Today author, Staci Stallings, joins us to share her tips on crafting great character interviews. Welcome, Staci!
Character interviews are hard. Let’s just get that out of the way first. At least they are for me. The only reason I’m good at it is because I hate boring. I hate my writing to sound just like every other thing you’ve ever read. So when I was first asked to write a character interview, I knew I wasn’t going to take the tried-and-true, Q&A type route.
I wanted my characters to stand out, and they couldn’t do that by being just like everyone else.
So should yours. Here are three tips on writing character interviews to help your characters stand out too.
Know Your Character
By this, I don’t mean just what their favorite color is or what kind of car they drive. No. You have to know what type of interview would suit them the best. For example, the first character interview I did ended up being a four-character interview. In the books “Cowboy” and “Lucky” which are both about fictional country music stars, there were two couples. At the end of “Lucky,” Kalin (the hero of the second novel) went on tour with Ashton (the hero of the first novel). So I did an interview as if they and their wives were being interviewed for a national television program (again fictional).
In the interview, I revealed a little of each one’s story. You can read that character interview here.
The idea is not to interview the character as a character, but to figure out why that character might really be interview in real life. Then write that.
Be Creative
This is probably the most creative, imaginative, out-of-the box thing you will ever do as a writer because it forces you to fictionalize fiction. You wrote the character, now you have to write about the character as if they are real. It takes some mental gymnastics to get around that mind-bender!
But don’t panic. The same wonderful creative mind that came up with the character in the first place can handle this challenge too.
A second character interview I did involved Jaylon Quinn and Camille Wright from “Dreams by Starlight.” In this story the characters were in a high school play. I considered writing a review from the high school newspaper, but I had already done that for another story (more on that one in a moment). What I finally came up with is to have a “big time” newspaper review the play. This guy, the reviewer, is cynical and jaded from his years of reviewing movies. So it was interesting to see these two young actors and their performance through his eyes.
Here is that one. Notice how different it is than the Cowboy/Lucky interview.
Leave the Readers Wanting More
When you write a character interview, the main purpose is to get people to click through to see more about your book. So don’t answer every question in the interview. Have the character hint at things that are in the book. In my final example, this character interview came from “The Price of Silence.” In the book, the heroine is a member of the newspaper staff, but in the midst of it all, she becomes part of the story. Of course, the kids in the school would have been interested in what was going on with her at the time of the incidents that had occurred. So I had a fellow reporter do a story on her.
Again, this involved knowing the character and the story and WHY people would be interested in reading about her story in an interview. This story was actually written as a news story (thank goodness for former journalism training!).
To read that one, you can go to: http://spiritlightworks.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/robyn-lockhart-hero-or-villain/
When writing your own character interviews, try to be more creative, think about the story and why this person might be having the interview, and always, always, leave your readers wanting more!
Staci Stallings is the author of 11 novels currently available on Kindle and Nook. She is also the founder of Grace & Faith 4U–an alliance of Christian authors dedicated to helping each other bring the very best in Christian writing to the reading public. To see more about Staci, please visit:
http://spiritlightbooks.wordpress.com
http://stacistallings.wordpress.com
To read more about Grace & Faith, go to: http://graceandfaith4U.com
Join Staci and 9 other Christian authors as they celebrate best-selling author Karen Baney’s new release Nickels.
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