Character Interviews
After my last blog entry, I got some feedback asking about what questions I ask when I conduct interviews with my characters. It's a good question.
There are a lot of good sources of interview questions out there, and they all follow the same sort of methodology: they start with easy questions and expand into deeper questions that prompt you to really think about the character's desires and motivations. The questions work very well for helping you better understand your characters.
Here are the questions I use when developing my characters.
The easy ones to ask:
- Is your character male or female?
- What is the character's name?
- How old are they?
- What do they look like (hair color, eye color, height, weight, etc)?
Then come the harder questions:
- Where does the character live?
- What is the character's job or means to support himself or herself?
- What is the character most passionate about?
- What would make the character cry?
- What would make the character rage?
- What would make the character motivated to act in way they never have before?
Then come the really hard questions:
- What would this character consider beautiful? (Not a person; this could be a moment, an object, a place - what do they love deep in their heart?)
- What does the character love more than anything else?
- What is the character's biggest fear?
- What is the one thing the character has never told another person?
- What does the character have in their pocket right now?
- Who is the character closest to and why?
There are a lot of great resources out there. I think the Gotham Writer's Workshop has one of best sets of questions, and they are easily downloadable in Word format.
As an example to the power of this tool, in one of my stories, I realized that my protagonist had a real fear of losing his family. From that, I found that if I placed that character's family in danger by the antagonist, I could really drive up the tension. It was a direction I never really expected to take the character or the plot until I started asking these questions. It really helps with writer's block as well. When you get to a point where you ask yourself, "What happens next?" you can pull out the character's bio, see what their biggest fear is (or any other answer), and confront from with that situation (or the absence of the thing, as in the case of something they really love for example).
It helps to think of the character outside the setting of the novel, such as if they were being interviewed on your television show or interviewed sitting across the table from you. Some people have suggested placing characters in a setting where they might have to react to a specific situation, such as "This character finds a $20 bill on the street. What do they do with it?" For me, I prefer to let the characters tell me their secrets at my desk, and I wait to see how they handle situations until I bring them up in my novel. But, as with all things writing, these are suggestions; find what works for you and do that.
Exercise - Take your protagonist and ask them these questions. Take your antagonist and ask them these same questions. See where you can expand your plot and increase tension based on the responses.
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