14 days of writing tips, Day 5: Interview your characters

5.     Interview your characters.

Sometimes, despite your enthusiasm for a story idea, you find yourself uncertain where to take the story next. Or a character just isn’t quite coming to life for you—which often, actually, is the reason why we’re finding it hard to move the writing along. One trick I like to employ when this happens is to interview my character(s).

I usually do it silently, in writing, in a separate document from the manuscript itself, th...