Question Your Characters

One of the most important things in writing fiction is creating convincing, compelling characters. I like to get to know my characters by asking a lot of questions. I find it really fun. No question is too small, no angle is too silly.

Are they the sort of person who would leave taking out the bin to the very last minute?
Do they have a scrap book?
Are their drawers organised?
Would they get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off or perpetually snooze?
What are they ashamed of?
Have they got a dog?
Do they want a dog?
Are they kind to waiting staff?
Quick to temper?
A nail biter?

In a conversation, do they usually hold the power?
Do they say what they mean (people rarely do in dialogue) and if not, what’s underneath their actual words?
Have they got any savings in a bank account?
What is their favourite thing to cook?
Would they stand in the kitchen in their pants eating a cube of cheese from the fridge?
Or are they a formal sort of person who sits stiffly on the sofa?
Who’s their family?
What’s their middle name?
When is their birthday and do they like the attention of it?

Most of these questions will never turn up in the actual text itself. That’s not the point of the questions though. The point of the questions is to enable us as writers to have a full, rounded and deep sense of who they are, these people we are assembling. An understanding of both the mundane details of their everyday life as well as the higher stakes stuff (what do they want? Do they fear death? Do they change across the course of this book at all?) means that we know them intimately enough not only to make them feel human, flawed, varied, but we also know how they might speak and respond to others in the book and how they might cope or react to the action of the story.

I don’t think you can go too far with the questions you ask of your characters. You could start by going through your day and asking, at each stage, what your character would do. Are they a morning person? Do they brush their teeth for the mandated two minutes? What and where is their work, and how is their commute? When they run into someone on the bus, do they dread it? Go from there. The build to the big stuff, like who they would turn to in their hour of need. Get to know your characters, make them live. 

Cecilia Knapp is a poet, playwright and novelist and the Young People’s Laureate for London 2020/2021. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward prize for best single poem. She is the winner of the 2021 Ruth Rendell award and has been shortlisted for both the Rebecca Swift Women’s prize and the Outspoken poetry prize. Her debut poetry collection Peach Pig will be published by Corsair in 2022. Her poems have appeared in The Financial Times, The White Review, Wasafiri, Popshot, Ambit, Magma and bath magg and anthologised. She curated the anthology Everything is Going to be alright: Poems for When you Really Need Them, published by Trapeze in 2021. Her debut novel Little Boxes is published by The Borough Press (Harper Collins.)