**I ask my own questions.** Only I know what my story is about and what character traits are relevant to that story. When I try to ask generic questions that I have found on the web (e.g. "What is the favourite food of your character?"), the answers are usually meaningless to my writing.

I have looked at character software, but I found that their preconceived structures of character relations (e.g. protagonist-antagonist or hero-sidekick) or their pseudoscientific concepts of personality (e.g. the Enneagram) have more stifled my creativity and made my stories generic and unoriginal. I sometimes do use some lists of character questions I find on the web when I need inspiration, but once my imagination has been sparked, I quickly abandon them and let my mind roam free.

###If you want to be original and creative, then using another person's concept of character will hinder you.

I take writing to be a dynamic process. I don't have to answer all questions about all my characters before I begin to write. I can always stop the writing and answer further questions, as they are raised by the advancing plot. I have found that I rarely had to rewrite anything I had written before because of these new Q&A.

To keep my characters organized I use a **spreadsheet app** (Excel), because it allows me to ask the same question (row) of all characters (columns) and see their different answers side by side and compare them. I can even easily highlight certain columns that currently interest me the most, or rearrange rows or include images. A spreadsheet app works better for me than a text editor (Word), where relations between pieces of content are difficult to visualize.

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One method I employ to understand my characters better is to **act them out**.

I got this idea from drawing. When you try to draw a figure in a certain pose, it is sometimes difficult to translate what you see into lines of the page. To better understand the pose and how it exists in space, I often simply get myself into the same position (or, if I'm in a public space, imagine myself in that position, which works almost as well, because your mind remembers your body holdin certain poses). I can't explain how this works, but once I know my own body in the pose I see, I find it much more easy to render that pose on the page, often even without looking much at the model anymore.

In writing, I do the same. I actually often get up from the table and do what my character would do and say what they would say. Again, if I'm in a public place, I try to imagine acting it out as intently as possible. Interestingly enough this helps me better imagine what *another person* would do.

The book *Getting into Character* Brandilyn Collins explains this method. She adapts Stanislavski's technique of *method acting* to writing. I haven't read the book, so I don't know how good it is, but the description seems promising, if you need more detail and (probably) additional ideas.