13 Prompts to Trigger Character Building

These are prompts originally from the now defunct Nanowrimo with small edits

Original Author is Kelly Loy Gilbert

All appropriate rights and credit for her inspiration:

A topic everyone has on the mind is inspiration; what do you do when you just aren’t feeling inspired—when it feels like you’re stuck and your story isn’t going anywhere?

If you’re starting to feel like things have been derailed, you’re not alone! With every story I write, I wind up getting stuck somewhere (or many, many somewheres) during the process. There’s always a point where I can’t see ahead to what happens next, and I’ve lost the heart of the story…

It’s easy to panic. But when that happens, it’s usually a sign that I need to return to the characters—to develop more clearly what it is they want and what drives them and what they’ll do next.

So when I’m feeling stuck, I step back. I try to remember I’ve been here before, and I’ll be here again. And I turn to trigger prompts that I write in my characters’ voices to get to know them more deeply, building the foundation for the story I need to tell.

Here are some of my favorites. You can use the prompts below or come up with your own; you can write them as standalone scenes or incorporate them into existing scenes; you can write them for your main characters or minor characters. The most important thing is to just write.

Some of my favorite trigger prompts:

1. This is the worst thing I ever lost.

2. If I could go back to any moment in time, it would be:

3. Everyone knows ____ about me, but what no one knows is this:

4. The one thing I’ve never told anyone is:

5. This is the thing I hate most about myself.

6. If I could change just one thing about my life, this is what it would be.

7. This is what an ordinary day looks like for me.

8. I didn’t say it aloud, but what I wish I’d said was:

9. I am so afraid of ______ I can’t even talk about it aloud.

10. This is what my perfect life would be.

11. I have always wished I could:

12. This was the moment when everything changed.

13. ________ was always wrong about me.

My first novel, Conviction, began for me as a character question. After the first draft, I tore it apart. This time, though, because I knew my character intimately, and knew the people around him, I could see more clearly how he would enter into the situations that would push him into a complicated, unthinkable moral crisis. It was knowing the characters that inspired the truer, better story.

Writing often doesn’t go to plan. And it’s tempting sometimes, especially when I’m racing the clock for my word count, to feel like every divergent path is a break of momentum—that any digression that doesn’t fit into my plot outline are taking steps backwards.

When I use these trigger prompts, I don’t always know where they’ll fit into the story. I don’t even always know if they will—some might wind up as backstory. Some might wind up getting tossed out altogether. But some will hit on something that gets at the very core of who my characters are.

In the end, it’s these character moments that propel your story forward—your characters’ motivations, their deepest desires and fears and secrets, that drive them. These moments are the beating heart of the story you want to tell.