I began my professional life as a journalist, before moving into public relations and working on the other side of the microphone and the camera. 

Through those early years, I developed a list of questions that I used to draw out the “human” side of my interviewees—those aspects that were more about them personally than the reason they were in the news.

I’ve come to learn those questions serve me well as an author of fiction as I develop profiles. I often ask these questions of people around whom I might model a character. I’m often fascinated by the answers.

If you desire to conduct interviews, write profiles, blog human interest stories, or just want to learn the more colorful aspects of someone special in your life, then try this baker’s dozen list of questions:

1. You’re so successful…I wonder, how did you begin? What was your first job?
2. If you had to be stuck in a hospital bed for three months and so did another, whom would you want in the next bed? (You’re confined to your own bed.)
3. What five books would you want with you if stranded on a deserted island?
4. Whom would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?
5. If you were not doing the work you’re now doing, what would you most likely be doing?
6. If you could live any time in history, when would you wish to have lived?
7. If you could be any person in history, whom would you like to have been?
8. If you suddenly were given $1 million, and told you had to spend it on yourself, what is the first thing you would buy?
9. If your house were on fire, what one possession would you grab on your way out?
10. What in the last year has given you the most pleasure?
11. Describe a typical day, five years from now (ideal situation).
12. What do you like and dislike most about yourself?
13. For what act or achievement would you most want to be remembered?

Wishing you peace and harmony in all your conversations!