We have all heard the advice about listening to your characters. Maybe we should also be asking them questions.

David Finkel, whose The Good Soldiers is a masterpiece of empathetic war reporting, talked about how to do this in a 2014 interview:

It’s a pretty deliberate process, and a lot of it involves working from an endpoint. But the first thing is I have to have a question I’m interested in answering … That doesn’t mean questioning all the time. All the tools we know. Learning to use silence as a reporting tool. All the things we do. Getting people to talk to each other. Trying to recede so something might occur as if it would have occurred if you weren’t there, if that’s possible. But, eventually, realizing what the story is I want to tell and then finishing the reporting to tell that story…

Start thinking about your characters like they are your subjects. Let them talk, with you and each other. Ask questions. Push them. See what happens.

Let your characters tell you both who they are and what the story is going to be.