolded within the cognitive confines of the Conflict and therefore will always carry its tint.)
There are plenty of reasons a writer chooses one of the above patterns over the other — maybe the Story needs to start in media res or the character only makes sense when you represent their base lives — or maybe the character (or the Story) only really lives under the onslaught of Conflict — or maybe it’s just what the story needs, the usual art mystery that explains a lot of our narrative decisions.
I’m interested here in the technique that defines stories like Kindred. When the writer grants the reader a panoramic portrait of the protagonist’s life in the time before the disruption that is the Conflict — the routines, relationships, troubles, wants, histories, institutions, spaces that connect them to the place they are rooted in, to their metaphoric home.
A technique that I call, in my homebrew, a Homeworld.