If you read much advice on writing fiction, you will at some point encounter questionnaires meant to help you build your characters. Questions about characters include: “What are their specific gestures? How did their culture impact them? If they had a day to themselves, what would they do?”

For many years those kinds of questionnaires both thrilled and frustrated me. I would begin them with so much excitement until I realized I could not get a full sense of who my characters were by simply writing out a list of traits. I would always write the first answer that came into my head, and the first answer was always obvious, trite, and dull.

What does Lucy do if she has a day all to herself? She watches television, she goes shopping, she talks on the phone. All of these answers are logical, but they are generic and boring; they could apply to almost anyone. They do not give me the sense of who Lucy is as a complex, unique, rounded-out individual. Answering character questions in the mechanical way you would fill out a medical form is a waste of time.

Is there a better way to approach character-building questionnaires? Yes. And what helps me more than anything is to take the preliminary step of writing a short point-of-view sketch.

I think about point-of-view sketches as “pretend you are a flea” assignments.

When I was in the sixth grade my teacher used to give the class point of view creative writing assignments such as “write a story from the perspective of a flea.” The exercise sprang me from my desk chair, flung me onto a dog, and sent me crawling through a dense forest of towering fur, searching for the tenderest spot of canine skin to quench my insatiable thirst for blood.

I rarely write from the point of view of fleas anymore, but the technique works just as well with human characters.

Point of view sketches are more important than questionnaires because they allow me to grasp my character from the inside and not just from the outside.

For my point of view sketches, I pick a situation, usually one I have imagined happening in my novel, drop my new character into it, and write what she sees, hears, thinks, and feels. For the sketch to work, I have to know a little bit about my character but not much. Is she a child, a school teacher, a sociopath? I start with what I “know” and after a few moments of writing, a mental shift will occur. If I put my character into a situation and have her think about it, react to it, and feel it, she is more likely to “come to life” than if I reduce her to a sterile list of questionnaire traits.

After doing my point of view study, I am ready to use my character-building questionnaire to add developmental layers to a character that now has the first hopeful murmurings of a heartbeat.

The questions encourage me to think about aspects of character I have not explored in my sketch, but I have to remember not to approach the questionnaire as I would a medical form. In fiction there are no “right” answers and closing in on a single solution too quickly suffocates creativity.

Planning fictional characters should not be rushed; it should be as creative, divergent, and fun as the actual writing. Besides, if I have done my point of view sketch before beginning to fill in my questionnaire, I am likely to find that many of the questions are already answered.

For any unanswered questions, I try to avoid writing the first answer that comes to mind, which is likely to be sensible but mind-numbingly boring. That is why I use a mind-mapping technique called clustering, which turns answering the questions into a fun and creative game rather than a dull chore.

To cluster, you start with a central idea or nucleus, which can be a question such as, “What would your character do if she had a full day to herself?” You circle the question as your nucleus and draw lines radiating from the center, free-associating as many possible answers as you can think of: “goes shopping,” “reads voraciously,” “bakes cookies.” In clustering, you can circle any of your free-associated ideas as a new center and shoot lines from it to even newer associations. “Goes shopping” might lead to the association “shop-lifting.” “Reads voraciously might lead to the contrasting idea “reads shallowly.”

After a few minutes you will have a radial web containing ideas that intrigue you. When an idea interests you, you will feel an inspirational tug. Go back to the original question: What would your character do if she had a full day to herself?

A sample of the kind of boring generic answer I usually end up when I neglect to cluster is: She watches television, she eats three meals, she talks on the phone.

But clustering allows me to choose what most interests me from multiple possibilities. For example, if I am drawn to the phrase “reads shallowly,” I might write: She would drag a stack of hardbacks off her book shelf, haul them to the living room, and plop down on the sofa; she would open a random book, scan the first few paragraphs, and stop. Then she would close the book, set it aside, and with a sad smile take up another book, always reading the first few paragraphs and always closing the book after the first page.

Better. And certainly not what most people would do with a day off. Lucy is still confusing at this point but she is starting to seem like an individual. And she is beginning to intrigue; what is up with her not continuing to read her novels beyond page one?

If I have written a point of view sketch before answering form questions, I might already know. I might add, Lucy liked the beginnings of things best. Middles and endings, she had too often learned, were bound to disappoint. Lucy unfolds even more when you add an unusual point of view to her actions, which brings up enticing questions. What trauma has caused Lucy to view middles and endings with suspicion?

While answering form questions about characters can be fun and useful, if I had to choose between questionnaires and point of view exercises, I would always choose the point of view sketches.

Character-building questionnaires invite the writer to view characters from the outside. We “see” how the character looks and acts as if we were watching television. Knowing a character from the outside does matter, but for a character to act in a way that make sense intuitively, I need to know what she is thinking or feeling.

If I skip the point-of-view step and try to write a character in third person, something usually seems “off” about their behavior, but once I get inside the head of my character, everything changes.

Admittedly, writing from the inside is not the only way to “know” characters. Observing real life models for inspiration is invaluable. Not everyone is like me or thinks the way I do. As a writer I am constantly striving to stretch myself as far as I can beyond the narrow confines of my skull in order to understand those who are different from me.

In real life I might fail. No matter how much I try to empathize, I am not a mind reader. I may reach beyond myself as far as I can, but ultimately I can only understand others in terms of my personal frames of reference. Fortunately, writing is not about mind reading; it is about using what I do know as a “jumping off point” to create.

The “pretend you are a flea” exercise drives me to reach toward the world outside myself, and the ambition to cross the barrier separating me from a different person or species dislodges familiar ways of thinking and inspires.

Will I actually ever fully understand what it is like to be a flea or, for that matter, another person? Probably not. But I can imagine.

And imagining can take me farther and higher than a flea can jump; farther, in fact. Much farther.

If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here. Also my new novel “The Ghosts of Chimera” will soon be published by the folks over at Rooster and Pig Publishing.