CHARACTERS: Creating Character Interviews & Backstories

Before writers write about their cast of characters, it can be extremely helpful to complete character interviews and backstories. Both of these forms of information can allow them to know their characters and understand how they would behave based on their distinguished personalities when faced with conflict and complications in different types of scenarios and situations. Let's review over the difference between character interviews and backstories, and how interviews can actually help writers to construct and complete their backstories below.

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WATCH THE EPISODE

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See episode 18 of season 2 of my Journey of a Christian Writer series, Characters: Character Interviews & Backstories or continue reading the blog post for more information.

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CHARACTER INTERVIEWS

Character interviews are critical thinking questionnaires writers write for character analysis to interview their characters' likes, dislikes, and other personal background details about them. For example, questions about their childhood, their teen years, or adult years depending on the ages of characters, as some things may not be needed. Writers will likely not need adult questions for a character that remains the age of seven throughout a story; except there be a continuation in another book. Character interviews can be done in different ways, such as a writing software program, such as Scrivener or other note-taking sites like Notion.

A simple way to create a full character interview is dividing it into three sections:

1. EARLY LIFE/CHILDHOOD

2. TEENHOOD/TEEN YEARS

3. YOUNG ADULTHOOD/ADULT YEARS

Afterward, writers could write specific questions based on each of the age group sections. For example, under early life or childhood writers could have the following setup question:

E.G. Question: What is your earliest childhood memory?

Character Name: Learning to walk in the backyard with my mother.

Other questions for early life or childhood could be the following questions:

• What was your favorite toy as a child?

• What was your favorite subject during grade/elementary school?

• What children's program did you enjoy as a kid?

Once this first section is done, then writers could do the same for the teenage and adulthood sections, asking more mature questions that are appropriate for these age groups. For example, for teen years writers could ask what high school characters attended and when they graduated; and for adulthood, they could ask about occupation or daily life. Then after thinking things through for their interview questions, writers can use their characters' answers to write complete, thorough summaries. Hence, their character backstories.

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CHARACTER BACKSTORIES

Character backstories are the past histories of characters prior to the present-time storyline. It's everything that happened to the characters before the start of the story and includes fears, emotional wounds, insecurities, or past traumas of the characters that contribute to how they act in the present and what they must work to overcome. Using both character interviews and character backstories aren't required by writers. However, starting with interviews can be helpful for writers and make it easier to write organized backstories which can gradually be weaved into their story's narratives to flesh-out their characters.

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CLOSING REMARKS:

Knowing characters' backgrounds and personalities is important for writers to write about them efficiently and make them believable on the page for readers. If you're have issues with completing full backstories, consider writing character interviews first during the outlining stage. For more writing videos or tutorials, subscribe to my writing channel Journey of a Christian Writer series. Well, that's it for this post. If you found it helpful, please, give it a (heart❤️), take part in the poll 🤔, and share your thoughts or comments 💬 below.)  

Happy Writing! 😊✍🏽💻

🤔Hey, writers, do you prefer character interviews or backstories?

• 🎤 Interviews, all the way!
• 📰 Backstories! Character Interviews aren't really needed.