Proust's Thirty-Five Questions to Ask Your Characters

I’ve been reading the Write Practice for several months and always find the posts informational and provocative. I was particularly taken with today’s post about delving into the lives of your novel’s characters. I’m in the midst of the first revision of my novel and I’m looking for ways to round them out. Marcel Proust’s Thirty-five Questions to Ask Your Characters will definitely help. Here’s his list, written in the late nineteenth century. By the way, his answers sold in auction for €102,000 in 2003.

1.   What is your idea of perfect happiness?

2.   What is your greatest fear?

3.   What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

4.   What is the trait you most deplore in others?

5.   Which living person do you most admire?

6.   What is your greatest extravagance?

7.   What is your current state of mind?

8.   What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

9.   On what occasion do you lie?

10.    What do you most dislike about your appearance?

11.    Which living person do you most despise?

12.    What is the quality you most like in a man?

13.    What is the quality you most like in a woman?

14.    Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

15.    What or who is the greatest love of your life?

16.    When and where were you happiest?

17.    Which talent would you most like to have?

18.    If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

19.    What do you consider your greatest achievement?

20.    If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

21.    Where would you most like to live?

22.    What is your most treasured possession?

23.    What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

24.    What is your favorite occupation?

25.    What is your most marked characteristic?

26.    What do you most value in your friends?

27.    Who are your favorite writers?

28.    Who is your hero of fiction?

29.    Which historical figure do you most identify with?

30.    Who are your heroes in real life?

31.    What are your favorite names?

32.    What is it that you most dislike?

33.    What is your greatest regret?

34.    How would you like to die?

35.    What is your motto?

And as Joe Bunting (@joebunting)of the Write Practice asked:

Which questions do you ask your characters to get to know them better?

  

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Who is the Write Practice?

Joe Bunting is the founder of the Write Practice. Joe is a ghostwriter, editor, and an aspiring fiction author and writes and edits books that change lives. He loves the sound of a good sentence and would like to think of himself as a literary snob but can be kept up far too late by a page turner meant for thirteen year old girls. He would like for you not to know that though. He and his wife, Talia, enjoy playing backgammon and Angry Birds on her iPhone. You can view his website and follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Liz is on the left

Liz Bureman has a more-than-healthy interest in proper grammatical structure, accurate spelling, and the underappreciated semicolon. When she’s not diagramming sentences and reading blogs about how terribly written the Twilight series is, she edits for the Write Practice, causes trouble in Denver, and plays guitar very slowly and poorly. She occasionally blogs at http://bureface.wordpress.com, but only when she feels like it.

        

Getting into revision

I took a workshop in novel revision last February and began my revision work in full force in March. My first job was to make sure every chapter was complete. In many cases I found I needed to add descriptions, research details, and dialogue, Once I did that, I could finally say I had a complete novel draft ready to be revised. That became revision 1 which I collected in a computer folder called 02. Novel Chapters.

Then, as advised in the workshop, I printed out a hard copy of the entire draft and read it through, taking notes in a notebook – not on the draft material itself – to indicate what fixes I thought I needed to make.

I also took a couple of detours. I inserted the Prologue into Chapter One and changed the tense in that chapter from present to past. However, I still haven’t yet decided to keep or integrate the Prologue into the main text and/or to change the entire novel into past tense. Hopefully my beta readers will advise me on that.

At this point I’m working through my second pass-through of the draft and creating revision 2 that I will place in a folder called 03. Novel Chapters. See my screen shot on how I’ve arranged these files. Needless to say, I save everything – just in case I have to resurrect one of the “babies I’ve murdered” in my haste.

I’m lucky to have specific feedback from my writing group and novel classmates to help me revise the first few chapters, which unfortunately don't exist for later chapters. So I plan to apply the gist of their comments as I get further along. I also made a list of things to be aware of as I edit:

• Use Point of view correctly – the hardest part for me to keep straight
• Use more metaphors
• Excessive use of “he” and “she”
• Use action verbs instead of passive voice
• Show emotional response in characters
• Look for and get rid of repetition, inconsistencies, and typos
• Add more specific details that show rather than tell
• Take away definition of foreign Yiddish words; rather use definition in dialogue or description.

My workshop instructor also gave me three helpful pieces of advice to apply overall:

• Slow down
• Delve deeper into the details
• Draw out the moments.

It’s no wonder it took me almost three hours to revise the first two pages of Chapter 4 yesterday. Yes, this work grueling and slow, but I really was getting into it. Hopefully I’ll feel the same today.

Novel revision next steps

I’ve finished the big read of my novel, made brief notes in my notebook – not on the book itself – to remind myself what inconsistencies and repetitions I’ve found, and I’ve hung the whole book, page by page, on six by eight foot, quarter inch foam board panels on my hall wall. (I used Moore aluminum push pins. And by the way, each board has space for thirty 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheets, which allows me some room to grow).

Novel storyboards

Now I’m ready for the next step: i.e., experimenting with first person narrative. I am going to see if I can rewrite a couple scenes in first person. If that works I'll take on the job of rewriting the whole book in first person. If not, I’ll move on to Part Two of my novel revision process: rewriting and fleshing out the later chapters of the book to catch them up to the level of the first eleven chapters, which I’ve worked over several times already. 

Then I’ll start the real revision, starting at the top. It looks like I have months of work ahead of me.