WINSTON (cont.):  . . .  When this character becomes a living, breathing person, you’ve got ten thousand anecdotes to tell.  It’s just a question of which ones you want to bother to tell.  I learned how to characterization from reading a great deal of Theodore Sturgeon, science fiction and non-science fiction.  And when he gets through with a character, he has really delved into the personality, even to the point where he’s telling a story in the first person and he’s not always the omniscient I’m-a-great-person storyteller.  Sometimes the person telling the story is an egotist, or a fool, or a crook, or somebody who is more humane than he himself even realizes.  So characterization covers all kinds of different facets . . .

“And sometimes you get so wrapped up in a universe that it becomes too much of real life.  I stopped writing CAPTAIN UHURA when ‘Roots’ came on for the first time, because at the end of the second episode when they whipped Kunta Kinte to make him accept his slave name Toby, that affected me very deeply; and on the paper, Uhura started becoming a black racist.  And I had to decide whether to write or watch ‘Roots.’  I didn’t watch “Roots.’  And then I got it out of my system, went on and completed my story, and I watched the series when it was repeated.  But that’s when your universe becomes a living, breathing thing.  Your universe begins to surround you.  Everything you look at begins to take on a new aspect.  Things that you’ve gone through in your own life, you say ‘How can I translate this into a story to say something?’  Because it’s not just that you’re telling a story, but that you’re living pieces of yourself.

“Even when you open up your universe to other people, when you let them in, you still say, ‘Okay, but this has got to be twisted to fit right, because I’m still saying something, over all.’  And you’ve got to keep firm control over it.  If you let it get out of hand, you wind up looking on it and saying, ‘What happened?!’  For a while, I had a fantasy where my universe would become like KRAITH, where I would have lots of other contributing writers.  It didn’t happen, and now I look back on it and say, ‘Thank goodness it didn’t happen!’ because I know some of the problems Jacqueline Lichtenberg went through.  I was close friends with several members of the KRAITH round robin.  It got to be sticky.  And so I had an article in PROBE 11 — which a lot of people did not like — about how the nuts-and-bolts of the KRAITH round robin writing system wasn’t doing the job it was supposed to be doing.  Some of the KRAITH creators said, ‘How dare you say that?’ but it was all true, because it was written by a KRAITH creator.  So sometimes your universe can get out of hand if you let too many people in with you and you don’t keep firm control . . .”