Bri CastelliniApril 9, 2026

7 Character Interview Prompts That Actually Work

Because readers crave truly unforgettable characters

For me, all stories are rooted in character. Even if the spark of my idea as captured by my Dump Doc is a situation or trope, it can’t become a novel for me until I personally fall in love with who’s in that situation or dragged through that trope kicking and screaming.

As a result, fleshing out characters is just as important to my writing process as the outline phase, which I’m on the record saying is what I consider my first draft. But most standard character design templates are either complicated for the sake of complexity, or too vague to function, and rarely get to the true core of who these people are and what makes them tick.

So we’ve designed our own! Paid subscribers to the Substack can get the download for our fillable Character Template at the bottom of this post, but for everyone else, I’ve picked my seven favorite prompts as a starting point.

Physical descriptions

Unless you’re writing sci-fi about brains in jars, your character has a physical form that will probably come up at some point. So what best describes their horrible visage meat sack basic aesthetic characteristics?

  1. Prominent physical features. Does this character, like most romance heroes, have a twice-broken nose? Freckles? A dramatic scar over one eye? A centered front tooth like Tom Cruise? When people in your book describe your character to others… what do they focus on? What stands out and makes them unique, beyond that they have startling violet eyes, auburn hair, and an aquiline nose (no shade to romantasy heroines with these descriptions, I too imprinted early on Alanna the Lioness)?
  2. Scents. As we walk you through in our Free Mini Course, you’ve got five senses, so use ‘em! What does your character smell like, naturally? What scents define them and their day to day lives? If they work at a cafe, they probably always smell faintly of coffee grounds and buttery pastry. If they’re outdoorsy, maybe they smell like freshly cut grass and sun-warmed skin. To build upon this scent-ual journey, what scents does your character favor in ways that other people can pick up? A fruity shampoo, Chanel No 5 they inherited from a beloved grandmother, fresh herbs from their medicinal lotion?

Background

From where did this person spring forth? What, and who, made them who they are today?

  1. Parents. Are your characters’ parents still together, is one or both dead, was there a nasty divorce? Who is/was your character closest with, and why? Or did they not know their parents at all/lost them young, who did they latch onto like a duckling for mentorship and surrogate support?
  2. Cliques. In school/as a child… how would their peers categorize them? Were they a jock or a nerd? A theater kid or a gleek? A goth or a burnout? And does that external categorization suit them because it’s a good shorthand… or because they carefully curated that perception for their own purposes?
  3. First Rejection/Failure. Be this a rejection by a crush, disappointing their parents, failing a test, not making a sports team, or something more angsty… what would your character consider their first time wanting something and not getting it? And how did that rejection define failure for them as they grew up?

Community

Who are the people your character sees consistently? And are they adding something to the book… or do they simply exist? All characters, even side characters, should be narratively supporting (or impeding) the goals and/or desires of your protagonists.

  1. Acquaintances. Who are the people orbiting your character in their day to day, and in what contexts? Who do they see the most and wish they saw the least, and vice versa, and why can they not course-correct the frequency in a more preferable manner?

Themes

What is this story ABOUT? And why is THIS the best character to explore that?

  1. Spiraling. You character has some kind of goal or belief system at the start of the book that motivates their decisions. Taken to the extreme… what’s the worst possible result of not achieving that goal, or not fulfilling that belief? AKA… the stakes!

You might not have all the answers right away, and that’s ok! Characters evolve as you get into freaky little situations with them, but you need to have a sense of their essence before you can start plotting, and then that plotting can inform their essence right back. But having a character interview template that gets to the heart of how your character was formed pre-novel and what motivates their decision-making in the present will only deepen your relationship to them, give you prompts to explore when you’re blocked, and ensure that they’re well-rounded and containing of multitudes.

Get the complete fillable character interview template. Or become a paid subscriber to our Substack and all of our templates are included – past and future.

“Read” this post as a YouTube video instead, if you’re so inclined!

Join our Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel (which meets every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST), where we’ll be building routine and community with YOU. Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind.

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Bri CastelliniApril 2, 2026

Character-Driven Novel Structure

Where theme and emotion meets order

I struggled with theme for a long time. I just wanted to torture fake people with wild scenarios and then make them kiss. What do you MEAN I need a point for the suffering beyond that I’m a sick freak?

Well, it turns out that I’m still a sick freak… for thematic and character-driven structure. It’s incredibly satisfying (and makes far more sense to my particular creative brain) when I can align the point of my story to the very skeleton that supports it, therefore making character arcs more intuitive and meaningful.

While Kelly’s (and Shakespeare’s) 5-Act-Structure makes a lot of sense now that she’s put it into words for me, and I definitely follow that version of structuring a book when the spirit moves me, my favorite way to outline a novel is with theme and character at the center.

Example: paranormal romance about grief

On a macro level, this manuscript follows every other phase of grief: Denial, Bargaining, and Acceptance.

What does this look like? Instead of trying to align conflict, rising action, twists, etc to a particular page count or percentage of the whole, I let the characters guide pacing along the thematic skeleton. That means I emotionally segment the book by where the character is (and how the plot reacts) along her journey through the stages of grief. Her “refusing the call” in Hero’s Journey parlance lines up with the Denial phase of the book… and her romantic counterpart’s inability to change gears to convince her to work with him.

Bargaining takes up the largest portion of the book, because Anger and Depression are mixed up in it- essentially, the grieving characters are bargaining how much of their decision-making is going to be led by anger or depression, but no concrete decisions are being made. A lot of learning and compromising happens in this portion of the book.

Finally, Acceptance. Not simply acceptance of the end of the Bargaining phase… but first one character, then the other, making a concrete decision about how they will show up in their own life, and the lives of those they love, as a result of all they’ve figured out in the previous act. At first, these Acceptances don’t align… but because it’s a genre romance, eventually, they get there.

These three phases don’t cut the book neatly into thirds, or a Three Act Structure, but it’s far more intuitive for outlining a character-driven story. It centers their experience and their wounds, and ensures that as I work out what’s literally happening in their world, the challenges the characters face should align thematically with what phase we’re in.

I find this much more descriptive and emotionally motivated than “something must change for your characters or they must make a very scary decision.” With a character-driven structure like this, we’re narrowing down what “something” means, and what kinds of “scary decisions” will be most narratively satisfying.

Example: contemporary romance about fame

On a macro level, this manuscript uses deeper and deeper levels of Dante’s Inferno to align the story beats to. Because, you see, hell is other people (hehe). Also, because to be constantly perceived yet consistently misunderstood is also hell, especially when people attempt to simplify your humanity down to sins they can judge you for and feel superior to.

To be clear- I was not by any means adapting Dante’s Inferno when I used some of his little circles of hell as thematic structure for a romance novel about two actors, but I was taking inspiration from his descent to help provide scaffolding for their emotional journey together because it felt apt.

What does this look like? A contemporary romance is generally 65-90k words, and that really isn’t enough time to explore every circle of hell, nor did this story need that. The rings I chose were Limbo, Lust, Greed, Treachery & Fraud, and Dis (“the only way out is through [Satan’s genitals]”).

Limbo finds our actors each at a crossroads of their career, with new directions in mind but plenty of reasons to stay exactly where they are… that is, until they meet each other.

Lust being so early in Dante’s journey at first frustrated me, because my characters weren’t ready to bang it out yet… but I realized it gave me an opportunity to explore a different interpretation of this circle. So by the time they’re in Lust… they’re attracted to each other, but more so covetous of what they perceive the other person represents. Their lust dehumanises the other to an extent, not just sexually, but overall, which sets the stage for…

Greed. This is the portion of the book where they’re actually finally intimate, and because of their covetousness in Lust, they’re gluttons for one another… but only through the lens of the preconceived notions that locked into place in the previous section. The heroine starts to believe she can have it all, and so does the hero… except one of them thinks it’s possible to do so out of the public’s eye, without considering how that would feel to their partner, who’s ready to finally come out of the shadows.

Treachery & Fraud represents, as you might imagine, our characters’ dark night of the soul, where preconceived notions are challenged and our characters choose to either betray the other or themselves instead of being vulnerable and relying on their partnership to see them through the journey.

Dis is the center of Hell according to Dante, where Satan is imprisoned and a whole bunch of other weird stuff, but ultimately the only way out of the Underworld is through… which for our characters means facing what they’ve been afraid to, together.

A word of caution/a diagnostic tool: when you come upon a narrative crossroads (for character or plot), look to where the chapter falls in your thematic outline. If the current phase doesn’t feel resolved, use that as your guide for what kinds of decisions will feel impactful. If the current phase the chapter’s in does feel resolved, or your characters are feeling antsy, consider moving on to what’s next.

Whether you stay in the section you’re starting at, or jump forward, that decision has answers for where the character themselves is, emotionally.

Other existing arc structures you might try out:

  1. The Trials of Heracles
  2. The Fool’s Journey in Tarot
  3. Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
  4. AA’s 12 Step Program
  5. The Artist’s Way
  6. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
  7. The lifecycle of a star

Join us for Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel (which meets every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST). It’s a great place to discuss your structure challenges. We host on our YouTube channel, where we’ll be building routine and community with YOU. Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind.

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Bri CastelliniMarch 12, 2026

Let’s Write a Romance Novel: Starter Docs

So you’re writing a romance novel. Congratulations! But you aren’t sure where to start. You might only have the items on your writer’s wish list to go off of, or a vague description of your two (or more, you cheeky thing!) lovers, and while you’re absolutely within your rights to start writing from there… it’s helpful to have a bit more to go on.

For a full-throttle breakdown guide and workbook of starting documents for romances of all kinds (including distinct world-building suggestions for historical, romantasy, and contemporary books), we’ve got the link below. Our paid subscribers on Substack get them automatically. For a great starting point, though, read on!

My must-have documents when planning a romance novel

  1. The dump doc. This is the starting point of everything- the kernel of an idea, the item that sparked joy from my writer’s wish list, the brain dump of things that interest me about this story. Once the dumping starts to organize itself (usually, when I name a character), I’ll spread out to the rest of the documents (see below), but until the shape emerges from the granite slab, I don’t put pressure on myself to stay in one lane or the other. There is no inherent structure- whether I’m starting with a character idea, a trope, a line of dialogue, or a scenario, there is no judgement in the dump doc. There is only sincere excitement and unfettered creativity.
  2. Character templates. At LEAST for my two love interests, but also occasionally for important secondary characters or antagonists. You can find a lot of great character interviews online, or use the one Scrivener has pre-built for you; the point is, you must know your people before you torture them incessantly make them fall in love.
    1. Sub-document: GMC grids. I find doing a GMC grid for each primary love interest to be extra helpful when developing balanced characters, so that I can ensure their internal and external conflicts are aligned thematically, even if they’re on different ends of the spectrum. Ex: both characters have parental baggage, but one reacted by overworking herself, and the other reacted by fully giving up, therefore the book is about them finding balance together. If, in doing my initial grids, I find that their goals or motivations have no overlapping words or concepts at all, I know I’ve either got the wrong love interest, or one of them needs some redeveloping. GMC grids explained in more detail here.
    2. Sub-document: Character names. I can’t be the only one who used to scroll through 50+ pages to see if I’ve named my protagonists’ pet chicken already or not. So now, before I ever start writing, I make myself a CHARACTER NAMES document, and when I name someone (a best friend, a parent, a pet chicken, etc), and especially if I imbue them with a unique, important description (ponytail guy? Rat face? Big red eyes?), I can easily jot them down for reference later in the story for continuity and reader recognition.
  3. Timeline. Similar to the character names doc, if your story is set during a strict timeline (“before Christmas”, “1 week total”, etc) and you need to keep track of what freaking day it is… as you write, a pre-made timeline doc (perhaps with days of the month already laid out) allows you to record how time is naturally passing… and advise on how much time can pass between chapters or scenes when you need SOME time to pass, but aren’t sure how much you’re allotted so the next scene falls on a weekend, or the week before a major national holiday.
  4. Epistolary elements. I wrote my senior thesis for my BA in Creative Writing on epistolary novels, so maybe this is just me, but I have yet to write a novel that doesn’t include primary source documents at some point, at least not a novel I’m proud of having written. And even if they don’t make it into the book, proper, I’ve found brainstorming in an epistolary format to be a really great brainstorming mechanism for characters. This can include:
    1. Emails and social media
    2. Journals/diaries
    3. Texts to friends and family
    4. Work communication (how do they talk to their boss? Their coworkers?)
    5. Lists (grocery, to-do, bucket, etc)
    6. Letterbox/Goodreads (what are they watching/reading)
    7. Articles about them by other people (especially if the character is famous to some degree)
  5. Questions I Need Answered. This is a kind of dump doc, but one for when I’m deeper into the process, where I ask myself questions about my concept/story that I don’t yet have an answer to but will need to eventually. This is things like- “why doesn’t Ivy agree to an interview if it will make her life easier?” or “Can fated mates on the planet Q’rris get divorced, and if so, what does that entail?” Sometimes, I’ll finish the full manuscript draft before these questions get answered, but it’s a good way for me to keep track of these questions, and then use them as prompts during writer’s group feedback sessions, or as a place to begin when I start revising. It’s also something I’ll work on when I’m experiencing writer’s block, because often the concrete question prompts are easier to ruminate on than conjuring full scenes.

Now is the best time to start curating these docs. And the second best time is during our Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST. The full calendar of dates is on our Community page.  Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind. We’re stoked to be building routine and community with YOU.

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