Doing a questionnaire about a character

In the Post "Creating a Character" I listed traits and descriptions that I thought would be interesting to know about a Character, this was based on the thought (for example) from Josip Novakovich that a questionnaire could be a good way to create a character. Based on these facts I portrayed a character answering every point I thought essential.

I thought for a long time wheatear I should share the answers of the questionnaire with you and before I had done it I thought I would, even though that basically is not the goal to show it to your readers. I invested a lot of time and energy into it and was for a long time sure that I would share it with you before I would to the next assignment regarding the character in question.

But later I figured, what if I really share my expanded notes of the character with you and you read them and then later you cannot tell wheatear you have read some tidbit in the answers of the questionnaire, in the background information, or whether it came across in the stories.

Also I consider that in the end the background information contains so many spoilers that the stories would lose some of their values and for you it would be even more difficult to evaluate my writing. I am still going to share the summary about the character though.

But I decided to share some of my thoughts about the questionnaire.

In my opinion the questionnaire took a rather long time to finish because I really had to think about so many little things... I didn't necessarily have to invest so much time in it... on the other hand it just made me think so much that I had to invest more time in it than I had thought.

What I really appreciated about the questionnaire though was the fact that I really started thinking about the other persons in my characters life. There weren't any more just mean or stupid people, I also thought about other people’s desires and background. (In this case the parents.) I think this alone will make the story of my character in question much better.

I also enjoyed thinking about "childhood smells" it made me really consider her environment more. Other things that really piqued my attention and made me think and see the character in (a bit of) a new light: desires, character timeline, mannerism and often used phrases/words.

Comments or thoughts are welcomed,
Kim A. Dreamreich

I started my "free writing courses online" -project with the course "Start writing fiction" from the Open University. You can see all my posts regarding this course here. This is Part 1.8 of the project based on an assignment of a Part called "Portraying a Character", where one was supposed to fill a questionnaire about a character.