Questions are the building blocks of writing. The answers to the questions that you ask are what builds your story.

When it comes to non-fiction writing – journalism in particular – there are the famous 5 Ws which need to be answered in any given news story: Who, What, Where, When, Why. And then, sometimes, it is instructive to add an H – How.

In fiction it is not THAT different. These are the fundamental questions which you need answers to in order to create a story.

And the most basic questions are the three which, put together, define Character.

On the face of it, the first two questions – Who and What – might seem to be dangerously similar. Ask somebody WHO he is and WHAT he is, and watch that person struggle with those concepts. I come to it from the point of view that is almost Nature vs Nurture – WHO a person is depends on the stuff that’s inborn, inside, instinctive; WHAT he is depends on the circumstances that have shaped that particular human being.

For instance, WHO I am is a writer – because that is what I do, it’s an instinct and a vocation, it’s something that I have to do and which drives me, and it’s something that I seem to have a certain amount of talent for. WHAT I am is an author, which is a PUBLISHED writer, and for that I have had to learn my craft, and practice it, and work with others in order to make it happen.

It doesn’t have to mean that the “who” is the personality trait and the “what” is the linked profession, at least not directly –  perhaps if you answer the “who” question with “I am somebody who likes people” it might merely lead to something like “…and therefore I am a philanthropist”.  Some things can mean both – there are people to whom the phrase “I am an aristocrat” covers both WHO and WHAT they are, and in some specific cases the WHAT informs the WHO rather than vice versa – for instance, “I am the Queen of Ruritania” might mean both WHO and WHAT but if treated as the “who” part of the equation, if that is something that you were born to and therefore which has shaped you all your life you might add the “what” along the lines of, “…and therefore I am the person on whom the responsibility for her people’s well-being ultimately rests” (please note that it’s the title, or the profession, that now builds the personality trait…)

You can have fun with this when you are building characters in a novel, in either direction. Most will do it in a forward direction, like the rest of us do, living their changes, starting with a WHO AM I set of characteristics and then developing those into a WHAT AM I personality as it accretes the trappings of their world. But sometimes it’s instructive doing it in reverse – a character who starts out as an evil wizard (technically a WHAT) can be deconstructed backwards to the roots of that, until you reach the bedrock of WHO that wizard was before he turned evil and wizardly. J K Rowling did something of the sort with the flashbacks about the early Voldemort.

One way or another, the WHO/WHAT dynamic in a character is very much about a character’s growth and changes while that character is engaged in a central problem which is the raison d’etre of a piece of fiction. But there is one other crucial piece of evidence that’s missing from the picture at this point, because none of this happens in a vacuum of intent: characters in fiction – like real people – must have a reason for doing something, for changing something; the bridge, if you will, between the WHO and the WHAT. And that bridge – it’s called “motivation” – is the WHY.

This character had a lousy childhood (WHO) and turned into a serial killer (WHAT) because they were paying back old debts from their salad days (WHY). That character is an orphan girl hated by her widowed stepmother (WHO) but who grows up to marry a prince and become a princess (WHAT) because she had a fairy godmother (WHY) (hey, I never said the reasons had to be completely rational…)  It’s an equation. It kind of balances out in the end. Characters are supposed to grow and change within the frame of their own story, flipping between their WHAT and their WHO – but the reasons for that change keep them grounded, and make those changes relevant and believable.

It’s the WHY that centers them. And it’s a WHY that has to remain overtly silent – because if the reader is putting the book down and asking, frustrated, “But WHY did he do that?” you’ve lost the battle for that reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and the fabric of your story falls apart. The trick to the WHY is to supply the BECAUSE which your reader never realised they were asking for, or thought they needed to ask. A good writer poses the WHY question in the form of the BECAUSE answer, and the reader is given all the building blocks of that necessary bridge within the narrative framework itself.

This is hard to even write about never mind do it, or do it well. Characters who change believably within a motivational framework are the characters who are most remembered, though. It’s worth the struggle. The prize is a great one.

Next time we will discuss the When, Where, and How.