The character development questions that matter most are the ones that get underneath the mask your character wears, in order to discover what actually drives them.
Surface questions like “What’s your character’s favorite restaurant?” are less useful than exploring the thing they believe about themselves that is quietly destroying them.
In this article, I’ll look at four categories of character development questions with examples, then give you a framework for applying them to your own characters. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon with a writing exercise to help your story take flight by finding the moment your character stops doing what you think they should, and starts doing what they must.
Strong character development begins with questions that uncover a character’s false beliefs, hidden needs, strengths, weaknesses, and relationships. Explore four categories of character development questions, learn from memorable characters in literature and film, and use a practical exercise to discover the defining choice your character must make.
The illusion of false belief
Every character is living inside a story they tell themselves about who they are. Your job is to find out what that story is and what it’s costing them.
Ask your character the following stream-of-consciousness questions in first person and write their answers without stopping to evaluate them:
- Who are you if you strip away your name, your job, and your titles? What is left?
- What do you want?
- What do you believe having it will give you?
- What is the lie you tell yourself most often to get through the day?
- What do you actually need, underneath the wanting? Would you ever admit to needing it?
Walter White in Breaking Bad tells himself that he’s doing all of this for his family for multiple seasons. It’s a story that has just enough truth in it to be convincing. But his underlying need is to feed an ego that his legitimate life has been starving for decades. The moment Walter finally says it out loud, “I did it for me. I liked it,” the confession confirms what the story has been dramatizing all along.
Don Draper in Mad Men builds his entire life on an assumed identity. His conscious want is to maintain the appearance of the successful advertising executive, the self-made man. His actual need is to be loved for who he really is, the broken farm boy he’s spent his adult life running from. This war between his fake self and his real self helps fuel seven seasons of television brilliance. It’s driven by the gap between what Don tells himself and what the story keeps forcing him to see.
Strengths and weaknesses
Your character’s greatest strengths will also reveal their deepest weaknesses under different conditions. They’re two sides of the same coin. This is the principle worth building your character around.
Ask your character:
- What comes to you most naturally? What are you genuinely good at without having to try?
- What do you hope for? What vision of the future keeps you moving?
- What do you fear most? Not in the abstract, but specifically, what is the situation or loss that you organize your life to avoid?
- What do you regret the most?
- What are your biggest weaknesses? Where is that soft spot that the universe might eventually strike?
Michael Corleone in The Godfather is defined by his loyalty. It is his greatest quality and the thing that ultimately destroys him. His conscious want is to remain outside the family business, a legitimate American with a clean slate. But his need to protect his family pulls him in. Eventually, the loyalty that made him admirable becomes the same quality that forces him to order the death of his own brother, Fredo. The strength and the weakness are inseparable. They were always connected.
Batman in The Dark Knight has a rigid moral code that he will not cross. That code is his greatest strength and, in the hands of the Joker, his most paralyzing limitation. The Joker understands this precisely and pushes hard against it. Because Batman will not cross the line, the Joker has unlimited room to operate. By the film’s end, Batman chooses to let go of the clean identity he built, and take on the blame for crimes he didn’t commit. He becomes what he believes Gotham needs more than what he wants.
Social dynamics and the hidden self
We don’t discover who we are in isolation. We discover it through what other people bring out of us, what they reflect back, and what they expose in us that we would rather not see.
Ask your character:
- Who brings out the worst in you?
- What does that tell you about what you are most afraid of?
- Who sees through you, and how do you manage that?
- What role do you play when you are with other people? Is that role a performance or your true self?
- What do you need from other people that you have never been able to ask for directly?
The Kim family in Parasite constructs an elaborate performance for the wealthy Park family. They infiltrate the household one by one, each playing a role carefully designed to fit the Parks’ needs and blind spots. Their conscious desire is financial stability. But underneath that desire is a need for self-worth that the class structure of their world has systematically denied them.
The social game they’re playing is a fragile construction, and the film builds its tension entirely from the gap between the performance and the reality underneath it. When that gap finally collapses, it does so violently and irreversibly. The distance between what the Kim family needed and what they were willing to admit they needed had become impossible to sustain.
The uncharacteristic choice
This is where your story becomes inevitable rather than simply plausible. The uncharacteristic choice is the moment your character does the thing they swore they would never do.
This isn’t because the plot required it. Character suggests plot, not the other way around. Everything your story has been building toward made it the only honest next step.
Ask your character:
- What is the one thing you would never do under any circumstances?
- What would have to happen for you to do it anyway?
- What belief about yourself would you have to surrender in order to make that choice?
- What would this choice tell the people who love you about who you really are? Is that something you could live with?
- What version of yourself can you imagine once you’ve made this choice?
Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment commits murder to prove a theory to himself about his own superiority. He spends the rest of the novel being undone by the guilt of his crime. He wants to escape consequence, and the universe gives him the opportunity: no witnesses, even someone else taking the blame. It destroys him anyway. His uncharacteristic choice is his confession. It’s the only thing that will give him back the freedom he thought he was achieving by determining the worth of someone else’s life and taking it. The story forces him to discover that the freedom he was looking for was never outside himself.
Jaime Lannister in the Game of Thrones series also committed a murder. He killed a king he was sworn to protect, and he seems to be indifferent to his reputation from that heinous act. Eventually, the audience learns he actually broke his oath for an honorable reason. Telling Brienne of Tarth why he did it is the uncharacteristic moment for Jaime. He finally lets someone see what it cost him.
Common mistakes writers make with character development questions
Stopping at the surface. There are countless questionnaires you can find online that you can use to fill pages, such as figuring out your character’s favorite cereal or top ten songs. But questions like these are shallow. You need to get to the heart of their dilemma and what drives them.
Answering the questions yourself instead of letting the character answer. This is the most common mistake and the hardest to catch. When you answer a character development question from your own perspective, managing the character’s response toward an outcome you’ve already planned, you close off the possibility of discovering something you didn’t know. Write the answers in your character’s voice without stopping to evaluate. Let them surprise you.
Building a biography instead of focusing on the dilemma. A character whose backstory you know thoroughly but whose dilemma you cannot state clearly is a character whose story has not yet found its engine. The point of these questions is not to produce a complete history. It is to see what your character wants and to locate the false belief, the thing your character believes about themselves or the world that the story is going to test until it breaks. Every answer you generate should be moving you toward that.
Treating the character development questions as a one-time exercise. Your character will change as the story develops. The answers to these questions at the beginning of your first draft will not be the same as the answers at the end. Return to them at every significant turning point in your manuscript. What’s changed? What has the story revealed to you that you couldn’t see before?
Your story weapon: Let your character take charge
The most alive moment in any manuscript is when a character stops doing what you’d planned and instead does what they have to. Your job is to find that moment in your own story.
Consider your protagonist and answer these three questions in their voice, writing quickly and without editing:
- “The thing I have always told myself I would never do is . . .”
- “The situation that would force me to do it anyway is . . .”
- “What I would have to give up about who I think I am in order to make that choice is . . .”
Write for at least ten minutes. Let your character respond honestly and follow whatever comes out.
When you finish, read back what you wrote and ask: Is this moment anywhere in my current manuscript? If it isn’t, ask where it belongs. This is almost always the scene the story has been building toward, the moment that makes everything before it meaningful and everything after it inevitable.
A character who makes an uncharacteristic choice that the story has genuinely earned doesn’t feel like a plot device but a living person. That’s the difference between a character you invented and a character you discovered. Focused character development questions are how you find them.
Strong character development comes from understanding what drives a character beneath the surface and allowing those discoveries to shape the story. To deepen your understanding of character, story structure, and the craft of writing, join one of my next workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
