I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I'm working on my characters, that's something I pay a lot of attention to: how their body works, how they move, how they articulate.
How I would describe my characters is absolutely different from how I would describe myself.
At our college we were taught a universal approach to find out about a person: what problems the person has, what difficulties, what personal tendencies and likings.
Any description of a person that comes from the outside is very hard to deal with. People don't like being summarised. It's nice to receive a compliment, but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
How can one know anything at all about people?
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.
Often you find the character through the things they say. How they talk about other people, how they describe themselves - which is very rare.
The biggest research of all when I do a character is self-examination. You look at yourself and you ask, 'How am I similar to this person and how am I different?'