Meet Lois McMaster Bujold
Science Fiction Writer
A Good Story

Karen: What do you feel makes a good story?

Lois: For me it's character, which is one of the reasons I write novels. Novels lend themselves to long, complicated character studies where you really get inside a person and find out what makes him tick. I think the people who write short stories tend to be more idea centered. They want to give you this quick, intellectual hit where you read the story and go oh, wow, what a cool idea. But I do character.

Karen: What pointers about characterization would you like to give young writers?

Lois: That character can't exist in a vacuum; what the character is is what he does or she does. So, she needs interesting things to do so that we can find out all those interesting possibilities about her character that otherwise we'd never know. This is also true for real girls, by the way.

For example, if you had a scene where two people are talking, you could maybe find out which one is smarter. But, if you had a scene where two people are challenged with running into a burning building to save somebody, you could find out which one had more physical courage. You find out different things about characters depending on what kind of plot challenges they face and how they solve them. So plot and character are very intimately connected because each creates the other. If you're a character, what you are is what you do.

Karen: What pointers about setting would you like to give young writers?

Lois: I tend to assemble my settings around the characters. And setting offers [openings] for me. Once I've got a setting going, I'll get ideas about it and that will trigger more ideas for plot incidents which will, then in turn feed into characterization. In science fiction you're always making up a culture and a history and there should be things about the characters that are special and unique to their culture that is different from ours. Otherwise, why write science fiction?

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