StoryWorlds with Junot Díaz

detail from Allison Raskin’s Gossip podcast Dialogue is one of the key channels of intrinsic characterization, along with interiority and praxis. What a character says, what a character thinks, what a character does — lock in on those three channels and you’ll be halfway up the mountain that is compelling convincing Character. Give the Character two other relationships (the extrinsic component) and you’ll have the summit in sight.

To sing this story from our wine-dark world into the warring stars I must first tell you about the boy. A Machine boy named Gilgamek. Who lived, of all places, on the planet Urth. Urth! A name that once struck terror in the hearts of a thousand worlds … but no more. Urth had fallen mightily since the days of its imperial majesty, no longer the conqueror of galaxies, no longer the source or center of anything — hard to imagine it ever was.