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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43270
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There is one thing that comes to mind - the **"36 questions that will make you fall in love with someone"**. It's a slightly different premise, of course, but the point of these questions is to make a connection to the person you're interviewing. So there might be something you can use there.

[Here's the New York Times article about it](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html) and [here's the study it is based on](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0146167297234003).

Some excerpts:

> 1. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
> 
> 2. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

It's 36 questions, and some are more intimate and probably less useful here, so I'll refrain from pasting the whole list. But you see where it is going. They're very specific questions meant to draw out a specific and personal response.

As you can see, this is based on a psychological study. If you want to do some more digging, I'd suggest to actually start by looking in Google Scholar for similar studies. Maybe the references in the linked study are also helpful. But this is a huge part of psychology, so you might find something that suits your purpose even better.

**Generally speaking I would say that questions should be specific, not generic.** They should also be relevant to the plot or the world of your book. So instead of the crystal ball question above, you might want to use ideas from your novel. If it is sci-fi, you might ask "Have you heard that they discovered these aliens that live backwards in time and communicate by tachyon streams? What would you like to ask them about your future if you could?" (If instead you're writing a historical novel in the vein of Jane Austen, you might ask them what they know about the trade war in China and what they think would be the solution that could make both parties happy. Again, it's important not to ask simply "What do you think of it?", but to be specific. Their answer can still be "I totally don't care.")

Original score: 4