And now we reach the final two techniques. By now, your character should be starting to take shape; he or she should have some real depth and that dimension you have been looking for is beginning to appear. These last techniques will give you what you need.

Do Some Lie Detecting

Everyone lies, usually when they have something they want to protect, and that tends to be something or someone vulnerable or valuable to us. When you uncover those lies, your character will be wide open, everything laid bare. So, you can do this in two ways. Hook up a lie detector and ask a few pointed questions – watch the needle on the polygraph jump about like a jack-in-the-box; note which questions and answers cause this to happen. The second way is to do it the old-fashioned way – watch body language and facial expressions. Does he or she constantly change the subject? Get defensive or attack for no apparent reason? Watch the eyes; do they slide to the left? Does he suddenly become very interested in a mark on his trousers? Six minutes, ask as many questions as you can and write those answers down.

Some questions you could use to try to get your character to lie are:

Is your wife the woman you really wanted to marry?

Did you want children?

Do you like your job?

Try Some Mind Reading

The last thing to do is ask the one question that can move things on to the next level – what one thing is taboo for this character?

Most of the time, you can learn more about a character, not by listening to what they say or watching what they do, but by knowing what it is they would never do or say. This is where the subtext is, this is what gives your story some depth and some very real tension. One of the biggest rules in writing is this – if your character really is saying/doing what they are saying/doing, you have a bit of a problem on your hands. In real life, we leave things unsaid that are important, we drop a few hints without actually saying anything, we skirt around the real issues.

Your job now is to find all of that in your character and you can do that using the oldest techniques of them all, one that is tried, tested and still used today – getting into their mind. Take the following prompts, choose one and put it into your character’s subconscious mind. Six minutes, write it all down:

I should never have …

I could never …

I just can’t talk about …

The result of these techniques should be pages and pages of writing, some of it useless but I guarantee that you will find some real jewels that you can use to give your characters that extra dimension. Give yourself a break and then read back over what you wrote. Forget about looking for “good” writing; what you want are the phrase, the words that throw themselves off the page at you, those that have some energy. Look for the hidden flaws in your character, the secrets they hide, their quirks and habits; something will give you exactly what you want to bring them to life.