The Perfect 10
And here's instalment four:
Character is Everything
I could have started with this. It's the beginning, middle and end of what makes or breaks a great script - and a great writer. You can have everything else, but if you don't create strong, vivid, compelling characters then you ultimately have very little.
We need to engage with your characters on an emotional level. We don't need to like them. We can even despise them. But they must have a human, emotional life. Even if they are a robot - there's humanity in Arnie's Terminator and Wall-E. Frank Gallagher is a disaster of a father who does terrible things for terrible reasons, but there are enough human shaped chinks in his armour to make us engage with him - for example, when Debbie is being pressurised into losing her virginity, he melts, realising she is still his little girl.
We have to want to spend time with your characters. We need to understand their desires, soak up their energy, feel their pain, fear for them. The vicarious thrill in wondering what Frank Gallagher or Richard III will do next is just as important as wondering whether two romantic leads will in fact get together at the end, or whether Tom Hanks will get Private Ryan home, or whether David Brent will ever realise just how embarassingly bad a boss he really is.
To be hooked by your characters, we need to feel compelled to go on their journey with them. It sounds neat and tidy, but if we don't know what they want, then we won't care about what they have to do to get it, and enjoy the ups and downs of them doing so. Give them a journey to go on - whether that's Basil Fawlty fending off the hotel inspector or Sam trying to get back to 2007 in Life on Mars.
The crucial thing, therefore, is to make them active. Passive, reactive characters just don't hook us. The problem with many scripts we receive is that the central character doesn't drive the story forward. If we know what they want, and see them having to make decisions and take action to get it, then you set up a dynamic and momentum with your character and their story.
If you're ever stuck with your character in a scene, sequence or plot point, then try asking these questions of them: What do they want by the end of this scene? What do they want when they wake up the next morning? What do they want in a years time? And what do they want by the end of their life? They might not know or fully realise all the answers, but it will give you a way into your character, and help give them a life that is perhaps outside the action of your story, but crucial to who they are in any given moment.
And of course, they need to be individuals rather than cliches and stereotypes. So invest time in working out - and then showing - what it is that makes them truly distinct and unlike any other character we've ever met. They may have an archetypal quality to them - but what else do they bring to the archetype?
A useful way to clarify what makes them an individual, is to try to look at the world they are in from their point of view - and therefore allow the audience to do the same. Show us their window on the world. Allow us to see their desires, insights, feelings, opinions, prejudices, fears and misunderstandings from their own point of view. If you can do that, then the character and the world they inhabit will be much richer.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~45~RS~)
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You posted this at a convenient time for me -- I was just looking to interrogate a new character with /some/ set of questions, and I think your suite above fits the bill nicely. Thanks.
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The whole idea of showing the world that my characters inhabit, from their point of veiw is something I over looked. Thanks.
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Great blog. Its shows that if you get the characters right, the script will flow and be good. I never try and write a script now without knowing the characters inside out and how they think and react to things.
Cheers
Nick
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I have heard this so often and it is totally right. I'm trying to write a script just now but i'm in the process of learning who the characters are - i know the main character but i don't know the other supporting characters.
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I was wondering how you guys name your characters as i'm struggling to name my main villain.
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All Villains should have a quirky spelling to let the audience know they are in the presence of a 'wrong un.' Michael, for example, would be spelled Micheal.
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@ Mr P.
How would the audience know about the quirky spelling?
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Dear me Antonia -
As in all, you show don't tell. We learn both the spelling of his name and that he is a villain when a letter is delivered with his name spelt incorrectly. He pulls out a gun and then shouts at the postman...
MICHEAL:
This is how my ******* name should be spelled, you muppet.'
He articulates the correct spelling of his name and then literally kills the messenger. That's how you handle exposition and reveal character. A particualry nasty vilain as clearly the postman is not responsible for the error in the spelling of his name. The viewer will be immediately wondering what he will do next.
Hope this helps.
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@ Mr P
As much as your posts are entertaining - my villain is not that kind of straight forward villain in the fact that he is not a villain to start with but during the course of events he turns evil and we see his motivation for turning evil etc. He never turns to your archetypal villain in your post.
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Call him Barry then.
:)
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@ Mr P.
Ahhh, I see.
Is what you describe going to move the story along?
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This is wonderful advice, and the comments are a joy to read as well. I used to instinctively know this when I wrote as a teen. I stopped writing (fiction, anyway), for a decade, and now that I'm getting back into it it's hard to remember all the "rules."
carrie
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Yes Antonia - the Story is called 'A FIRST CLASS MURDER'
This is the inciting incident. It sets our criminal on the run, and as you know only a third of murders are solved by the police nowadays, you need to have someone in a different profession, a pie maker for example like the great Richard Griffiths, or a vet like Rolf Harris. So our hero is in this case - a postman detective. He passes unseen through all our lives, but whereas we dont see him - he sees all about us through the rectangular lens of our letterboxes. He knows all our secrets. So who better to track down the brutal slayer of one of their own. Our hero may have baggage, but he has got a bike to carry it on and you know damn well he will deliver by the end of the story.
So not only from the beginning do we know the sort of crime we are dealing with, what the 'original' high concept of the detecting is going to be, we also have a pun in the title and anyone who has seen ' A Touch of Frost' will know just how important that is.
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Sounds goooooood. Hope Rolph Harris isn't playing the lead though, cos he always has to play his didgeridoo.
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Apparently Rolf will only do it if he gets to write and perform the theme tune which was a deal breaker - so they are trying to get Denis Waterman instead. To give him a twist he is going to come from swedish/magya stock with a comedy limp - which you don't see until he gets off his bicycle. Imagine Kenneth B impersonating Max Wall playing a scandinavian Francois le Facteur.
As David Renwick famously remarked ... 'A screenplay is like soup, you have to have all the right ingredients plus a touch of pepper, and of course it helps if you have a Jewish grandmother.'
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Yes Mr Ashton, all of that and an awful lot more, I'd definitely say. There has always been solid rules about character definition and character development etc. etc. as long as there as been an art of drama - a long time. These rules are sacrosanct really. So why is it you still see TV progs - yes even on the BBC - that have flaunted these paramount and basic rules? How on earth, for example did Not Going Out get a commission? It's hilarious yes, but it barely has any character definition at all. A tincy bit maybe, but you do have to strain your eyes and ears to find out who said what sometimes, at least I do. How DID that show make it onto air? I'd love to know. Are established stars not subject to the same set of rules then? I just struggle to see how that show bypassed what should be the hardest test for all new scripts. Character is everything as far I'm concerned, and that includes difference or definition between them. The two lead characters on NGO just about make it when they're head to head, but neither on their own are massively 'big', they look far too normal or everyday ordinary. Would one of that sitcom's scripts really pass all your tests if an unknown had sent it in unsolicited? I do wonder. It passes the humour test easily, but does that mean then it doesn't have to be strong on the character front? That would be unthinkable, in my book.
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