Understanding the relationships between pairs of characters


 

 

The next step up from understanding a character is to understand the relationship between a pair of characters. I’m just starting to think about the sort of questions I should ask in order to explore how a particular relationship works. Questions like:

 

Who has the power? Who’s dominant? Is there an official hierarchy? How do they make decisions?

 

Do they have a secret that they both keep (together)? What secrets do they keep from each other?

 

How’d they first meet?

 

 

When two people meet, they also talk about the things they have in common - which can be their social group or it can be shared interests. And what they talk about can be the thing they care most about at that moment. That's possibly not so useful for creating conflict in a scene, but it gives me two good questions for figuring out a scene's starting point, to create a sense of reality.

 

What do these people have in common?

What do they care about most, right now?