Character Questionnaire: 50 Questions to Find Their Voice

Why most questionnaires waste your evening

A question earns its place in a character profile questionnaire for one of two reasons: the answer will show up on the page, or the answer will drive a decision the character makes. Questions that do both are the core. Questions that only drive decisions are the hidden engine; readers never see them stated but feel them in every choice. Questions that only show on the page give texture and voice. And questions that do neither, like a zodiac sign or a favorite ice cream flavor, are trivia unless your plot happens to hinge on them.

That is the sorting below. Every question carries a tag: Core, Engine or Texture. Answer the twenty core questions first. Come back to the engine questions when a character's choices start to feel arbitrary, and to texture when their dialogue starts sounding like everyone else's.

The character questionnaire: 50 questions in 7 groups

Filter by group, show only the core twenty, tick off what you've answered, and copy the set you need into your notes.

Question 26 is the one most authors rush. The answer is usually both a strength and a flaw, and the character strengths and character flaws lists are built to help you find a pair that turn into each other under stress. Question 44 is not really about the character at all: whatever they are least prepared for is the plot you should be writing.

The Proust questionnaire was a Victorian parlor game, a printed album of personal questions that guests answered in their own hand. Marcel Proust filled one in as a teenager and again in his twenties, and the questions have carried his name ever since. As a Proust questionnaire for characters it is less useful for facts than for voice, because its questions are short and blunt enough that the way someone answers says more than what they answer.

Here is the trick: don't summarize. Write each answer in first person, as the character, in the words they would actually use. If three different characters give answers that sound alike, their dialogue will too.

1. 1Your idea of perfect happiness?
2. 2Your greatest fear?
3. 3The trait you most dislike in yourself?
4. 4The virtue you value most in others?
5. 5When do you lie?
6. 6Your motto?

A questionnaire pays off only when an answer turns into a choice on the page. Here is how three answers became one scene for an invented thriller lead, Dana, a night-shift emergency nurse.

Put those three answers side by side and the contradiction jumps out: the trait that makes her good at her job is exactly what will make the police suspect her. So the scene writes itself. The ex interviews her. Tears would help her brother; she can't produce them. She tells a precise, calm lie, and he notices she never once looked away. Nothing in that scene states her backstory, yet a reader learns more about Dana from it than from a page of biography.

If dialogue scenes like this one are where you get stuck, the dialogue writing tips help you make each line do two jobs at once.

Not every character deserves fifty answers. Spend the effort where the page time is.

Villains get their own treatment in our guide on how to write a villain, because the question that matters most for them is the one that makes their logic hold up from their side.

Common character questionnaire mistakes

1. Answering everything before writing a word. The draft will overturn half of it. Answer the core and start.
2. Answering like a résumé. "Brave, loyal, stubborn" tells you nothing. "Ran back into the fire for a dog she didn't own" tells you plenty.
3. Only flattering answers. If question 11 has a soft answer, you haven't found the character yet.
4. Keeping the answers when the draft disagrees. When a scene shows you who someone really is, update the profile and let the scene win.
5. Giving the whole cast the same depth. Side characters with forty answers crowd the protagonist's page time.