I often remember how one classmate said to me, ‘Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?’ It angered me, but I had to consider it, and defend my choices, and live them, and ask myself if I had failed my characters if my story hadn’t made them matter even to someone disinclined to like or listen to them.
—Alexander Chee, “My Parade”, Buzzfeed
Hello friends,
I have a bunch of systems I use to shape stories, and recently I realized, shoot, I don’t have one for characters. I’ve always found creating good characters rather easy, but if I can make them consistently great, well, that’s gravy.
So we gotta ask, why do readers love certain characters? What makes readers cosplay them, write their dialogue in sticky notes over their desk, quote them in their email signature?
I experimented. I turned the 36 Questions that Lead to Love into a Google Form. When I need to flesh out a character, I fill it out, pretending to write as that character. Because the questions were meant to be answered with a partner, I pretend the partner is another character, someone who means a lot to the first character. If I don’t have an answer, I throw out something random, no matter how squicky, weird, or traumatic, and then what I have is what I have. Unless I think of something dramatically better, I stick with the form.
I think it’s a fantastic system. The questions were for romantic love, but really, you can use them for most kinds of love. It prompts details that create intimacy.
But it’s not enough. The form needs a counterpoint. 36 Questions that Lead to Hate. The salacious stuff you really want to hear!
- What gross thing do you do?
- What did you get away with?
- What do you lie about? What’s the biggest thing you’ve lied about?
- What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
- Roast your partner in 3 sentences. Extra points for creativity.
- Rant about something as much as you can in 4 minutes.
- What’s your unpopular opinion?
- Who do you hate and why?
- Tell each other three things you hate about each other; something you would never normally tell a stranger you just met, or even someone you love.
Et cetera. I’m still fleshing them out. Give me good questions in the comments below.
It’s like adding bitters to a cocktail. Making things bitter sounds terrible on the face of it, but it’s how you get that luxurious depth of flavor. The Love Questions create intimacy between characters; the Hate Questions lead to tension. Put them together and you get that wonderful inner and outer tension. Tension leads to conflict; conflict leads to momentum; and then the characters matter.
With love (no hate),
E. C. Fuller