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"The Peace Corps had constructed a mock Indian village [in Wisconsin], replete with shanties and stocked with educated Indian functionaries they had hired and flown over from Delhi to play the role of the poor and underserved. Acting the part of people they didn't even condescend to speak to in life, those high-caste Indian educators needed help from the American trainees..."

That's novelist Tony D'Souza describing a surreal Peace Corps training in the 1960's, something he never experienced, but used as a pivotal plot device in his new book, The Konkans.

His first novel, Whiteman, was a journey deep into a troubled African country where D'Souza served in Peace Corps, but his new book travels into brand new spaces. 

Today he gives us a long essay about characterization in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your first book focused on a young man who lived a life very similar to your life in Peace Corps. This second novel dives into the lives of people very different from yourself. How did you imagine your way into the lives and thoughts of these unfamiliar characters--especially the middle-aged mother of the narrator and the Indian immigrant she secretly loved for years?

Whiteman and The Konkans are equally fictional. I just had all the concrete details in both cases to make them feel more real than most fiction. At least that's what people tell me, that my books feel real to them, likely thinly veiled memoir, but we'll see.

If I'm only writing thinly veiled memoir then I suppose I'll run out of material soon because how much material do you get from your own life?

As far as putting myself in the shoes of people vastly different from who I am like—like the mother in this story, and her lover, her brother's husband. I did write in Whiteman from the perspectives of people very different from myself and my narrator, Jack.

For example there is a chapter in Whiteman called Wu Didi about a Chinese doctor's struggle to get his grandson back from the village girl (the boy's mother) who has taken him. In the writing of that chapter I had to release myself into Dr Wu's consciousness in the same way that I did in the writing of Denise and Sam in The Konkans.

Whether it was successful or not, the way that I went about it, I dunno, I guess I'll equate it to breaking and entering into someone's house. I did that a couple of times when I was a kid goofing around with a couple of buddies when I was growing up, and later in my early twenties I got hooked up with these guys in Scotland and we robbed a house.

Anyway, you go in there and everything is interesting, worth looking at. You know you're not supposed to be in there and that's a part of it, too. I like to think I have an eye for details; so going into other people's homes for me was always about the adventure.

So say you do something like that and you get beyond the nerves and the adrenaline of it to sort of settle into it and experience it, the question then is what are you going to see, what are you going to remember you saw.

So in The Konkans and in the Dr. Wu story, well I suppose I did a lot of research into those people in my imagining and creation of them, thinking of who they were and where they had come from and the pressures that faced them in their lives.

And so there become rules to their lives just like there are rules to our own. And while as little of that stuff eventually makes it into the story as does stuff from research--again you have to sift through the mountain to find the few diamonds--and anyway, you do find it, and I think this is one of the most important parts of revision for me.

Because as I write the book I just kind of go along writing scenes, more worried about the scenes, that something is always happening, not to have dry patches. And then in the revision, I've written the whole book and in the writing of the book I have gotten to know the characters.

And so in the revision I go back to pages I wrote, who knows, three, four months ago, and now I know Sam, I know Denise and as I look back at those pages I can say, 'What? Denise would never do that. Sam would never think that.' And then I revise and make them do the things they would do.

If you don't know what your character would do in a certain situation, then you haven't learned your character yet. Because there is only one thing that character can do in that situation, just like there is really only one thing we can do in the situations of our lives.

But when you do know what your character will do, viola you have inhabited your character. For me it takes a lot of time, it comes through in revision. But at the same time the kernels of who they are and what makes them good as characters is there from the beginning. Because it is those things that compels you to write them in the first place.

So my advice and what I do is press on in the draft, even if you don't know where you are going. The book will teach you. The book might even teach you that it is a piece of crap and you should throw it away. That happens often enough.