A Guide to Real Characters
How to Write Characters
"If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader." ---Stan Lee
Characters are the driving force of your screenplay. It's important that your characters have a strong back story and that you understand what drives them. Here are a few tips to keep your characters consistent and interesting:
1) Play Against the Cliché: A great exercise I learned from Writers' Digest magazine is to take a cliché character (the Irish cop, the stupid jock, the nerdy brain, etc) and turn it on its ear with one major change.
So the stupid jock has the following traits: He's muscular, he's stupid because he doesn't study, he dates a cheerleader, he's a bully, he wears a letterman jacket, he has a crew cut and the teachers look the other way because he's a good athlete. Now you have a list of the typical traits for this character.
Now all you have to do is add a trait or make one very different from the ones on the list. He's a stupid jock, but he worships Satan. He's a stupid jock, but he only speaks French. He's a stupid jock, but raises flowers as a hobby. By changing only one of these traits, you've created a new character.
2) Characters are Attitude: A lesson I learned in doing improv comedy is that characters are all about their attitude. An attitude consists of some sort of emotion connected to a person, thing and/or event. Serpico desires honesty in the NYPD. Captain Kirk of Star Trek loves beautiful women. Bart Simpson of The Simpsons enjoys making Homer crazy. Each attitude is specific and comes out by the character's action and dialogue.
Characters will have multiple attitudes, but some will be primary and some will be secondary depending on the story. Bart may enjoy making Homer crazy, but he doesn't necessarily enjoy making Marge or Apu crazy. Bart also thinks Jimbo Jones is cool and wants to be like him, but he doesn't think Martin Prince is cool.
Characters should maintain their attitude even when it hurts them. Serpico stays honest even though it hurts him financially and endangers his life.
3) Characters Should do Things at the Height of Their Intelligence: This doesn't mean you can't have stupid characters, but it means the characters can't willfully be stupid, especially if it's just to justify a plot point. A character may be uneducated, but he can be shrewd. A character might be educated in crime statistics, but may not have the street savvy to avoid a con artist. A character can be very sharp, but if he doesn't know all the facts he may make the wrong choice. Just like attitude, intelligence tends to be specific to particular areas and topics.
4) Characters have Good and Bad Traits: Depending on your screenplay, characters are both parts good and bad. They do not have these traits in equal amounts. Good traits make the audience like the character. For instances, a character might uphold the law, fall in love and hope for the future. Bad traits or flaws make the audience dislike the character. For instance, the character might steal from his mother, kill his true love or lie to his friends.
5) Characters in a Screenplay have an Arc: Important characters will go through a change during the course of your story. As the events and their actions have consequences, these consequences need to be explored based on the character's attitude. For instance, if a character has spent his whole life hating his father and then discovers his real father would have some sort of attitude change. This transformation often drives the plot. Perhaps this discovery sends him on a journey to meet his real father and find out who he is. Perhaps this drives your character to hate his new father even more. Characters with life-long attitudes won't change easily and are often reluctant to change.
Here are a few websites with more information on writing characters:
Storymind.com
http://storymind.com/dramatica/characters.htm
WritersDigest.com
http://www.writersdigest.com/tipoftheweek.asp?id=2092
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