Questions to Ask Your OC
Twenty questions to put to your own character in their own voice, for writers and roleplayers whose pages of backstory notes have not yet made the character feel like a person.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What is in your pockets right now?
Why ask it
Pockets are an inventory of a life: keys to what, whose photo, which receipt. If you have to invent on the spot, the thing you invent is usually the truest detail you own, and if you come up with nothing, the character has not been placed in a world yet.
What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a room?
Why ask it
Exits, faces, price tags, the cleanest chair. This is where profession, class and old fear leak out without you having to state any of them, and it gives you a lens to filter every later scene through.
What do you do with your hands when you are nervous?
Why ask it
You need one physical tell you can use on the page instead of writing anxiously. Watch out if the answer is a stock gesture like clenching a fist, since a borrowed tic means you are still describing a type rather than a person.
How do you eat when nobody is watching?
Why ask it
Standing over the sink, hoarding, ordering the same thing every time, unable to leave food on a plate. Eating habits carry scarcity, upbringing and control, and readers register them faster than any stated backstory.
What sound makes you flinch?
Why ask it
A flinch points at a specific past event, which is more useful than a listed trauma because it can happen mid-scene. If the answer is a vague loud noises, you have a wound without a story attached to it.
Who taught you the thing you are best at?
Why ask it
Skills come from somebody, and that somebody is a relationship you can use: a debt, a rivalry, a grief. A self-taught answer is fine, but then ask what they had to go without in order to learn it alone.
What did you own as a child that you would still know by touch?
Why ask it
This gets at sensory memory rather than biography, which is where readers feel a childhood instead of being told about one. Where the object is now, kept, lost, sold, is usually the plot-relevant half of the answer.
Where do you go when you cannot be around people?
Why ask it
A named place tells you what they consider safe and what they can afford, whether that is a roof, a chapel, a car park at 2am. It also gives you somewhere to send them when a scene needs to break.
What rule do you keep even when nobody is watching?
Why ask it
This is their real code, as opposed to whatever they claim to believe. The interesting version is a rule that costs them something, since a rule with no price attached is just a preference.
Whose approval do you still want?
Why ask it
Naming a specific person, often one who is dead, absent or unimpressed, explains behaviour that otherwise looks irrational. If the honest answer is nobody, ask when that stopped being true and what happened.
What are you saving money, time or favours for?
Why ask it
A saved-up resource points straight at a want the character will not state, and it gives you something concrete for the plot to threaten. A character who saves nothing is telling you they do not expect a future.
What is the last lie you told, and who did it protect?
Why ask it
The direction of the lie matters more than the lie. Protecting themselves, protecting someone weaker, or protecting a story they need other people to believe are three different characters.
Who could ruin you with one sentence?
Why ask it
This hands you an antagonist or a hostage without inventing one, because it identifies the person holding the information. It also tells you what the character believes is unsurvivable, which is not always the worst thing they have done.
What would your enemy call your weakness, and would they be right?
Why ask it
Asking whether the enemy is right forces self-knowledge, and the gap between how the character sees themselves and how they are seen is where readers do their own thinking. A character who agrees completely, or dismisses it entirely, is not finished.
What is the last kind thing someone did for you, and how did you react?
Why ask it
Reactions to kindness are more revealing than reactions to threat: suspicion, an immediate need to repay, embarrassment, calculation. If they cannot remember any kindness, that is a fact about their world worth writing.
What have you forgiven that you swore you never would?
Why ask it
Forgiveness given against their own stated principles shows you where the character bends, and that bend is usually the shape of the story. Absolute answers in either direction are worth pushing on.
What do you want that you would not say out loud?
Why ask it
The stated goal drives the plot, the unstated one drives the choices readers argue about. If the two are the same, there is no subtext to write and every scene will play out exactly as expected.
If you had to leave tonight, what would you regret leaving behind?
Why ask it
A forced choice ranks attachments in a way that open questions about love never do. The regret is often something small and unheroic, which is exactly what makes it land.
What do you believe about yourself that stopped being true a while ago?
Why ask it
This is the arc, stated in one line: an old self-description that the current facts no longer support. If the character has already noticed, you are writing the aftermath rather than the change.
What would you have to lose before you changed?
Why ask it
The answer tells you the price of the ending and how much of the book you need. Save this one for last, because it only produces something usable once the earlier answers have told you what they are holding on to.
Interviewing your own character
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to run the interview
Answer in first person, in their voice
Write she would probably say and you get a character sheet. Write the sentence they would actually say, with their grammar and their evasions, and you get dialogue you can lift straight into a scene.
Let them refuse
A character who deflects a question is giving you the most usable answer in the set. Write the deflection down verbatim and note which question caused it, then come back to it after the others.
Break off when you start explaining
If an answer turns into paragraphs about the magic system or the family tree, you have switched from the character to the setting. Cut back to what they personally saw, held or lost.
Answer the same question as a second character
Put the same question to someone who knows them and take the contradiction seriously. The disagreement between two accounts is where a reader feels a person exists independently of you.
What to do with the answers
- Mark every answer you had to stall on. Those are the parts of the character you have not built, and they are where a story will find a hole.
- Turn three answers into physical details a reader can see, then delete the notes. Nothing goes on the page as an answer to a questionnaire.
- Look for two answers that contradict each other and keep both. People are inconsistent, and the inconsistency is usually the interesting part.
- Check whether every answer sounds like you. If the voice is your voice, you have a mouthpiece rather than a character, and the fix is usually to give them an opinion you disagree with.
- Note which answer would be hardest for them to say in front of the person they love most. That is your scene.
Common pitfalls
Trauma instead of personality
A dramatic backstory is not characterisation. What matters is the ordinary habit it left behind: how they answer the phone, who they will not sit next to, what they overpack for.
Flaws that cost nothing
Clumsy, too kind, works too hard. A flaw only reads as real when it damages something the character wants, so check that at least one answer here makes them harder to like.
Filling in every blank
A completed hundred-question profile can leave a character with no room to surprise you. Leave some things undecided until a scene forces the answer out.
Answers with no world attached
If the responses would fit any setting, the character is floating. Push each one until it involves a specific place, price, law or custom from the world they live in.