You put months, even years of sweat and tears into crafting your novel but the hardest work, the most important bit of it, is the bit that nobody else sees. It’s the bit that is strictly between you and your main characters. What is it? The character study. There is no way to write a decent novel without knowing who your characters are, from the inside out.

There are loads of ways to study your characters; it could be through a letter she has written, a session with a psychologist, even down to a list you write of things that you want to know about your character. When you are doing your daily chores, imagine your character with you; get stuck in a long traffic jam? Ask yourself how your character would react to it. A woman barges into you with her trolley in the grocery store – does your character just ignore it or does she lose her temper?

There are writers who prefer to do all their character studies before they put pen to paper on their novel while others prefer to get started and do the study as they go along – how you do it is entirely your choice, whatever you feel comfortable with.  

Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel Gone Girl is a perfect example of including a character study as part of your novel – the ‘cool girl’ speech that is the most quoted bit of her book was written when she had writer’s block and she considered it good enough to go into the final manuscript. But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to; there are those who feel character studies should be kept out of a novel entirely. Again, it is your choice. If you feel that your character study would provide readers with some benefit, perhaps some background stories, then include it but this quote by Stephen King, master of horror, sums up character history perfectly:

 “The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.”

It might hurt you to cut out the backstories but it won't change anything; when you know your characters thoroughly, you will find that their backstories end up in the book anyway but in a better way, without huge swathes of text to explain it. So, keeping all of that in your mind, there are 10 questions that you should be able to answer about any and all of your characters so ask away and write it all down:

How old is your character? Not just physically, but mentally. Some of us really don’t act our age and it could be important if you have a 50-year-old character in the body of a 20-year-old.

Did your character have a good childhood? Why? Or why not?

What about past and/or present relationships? What effect have they had?

What does your character really care about?

Is he/she obsessed with anything? What/who?

What is your character’s biggest fear?

What are the best and the worst things that have happened to him/her?

What is the most embarrassing thing that happened to him/her?

Do they have a secret? What is it?

What is the word that defines your character? Just one word.

Answer those and your agent/editor/publisher/readers will all thank you for it!