With thanks to Emily Rubin, who was reminded, as we read Frankenstein aloud in The 24-Hour Room this week, of the three questions Anna Deavere Smith asked her interview subjects when she first began writing her plays, comes an approach you can use to probe your characters' depths. For ADS, the strategy was about accessing authentic language in the people she was interviewing. For a prose writer, the same questions may lead them to discover critical, formative incidents in a character's backstory that determine who they are and why they do what they do.
Three Questions
Three Questions
Three Questions
With thanks to Emily Rubin, who was reminded, as we read Frankenstein aloud in The 24-Hour Room this week, of the three questions Anna Deavere Smith asked her interview subjects when she first began writing her plays, comes an approach you can use to probe your characters' depths. For ADS, the strategy was about accessing authentic language in the people she was interviewing. For a prose writer, the same questions may lead them to discover critical, formative incidents in a character's backstory that determine who they are and why they do what they do.