The Interview System

Maybe you’ve been disappointed, so far, that this course only gives general advice. I give tips to quickly find a strong core for a character, and say that details (such as appearance or personality) flow from that.

Well, this chapter is for you—kind of. I know quite a few authors who invent characters through a sort of “interview” or “questionnaire” system.

They have a long list of questions they ask their character. Think of questions like “What’s their eye color?” or “To what school do they go?” or “What’s their relationship with their parents?”

By answering all of them, they slowly get all the nitty-gritty details of this fictional character. Once they’ve conducted the interview, they’re ready to write.

I wanted to provide you such a list in this chapter, but could not find a set of questions that was both short and might be useful. This whole course explains, time and time again, why the core of a character (empathy + purpose) is important—not the details. Conducting such an interview ignores that entirely and misses the point, unless you ask so many questions that you find their core personality anyway.

However, asking your character questions is a good tool! You just need to make sure you ask the right questions and answer them in a useful way.

What questions to ask?

You invent a list of awkward, hard or complicated situations. Then you ask your character how they would respond.

By answering these questions, you get a clear picture of who your character is. And it’s a fun technique that invites more creativity. This is how you make the “interview system” useful, in my view.

This list of situations depends on your genre, story style, setting, age of the character, etcetera. (You might throw a kid into different situations than an adult.) That’s why I can’t just give you my list and set you on your way.

But the idea is simply to invent simple situations with conflict. Something awkward, something uncertain, something that requires action or a response.

Of course, if you already have an inciting incident or other plot points—use those as questions!

How to answer them?

If you have trouble coming up with good answers, you can take a more logical approach. (This also helps when you have a scene in the story, but you just don’t know how to continue or how the characters will solve it.)

Suppose X is a possible response to the situation. Create two lists:

• One with arguments for why they would do X (as a response)
• One with arguments for why they would NOT do X (as a response)

The side with the strongest arguments obviously determines what they choose. Keep going until you find a response that feels fitting.

This trains you to think logically through all possibilities and find the one most consistent or interesting for your story. It also forces you to think like a character. To see the situation through the eyes of the character, coming up with any reasons why they would or would not make a choice.

An example

Imagine our character is a guard. They guard some very important prison or prisoner. Now another person approaches, in a black cloak, offering them a lot of golden coins for opening the gate and walking away. That’s the inciting incident of our story.

What do they do? You make the lists.

Why would they accept the bribe?

• They’re poor and really need the money.
• They’re secretly sympathetic with the prisoner they’re guarding.
• They’re insecure or easy to sway.

Why would they NOT accept the bribe?

• They do not want to lose their job.
• They believe in honor, bravery and responsibility.
• They’re afraid for their safety (or that of their family) once their treachery comes out.

Just by inventing these arguments, we already get a more detailed idea of this guard. We get some conflicting desires inside them, making this inciting incident even more interesting. We can convey these reasons as dialogue or thoughts during the scene.

Now you pick one thing to focus on. Maybe the fact that they’re poor is the most important theme of the book and the aspect most explored. Then this argument weighs more heavily than others, which means … the guard accepts the bribe.

Is that not an interesting first chapter? An impactful decision, but completely logical. The reader already has a strong idea of who this interesting guard character is. And all of that just by improvising a list of arguments for and against a decision.

Now write!

Invent your list of ~10 interesting situations. For each character, answer how they’d respond. Preferably, there’s no situation to which all characters respond in an identical way!

When stuck or uncertain, make lists with arguments for and against a certain response. Do so through the eyes of the character, not your own. Pick the side with the best arguments.

Now write your story with these characters.