AI-assisted practical guide. Examples are hypothetical; these are proposed editorial methods, not reported research results.
Developing a character interview for an AI writing exercise helps you explore a persona's voice and motivations before drafting a full scene. By structuring the interview as a dataset, you provide the AI with a consistent reference point for dialogue and behavior. The goal is to create a document that distinguishes between established facts and areas where you want the AI to suggest creative directions.
Structuring the Interview Document
Begin by listing questions that cover the character's history, desires, and contradictions. When writing the answers, use a clear marker to indicate which responses are fixed canon and which are placeholders. You might use a bracketed tag like [UNDECIDED] for story choices you have not yet finalized. This signals to the AI that it should treat those specific points as flexible suggestions rather than rigid facts. To handle the difficult case of contradictory traits, write the answer as a conflict. Instead of choosing one emotion, describe how the character feels two opposing things at once, which gives the AI a more complex psychological profile to emulate.
Hypothetical example
Imagine you are building a profile for a disgraced space captain named Elara. Your document would look like this:
Question: Why did you leave the Galactic Fleet? Answer: I refused an order to fire on a civilian outpost. [FIXED]
Question: What is your greatest fear? Answer: [UNDECIDED] Perhaps a fear of open water or a fear of being forgotten.
Question: How do you treat your crew? Answer: I am stern and distant, yet I secretly ensure they are paid double the standard rate. [FIXED]
To use this in an exercise, you could use a prompt such as: Using the provided interview, write a dialogue where Elara argues with a crew member. If a response is marked as undecided, propose a logical character choice based on the fixed traits.
Input: Interview document for Elara. Output: A scene where Elara's fear of being forgotten manifests as an obsession with recording her logs.
Verifying the Character Voice
Once the AI generates a response based on your interview, check the output against your intended persona. The most common error is the AI smoothing over the contradictions you intentionally built into the character. Review the deliverable to ensure the AI did not ignore the [UNDECIDED] tags by simply picking the first option provided, or conversely, that it did not invent a backstory that contradicts a [FIXED] entry. If the AI makes Elara sound too friendly, refine your interview answers to include more specific linguistic quirks or negative traits. The final check should confirm that the AI's creative additions to the undecided sections align with the established logic of the fixed answers.