Novel Mage Feature
Interview Agents
Talk to your characters to explore motives, secrets, and next steps.
The Interview Agents feature lets you hold a real-time conversation with any character in your novel. Novel Mage loads the character's codex entry their background, personality, goals, fears, relationships, and role in the story and creates an AI agent that responds in character. You ask questions. The character answers as themselves.
This is character development by discovery rather than by outline. Writers often find that their most interesting character moments come when they stop planning and start listening. Interview Agents replicates the experience of having a character 'talk to you' which many authors describe as the moment a character becomes real. You might ask Elena why she never told Marcus the truth, and the answer she gives reveals a motivation you hadn't consciously planned but that makes the story deeper.
The interview isn't just creative play it's practical. If you're stuck on a character's decision at a plot fork, interviewing them can reveal what they would actually do given who they are. If a character's behavior in a scene feels off, interviewing them from before that scene can clarify whether you've honored their established psychology or accidentally overridden it for plot convenience. The responses are generated from the codex profile, so they stay consistent with your world-building.
Key benefits
- Discover character depth through conversation rather than outlining alone
- Reveal motivations, contradictions, and backstory organically in dialogue
- Test plot decisions would this character actually make this choice?
- Ground characters more deeply in the world before writing their scenes
- Sessions can be saved and referenced during drafting
How it works
From your Codex, select a character and open the Interview panel. The AI agent is instantiated with that character's full codex profile as its context. Type your questions naturally as the author speaking to the character, or even in-world as another character. The agent responds in the character's voice, drawing on their established background and personality. You can probe for information the character might hide, press on contradictions, or simply explore how they see the events of your story.
When to use it
Developing a character's voice before writing their first POV chapter
Exploring a character's perspective on past events that happened before the story starts
Finding the emotional core of a character who feels flat or inconsistent on the page
Testing dialogue patterns to write the character's spoken voice more authentically
Related features
Try Interview Agents in Novel Mage
Novel Mage is $99 once lifetime access. Every feature including interview agents is included. Fully offline, local AI support, your data stays on your machine.
Free to download. No credit card required.