I might be a little biased here, but I have most if not all of Kylie Day’s books on writing. Upon seeing that she had a character interviews on her website, I definitely needed to include a link to it for you to check out.
Kylie has a list of 115 questions you can use as a character interview. It is divided up into seven sections which makes it easy to divide up the interview over multiple days if you don’t have time to do it all at once.
As a lefty my favorite question is asking about handedness. It’s not one that I see all that often, but it is a definite relevant part of my life. In softball I couldn’t borrow other people’s mitts, because I was the only lefty on the team. When eating with others I have to be careful not to bump elbows with others, because only one other member of my family is a lefty. There’s a lot to it and I’m glad it’s covered.
Maybe one of your characters are part of a minority most people don’t think of such as handedness. I don’t think about it all the time, but when I see someone doing something right handed I just look at them and can’t figure out how they are doing it. Weird when I’m in the minority here. Way more people use their right hand to do things every day than use their left hand.
Another question I found interesting was about how success is measured. I thought that was a good question to include, because people don’t consider success the same way. To some people it is all the money. Others consider it having good relationships with all of those in their lives. For someone else it might be completing a specific project or discovering a certain thing they believe exists.
There are a lot of measures of success and what your character sees as a measure of success says a lot about them and their values. There’s no wrong answer to that question, because your characters are going to have different values and different goals than each other just as people do.
A third question that I would like to mention is about what is in your character’s pockets or purse. That’s the kind of question that can reveal a lot about a person.
My “purse,” for example, is a messenger bag which contains, among other things a notebook, various pens, and when I am in transit, my iPad 2. Of late there usually is one or more spoons for stirring hot chocolate. The majority of the time there is between one and three books in there. A lot of papers go there to die and sometimes I keep candy in there, if I have any, which I don’t at the moment. What questions catch your attention and why?
