The first part of writing anything long-form for me is always some exhaustive outlining, working through all the macro-structural elements so I can comfortably dive into the micro-structural elements. It saves time, gives me something to write towards. Saves me from going down a lot of wells and getting married to all the well-toads that live down there, not being able to divorce myself from them later on when I realize I was supposed to be somewhere else.
But even antecedent to that deep outlining phase, while we’re still trying to figure out who our characters are, I’ve taken to an exercise with a little piece of pop psychology that most of you have probably heard of at some point: thirty-six questions developed by psychologist Arthur Aron, which, when answered earnestly together by any two people, are designed to make them “fall in love” (whatever that means clinically). You read the questions, you see what they’re talking about. They range from relatively benign ice breakers to pretty emotionally deep stuff. It’s easy to read them, feel yourself beginning to answer them out loud, feel yourself beginning to project a kind of trust and gratitude onto the hypothetical listener even as you just think about expressing those aspects of yourself to someone. Feel like you could know yourself better just by working these out for yourself, and imagine the debt of care you would feel for anyone who would bare those parts of themselves to you. It’s obvious how people end up in bed together.
So: generally speaking, I think the world is full of too many people taking their narrow experience and trying to tell other people How to Write (you may as well be asking How to Think), but I’ll make my gentle offering here: if you’re writing characters that you want your reader to love, you’d do well to fall in love with them first. So I’ve found these to be a useful tool, a good outset exercise, going through 36 questions for each of your major characters, writing their responses.
I mean, it’s not a straight-line process. You start with Who would you most like to have dinner with in the world, and after a few hours of picking apart the subconscious implications of that question just to slap a celebrity on their propensity to look in the mirror and wonder who they really want to be, you realize you don’t even know who this character’s mother is, and then you’re off to the rabbit-hole-races, rabbit-holes that interconnect with other rabbit-holes, making a map by trial-and-error of the entire underground rabbit infrastructure system. And then you finally get to question #2, feel like it’s all child’s play for you now, until question #3 makes you question why they don’t have even a religion in your notes. Rinse, repeat. By the time you get to question 8, Name three things you have in common with your partner, you can articulate things that they’re borrowing from you, or what they’ve borrowed from other people in your life, so you not only have a sense of who they are, but what is it in your life that has informed their creation.
I think it’s useful to have some kind of exercise like this, even if it’s not the 36 questions specifically, because one is inclined to approach questions of character development with some personal bias, with some lazy muscle memory. What you think you need to know about your character becomes your cage. But if you let go of the process just enough to let someone else dictate what you need to know about the character, and if you start approaching them from angles you wouldn’t be inclined to otherwise, you may end up finding out a lot more about these people than you anticipated.