101 TIWIK #30: Characters are Made of Questions

When we craft characters, we often do it half-blind. As we draft, a character’s form, both physical and psychological, takes shape in our minds. By the time the first draft is complete, our characters often resemble Frankenstein, cobbled together from pieces, lurching inanimately across the page.

Even writers who outline every detail of plot rarely start out with a full dossier on their characters. But understanding your characters through and through is just as important, if not more important, than knowing what will happen. Particularly if your characters are driving the plot.

I struggled to manage a cast of unwieldy franken-characters for years until I discovered a gem of a writing resource called Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress. In addition to loads of great advice about how to create, manage, and develop characters, Kress provides a 14 page, five part questionnaire to fill out on your characters.

Pansters, don’t despair. If the thought of filling out 14 pages of info on your characters before you’ve drafted a single word makes you cringe, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve used this questionnaire successfully after drafting to bring my franken-characters to life.

It is well worth purchasing Nancy Kress’s book and filling out the entire questionnaire. For those of you not yet convinced, read on. I’ll summarize the kinds of questions she suggests asking and why I believe it is important to ask these questions.

The Dreaded Government Form

In this section, you’d answer questions about basic physical statistics, like height, weight, eye color, etc, along with birth records, occupational information, marital status, religion, race, address, etc. Why do you need all of this information? Because just asking these questions starts to reveal loads about the character. For example, “Where were they born” tells you what their cultural influences at a young age were. More importantly, the sum of these questions puts the character in context. Is he or she poor? Middle-class? Wealthy elite? The answers in this section, while alone read like boring facts, come together to reveal where your character stands, what their role is in life.

Beware, though. You will not want to include all, or perhaps any, of this information in the actual narration of the book. Rather, this information will help you understand how the characters will interact with their world.

Lifestyle

This section is for the things that distinguish your character from other characters. What is their style? What do they wear, drive, where do they live, how is their home furnished, how do they speak, what are their hobbies, what kind of cultural activities do they enjoy? Do they have pets? Where would you find them on a saturday night? A lot of the information in this category will probably come through as you show the character moving through their life. But imagine being able to draft already knowing all these things, down to what kind of music the character likes? Having ready answers to these questions allows you to always consider the character in the context of their lives. It helps you add that little bit that makes the character more real and believable to the reader. These are minor details that won’t make a huge difference alone, but taken together, are the readers’ impression of the character and how they will pick your character out from the crowd.

For those of us who are building new worlds in our writing, these questions also reveal gaps in setting. Perhaps you haven’t even considered what kind of pet a Blorthian will keep, or what kind of artwork is admired by the Narth. While all of Kress’s questions are directed at contemporary fiction, I didn’t have any trouble adapting them for a built world, and found that they helped me deepen my worldbuilding. Sections one and four are also helpful to world-building.

Relationships

What are the primary relationships in the character’s life? How does he or she interact with these people? It is important to answer these questions not just for the relationships with other characters with “screen-time” in the book, but for all people the character knows. For example, your main character’s mother may never appear in the book, but if you know what their relationship was like, you’ll have loads of information about what kind of person your character is.

A day in the life

This is probably my favorite section: Imagine a typical day in the life of your character. Where does he or she wake up? Do they eat breakfast? Who do they see first? Where do they go to work? What happens there? What is dinner like? How do they spend the evening? Answering the questions in this section really helped me get my scenes out of the rut of taking place only during the most important events of the day. I found that scenes placed or started in the “off times,” such as when a character is doing their morning routine, added to the richness of the character. For example, knowing that a character starts every single morning doing an exercise routine reveals a lot about that character. It’s fun to establish a routine, then have something happen to the character that interrupts the routine. How do they handle the disruption?

The inner reaches of the character

What are your character’s hopes? What are his deepest fears? What does he love, what does he believe? These questions go beyond merely asking, what does the character want in this moment, to asking, what is the psychological make-up of the character? This section also asks you to make a distinction between how the character sees himself and how the character really behaves–which can reveal volumes. 

This section is perhaps the most important, because it is the character’s inner life that will inform their behavior in a crisis, which is what they should be in through most of the book if it is to be interesting. Will your character’s secret fear of water prevent him from jumping into the lake to safety? Or will her willingness to die for her religious beliefs propel her into taking a drastic action that no one thought her capable of? As with the basic facts, you won’t always want to tell the reader the direct answers to the questions in this section. But you do want to make sure that you’ve shown enough of your character’s inner life to make their actions believable.

In short: A) Invest in Nancy Kress’s Dynamic Characters, and B) invest the time into thoroughly questioning your characters. You’ll find that the more you know about your characters, not only does it become easier to write them, but doorways into plot, setting and theme that you hadn’t seen before will swing wide open.

Now that you have built a character or brought your frankencharacter to life, it’s time to put them through the ringer in tomorrow’s post: 101 TIWIK #31: Be Mean To Your Characters, Then Be Meaner

This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning. 

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