“Unlocking the Soul: Secrets to Unveiling Your Character’s Hidden Humanity”
Are you ever curious about what goes on inside a character’s head? I mean, how often do we find ourselves wondering who they are beyond the lines we write? In the captivating world of storytelling, digging into a character’s inner life is like peeling back the layers of an onion—each layer reveals more depth, more emotion, and, yes, more complexity. This article dives into a unique exercise that invites you to literally ‘interview’ your characters, probing their thoughts and feelings as if they were sitting across from you at a café, sharing their innermost secrets. This isn’t just about crafting dialogue; it’s about understanding what makes them tick. So grab your pen or your keyboard, and get ready for an exploration that promises to unearth the quirkiness and humanity of your fictional companions. Trust me, they might just surprise you! LEARN MORE.
A writing exercise which helps you tap into a character’s inner life.
on UnsplashIn Part III of my book The Protagonist’s Journey, I provide six writing exercises as part of an immersive character development process. One of those exercises is the Interview.
This is a form of direct engagement with your characters. How? You ‘sit down’ with each of your characters and ‘interview’ them. I like to do this while I’m at my computer, but if you feel like you can get more comfortable with a pad of paper and pen, by all means use that approach.
It might help if you imagine a scenario:
- You are someone who is interviewing them for a job.
- You’re out on a date and getting to know them.
- You’re a police detective and you have them in a holding cell interrogating them.
My favorite: I’m a psychiatrist. They are my patient. What’s more, they have been court ordered to answer my questions.
One of the writers taking my class posted this comment:
My problem more often than not is that I can’t get my characters to stop talking! But I let them go on because I’m hoping down the line that I can synthesize and pare down to something more essential. Which brings up a question: how do you synthesize/simplify without losing the humanity?
Here is my response.
If you, like I do, subscribe to the theory that your story’s characters exist — in some sort of strange, magical way … a parallel universe — then the hope is to discover their unique humanity. And of course, that includes the way they speak. So the idea is the deeper you go into a character’s personality, psyche, and background, the more they come to life … and the more they come to life, the more human they become.
If you don’t have a problem getting your characters to talk, in fact you have the opposite issue, then the concern is not what some call the receptive writing process, where we immerse ourselves in the lives of their characters and “receive” stuff from them (e.g., dialogue, memories, associations, personality, behaviors, beliefs, and so forth). The issue may be with the other part of crafting a story: the reflective writing…
