Character Background Sheets Be Damned: Three Questions to Develop Your Characters
So often when I pick up a book on characterization or encounter a characterization tip on Twitter, I’ll see the “character background sheet” espoused as the be-all and end-all of character development.
These sheets include questions about things like your main character’s profession, eye color, and astrological sign. In fact, they generally include a lot of questions, as if the more questions you answer about your character the better, with titles like “103 Ultimate Questions for the Perfect Main Character.”
It’s not that a character background sheet isn’t useful. It’s not that it’s not important to know your character’s profession and eye color and astrological sign. But there’s something more fundamental, more essential about a character that needs to come out on the page — something that the pressure of a situation draws out more than a fact sheet.
I’ve been toying with these three questions as questions that get to that essence. I like to think that the answers to these three questions might be all you need to write a novel because the character’s essence defines the story, guides what actions will be taken or not taken, and provides the entry to a reader’s interest in the character.
What does your character do when someone cuts in front of them in line?
I like this question because it can show whether your character is easy-going or easily angered, generous or spiteful, able to voice a complaint or too meek to speak up, oriented toward justice or accepting of leniency, and many other things.
It also dramatizes your character’s sense of agency and power in the world. When I think of my own personal response to this situation, I think of how I might respond differently to different people, or how I might respond differently in different places (my hometown versus a big city in a foreign country versus a neighborhood I don’t feel safe in).
No matter what, the question will help dramatize a crucial character question: what kind of power does your character feel in relation to others, and what kinds of actions (or non-actions) will your character take.
How does your character eat an apple?
I think it was Emerson who wrote an essay about how to eat an apple. I tried to find it on the Internet, but I failed (maybe it was Thoreau?). I read the essay once, though, and I remember how he indulged in every detail of how to best eat an apple — to eat it outdoors, on a crisp fall day, picking it fresh from the tree. He poetically described the taste, the angle of the light, the way the apple touched his soul.
There are many ways to eat an apple, of course. You can eat it without thought or taste, focusing on food as fuel. You can eat it so quickly that you might choke on it. You might only eat apples that are shiny and unblemished or you might eat earthy apples that somehow hold the soil and tree they grew on.
In the end, the way we eat an apple can reveal our sense of sensuousness, our ability to notice, our ability to connect with the world beyond ourselves.
How does your character order at a celebratory dinner in a fancy restaurant, and what do they order?
This question combines the first two questions in some ways. How you order in a fancy restaurant reveals who you are, starting with how comfortable you are sitting in a fancy restaurant to begin with and how you view the waiter (e.g., are you deferential, viewing yourself as less sophisticated, less polished, or do you treat the waiter as a servant, someone who will do as you say?).
What you order is also telling. Does your character feel entitled to order the most expensive items on the menu, not worrying about cost (and maybe your character doesn’t have to worry about cost), or does your character order the cheapest entrée and skip the appetizer? Do they feel as if they should shoot for the moon on a special night out or do they wish they’d just gone to get a burrito and saved the money? Are they capable of indulging in themselves and their desires or are they inhibited in some way?
The way we approach a fancy restaurant, and if we even enter one, reflects our upbringing, our feeling of entitlement, our sense of pleasure, and the way we approach money, among other things.
The Questionnaire
But if you’d still like to use a questionnaire, I recommend using The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, popularized in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. It’s said that if you answer these, you’ll accelerate and enhance the intimacy you feel with another. I don’t think these questions will necessarily help you create a dramatic character, but they can be a fun a way to get to know the character, just as they can be a fun way to get to know another person.
Warning: As with research, sometimes people feel the need to include all of the answers to such questions in their novel. Background material is called “background material” for a reason — it’s supposed to remain in the background, not the foreground of the story.
The Rundown
Reading: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makai
Listening to: Time Walk, by Bnny
Lusting for: An Italian hot chocolate. And more rain. And another log in the fire. And for someone to put the log in the fire.
Inspiration: "They say a person has so unique a set of meanings we ought to be incapable of understanding each other, yet we speak as if by magic." ~ E.J. Koh
Random question: What if said the thing that’s on your mind with the same words that are on your mind?
Photo prompt: Because it’s Halloween this week. And I love walking around cemeteries and taking photos.
