Five Writing Prompts to Help You Write Your Character Bios

It happens to many of us. We come up with what we believe to be the perfect story idea, and we take off with it. We’re jotting down notes and maybe even outlining, until we get stuck and it turns out…we don’t know our characters well enough. Great stories are driven by the decisions your characters make in them, and so it is important to understand who they are. You should know what they would and wouldn’t do, what their core needs are, and what their flaws are.

I’ve formed a habit of at least creating some rough drafts of my characters’ bios (especially my protagonist’s) before I dare to begin any outlining, but I then realized that I was missing a way of getting to know my characters in the context of the story. I eventually crafted some writing prompts for myself that would place my characters in different scenarios which would help me work through getting to know them and how they would behave under pressure.

Hopefully, these prompts will be helpful to you as well.

  1. Your protagonist is in a therapist’s chair, pouring their little heart out. What happened to them? Why did they decide that today was the day to tell the therapist?

  2. Your protagonist is in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. They’ve found a group of other survivors to stick with for the time being. A fellow survivor has been badly hurt and the group has to make a decision on what to do. What happens? What do they decide? Most importantly, what does your protagonist think is the right thing to do, and why?

  3. Take a monumental moment from your protagonist’s childhood and write it.

  4. Your protagonist has to explain to someone why they are the way that they are. What do they say?

  5. Your protagonist gets lost after deciding to go on a spontaneous adventure one day. What do they do? Do they ask for help? Do they try to figure it out on their own? Something else entirely?

Of course, you can also use these prompts to get to know other characters within your story. You can even incorporate more than one character into some of these scenarios to figure out how they would interact with one another.