Interview Your Characters

I know we are the creators of the characters. We have the power to make them protagonists, to make them nameless anti-heroes, and often we are too controlling and subject them to our will, so that they operate like puppets we manipulate. As I revise some of my stories, I am learning that encountering my characters like personalities I didn't create helps me see things from their perspective.

Take Tendi, for instance. She nearly ruined my story when she suddenly used an American profanity. She is based in Mazvihwa, and although she has been a temporary teacher in the Gudo area, she has not lived in the city, nor has she ever travelled abroad. I doubt that she has seen any television in her life, although, as a former temporary teacher, she could have a good idea what a TV looks like, what it does, etc. She suprised me at a crucial moment of the story.

I want to interview her. And let her answer her questions fully. She knows what she knows, and I realize that if I do a good job, what she knows may be very different from what I know.

I am trying to write convincingly using a female narrator, to run away from the brother-to-brother narratives I have been writing in the past year.I have accumulated Mukoma stories that could be turned into An Elegy for something... (Talking of elegies, I finally saw Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly at my Borders in Sacramento, right on the shelf with Garcia-Marquez. Two copies. I was hoping for more; in fact, I wanted to see it in the front of the store, right there with vampire stories and massive mystery volumes).

I want to interview Tendi; question her motives, ask her what she wants. For one, she wants her brother's British pound; she wants clothes, but as you read deeper into the story, she wants more, but she hasn't quite opened up to me.

I want to interview Tendi; to have her talk about Mazvihwa in a way that will make sense to any reader. Mazvihwa is a place of mystery, as far as I can tell from the way Tendi is telling or trying not to tell the story. I talked to someone who said historians were beginning to eye Mazvihwa for its unique history. Who would have thought that Mazvihwa had a history? With Murowa Diamond Mine flourishing in Murowa, and the displaced villagers languishing somewhere in a farm in Masvingo where they were relocated, there is a story brewing in Mazvihwa. And Tendi (is this even a girl's name anymore?) touches on that as well, but her story is about the return of her brother, "a tall, dark Karanga man who has brought a light, tall (too) Ndebele woman he met in the UK somewhere" ( we are never told where because Tendi does not know where), but she is determined to tell her brother's story....

I want to interview Tendi, and, in the words of a writer friend who has read the first draft, "to particularise her". To give her a voice. Hers not mine. In doing this I would be killing two birds with one stone: working on characterization and point of view. She uses the first person POV. I can say that when I conceived her, she wasn't a teacher at all, but after three drafts, I watched as she woke up to find out that she had turned into a teacher. And lately, disturbingly, she has begun throwing in some profanity.