I’ve been interviewing my characters as I work on a new middle-grade mystery novel. I started with my villains because I knew less about them than I did about my protagonist, an 11-year-old girl. After seeing how much I discovered about my villains, I decided to use the same approach with Jazz.

Since I didn’t know my antagonists as well as my protagonist, I decided to interview them. It’s a technique I’ve suggested to several of my book coaching clients too. One client interviewed her antagonist, a non-human character that I couldn’t get a good feel for in her manuscript. The interview she did with him was so powerful. He’s a dark, selfish, narcissistic piece of work.