Storing a word in reserved memory

Question

I am coding in MIPS Assembly language and reserved 12 byts in .data.

.data 
bool: .space 12 #12 byts to be able to save 3 words
other_data: .asciiz "Part of some other data I saved"

.text
...
li $a1, 4
la $a0, guess #address to read sting in
li $v0, 8 #read string
syscall
...

The string is recorded into 1 byte from the address of $a0 but I want to seperate each character into a seperate byte