Here’s another round of a few questions you can ask of one of your fictional characters to help you flesh him or her out a bit more. The number you decide to answer will probably depend on how much detail you go into—the more inspiration you find in a single question, the fewer you need to explore on the whole.
- Bravery: How does your character define bravery? Does he see himself as brave?
- Brat: Who’s the most bratty person your character knows, and what’s her relationship with him?
- Baffle: Write a list of things that confuse and baffle your character.
- Bulldoze: If someone tried to run roughshod over your character, figuratively bulldozing him out of her way, what would he do? Write about a scenario in which this happens.
As I’ve noted before, I like having a wide variety of questions to choose from simply because you probably want to answer different questions for each character you explore, and you might find one question inspiring but not another. However, I don’t recommend trying to answer a huge number of questions for a single character—you can end up burning yourself out on the character before you get to your actual writing! Just pick a few highlights and use those. Even one or two good questions can teach you a lot about a character.
If you prefer to write non-fiction rather than fiction, always feel free to ask character-building questions of yourself and journal about the answers.
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