Encounters with nincompoops or champions both bring life to good yarns, if you throw a little interpersonal intelligence into the mix. In fact, the best stories show folly in a star one minute, and champion the bravery in a scoundrel the next.

In his recent best seller, Prisoners, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote about people who humiliated and bullied him in a Long Island schoolyard, and, Nick Rennison’s new biography, Sherlock Holmes, takes readers into the ambiguities of the world’s most famous detective. Both show similar interpersonally strong storytelling skills in different ways.

What life experiences could you bring to a story about people you encountered? Would your story look like Goldberg’s admiration for people, and show his realistic colors of Israelis he admired? Or would it bring Rennison’s sense of adventure to the afterlife of a literary character?

Interpersonal intelligence grows a story when real people you know, end up in stories you write. Goldberg wove his 1990 experiences as an MP at the Israeli military prison Ketziot during the first intifada, into a story about a Muslim & a Jew across the Middle East divide. Rennison’s showed Holmes’ ambiguities as a reflection of his zeal for progress on one hand, and personal darker struggles with emotions on the other.

As witnessed in Goldberg’s and Rennison’s stories – an interpersonally alert writer tends to be part memoirist, and part reporter, because interpersonal skills increase an author’s ability to develop and interpret relationships as they relate to an interact with nincompoops and champs.

Your interpersonal intelligence guides you past the mundane, in behind the obvious – to capture an adventure through triumphs and tragedies of interesting people. Goldberg reached out to talk with Jewish and Arab prisoners and try to find out what they were thinking – and readers see nuances often missed in media reports about Palestinians and Israelis. In Goldberg’s favorite prisoner, a scholarly rogue named Rafiq, you see likeability and a sense of humor. Similarly, Rennison shadows Holmes through the ups and downs of the late 1800s in ways that show a Victorian era at war with its own skeletons.

A writer’s interpersonal muse holds insight from relationships all around you – those that work and those that don’t. Here are a few prompts to get your next story off the ground through activating your own unique people smarts.

From your right brain…

1. Interview your favorite hero and write three insights you learned
2. Create a post with a writer you admire, alternating sentences
3. Ask 3 people to tell you what they think of immigration, growing old, or AIDS
4. Tell your story idea to a child and invite a response

From your left brain …

5. Re-tell a recent dialogue between 2 people you know
6. Climb a mountain with a friend and relate the conversation sequentially
7. Play a board game for 4 with people and compare culturally different responses
8. Discuss a news article with friends and support opposing views

What prompt would you add to use more interpersonal intelligence as a tool to tell somebody’s best story?