A piece of writing advice you see a lot is to do a character sketch, which is sometimes presented as a questionnaire. You’re meant to write down physical details (yes, do make an easily found note of which side the scar is on) but also more abstruse things. What is your character’s greatest fear? Was he closest to his mother or his father? One writing advice page suggests that before you start your novel you should answer the following, among much else:

When your character thinks of her childhood kitchen, what smell does she associate with it? Sauerkraut? Oatmeal cookies? Paint? Why is that smell so resonant for her?

Your character is doing intense spring cleaning. What is easy for her to throw out? What is difficult for her to part with? Why?

It’s Saturday at noon. What is your character doing? Give details.

This seems like a massive waste of writing time to me. Action is character; plot is character in action. Sitting down to decide what a fictional person’s mum’s kitchen used to smell like before you have got to know them in action isn’t going to make you know them. At best you’ll create a huge, real, detailed piece of deep writing that you will never be able to use in a book (whyyy)­; even worse, you’ll do all this work and then torture your plotline until it becomes necessary for the hero to tearfully recount how the smell of fried eggs on a sunny day makes him think of his parents’ marriage failing. (I’ll have my MFA now please.) Or alternatively, this will end up creating an even less useful version of the Quirky Detective. You know: the detective likes punk rock, drinks artisan gin, and does Sudoku; or goes to art museums for inspiration, eats curry, and has insomnia. Etc. A set of bolted-on character traits is not the same thing as a character, and if you try to create a character in isolation, without action and interaction, you’re growing him in a vat.

I don’t think the reader needs to know what the hero’s childhood kitchen smelled of, unless it was the incense of the Satanic cult who met there on Thursdays. But the author does have to know the character, deeply and intimately, so that if it became needful, she could tell you those things.

I have a Facebook group, and one of the members, Tabitha McGowan, asked me about my hero Stephen’s accent. I had never given this conscious consideration before. When asked—well, he spent his childhood in rural Gloucestershire, to the west of England, but he’s developed a middle class London clerk’s accent, to go with his mid-status London job—even if just a smidgen of the childhood accent comes back at times of stress.

I didn’t know any of that before Tabitha asked me, or to put it another way, I knew all of it, I just hadn’t thought about it. Stephen is a champion at hiding himself: of course he’s adopted a neutral accent for where he lives so his voice won’t strike anyone as unusual or noteworthy. But he has a tendency to fray under some sorts of pressure, so his adopted accent will very slightly, very occasionally slip.

This doesn’t tell me anything new or revelatory about Stephen. Quite the reverse: it arises from what’s already there. Everything that tells me about Stephen’s accent is in the character. I know his accent because I know him, not vice versa, and sitting down to work that out in advance would not have deepened my understanding of him.

Obviously, if you’ve got to the end of the draft and you still can’t answer the kitchen question, you’ve failed to get to know your own character, and he’s going to be flat on the page, and in the reader’s head. It is absolutely crucial for the author to know more about the character than appears on the page. Not as a checklist or a creative writing exercise and really not as details you can shoehorn in for character depth (“Why, Stephen, I can’t help noticing your accent went a little bit Gloucestershire there, while we were having kinky sex!”). I mean that you should have a fuller awareness of his past, his secret shames, his trivial preferences, all the things that drive his reactions. So that if you were asked about his mum’s kitchen, you could think for a second and say, “Yes, of course, it was like this…”

Just don’t be tempted to put it all on the page. You need to know, but the reader really doesn’t.

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KJ Charles writes historical m/m romance. Her latest release is Jackdaw, a linked book in the Victorian paranormal Charm of Magpies series starting with The Magpie Lord

Find KJ on Twitter @kj_charles, read her blogs here, or join her Facebook group for sneak peeks and book chat.