A good story needs a great cast of characters to be memorable. When you start your screenplay you need to think about the characters you are going to write about. There are ten things a character needs to be great. These all apply to main characters, villains, supporting characters and even minor characters. The ten keys to building a great character are:
- A Goal And An Opposition
- Motivation
- A Backstory
- A Point Of View And Attitude
- Revealing Action
- Growing Room
- Plausibility
- Details
- Research
- A Strong Supporting Cast
Lets look at each of these in detail.
A Goal And An Opposition
There is something that your character wants. The character’s goal should be specific and measurable. Seeking inner peace is not a measurable goal. Seeking the Presidency is a goal, you know when it has or has not been accomplished.
A good goal should be hard to achieve and worth fighting for. Nobody wants to watch a movie about a woman trying to find her spare set of keys. Whatever goal you choose for your character there also needs to be an opposition, an individual force trying to stop the character achieving the goal. That individual force should make the character sweat and work to achieve the goal, and face an inner fear.
At the very core of every piece of film or television is conflict. If everyone just got along it would make for a very boring movie. As a scriptwriter you have to inject conflict into your script to keep the action moving along so the audience will remain interested.
The most important piece of conflict is always the conflict between the main character's success versus the failure of acheiving their ultimate goal. You need to think of each scene as a mini-story where your main character has a goal, it doesn't have to be their ultimate goal, where obstacles are pushed into their path to stop them acheiving their goal. In most scenes the character will be able to overcome these obstacles and achieve their goal with a few exceptions.
Brought down to the basics there are two types of conflict.
- Inner Conflict
- Outer Conflict
Inner Conflict
Inner conflict are the emotion hang-ups and neurosis that we all have. Whether it's something obvious such as a person refusing to ever swim because their Dad drowned when they were a child, or something more subtle, inner conflict is often the deeper, darker side of a character. Inner conflict often hinders the character from developing as a person and acheiving their goal in less obvious way than a physical force.
Outer Conflict
Outer conflict are the obstacles which confront your character and attempt to stop them acheiving their goal. These can range from the character's relationships to freakish zombie mutants.
As much as I have just harped on about the importance of conflict you shouldn't make every scene in your script a desperate fight to save the world from some impending force of doom. If you do this then the audience's emotions will be drained by the climax and then they simple won't care, they've seen it all already. The truly great scriptwriter will take the audience on an emotional rollercoaster, complete with ups, downs, and maybe a few loop-de-loops.
If you ever get to a point in your script where, with the end still 40 pages in sight, the conflict and tension seems almost impossible to top you need to ever re-write the scene to lower the stakes or provide a little relief from the conflict maybe with a moment of comedy or romance. Then just when the audience has settled down - BAM! - hit them again with more conflict.
Remember that life is an eternal struggle and that is exactly what your main character's life needs to be to create an interesting script.
Motivation
Now your character has a goal you need to ask yourself a question, why does the character want to achieve this goal? What is his motivation? The more personal the motivation the better. This is why there are so many movies where a character has their family kidnapped. There’s nothing more personal and motivating than that. A deeply personal motivation will allow the audience to relate to the character in your screenplay. This is how you create a relationship between the character and he audience.
A Backstory
The backstory is what happened to the characters before the movie began. Having a detailed backstory helps bring the characters to life rather than being instruments of telling the story. A character’s past should influence how they act and react to things. If their parents were involved in a messy divorce when they were young then they may be very wary of getting married themselves.
Backstory is a great example of the “show don’t tell” adage. Rather than have a dozen flashbacks try to bring out the backstory through the way the character acts, what they say and how they say it.
A Point Of View And An Attitude
Everyone has their own world view, attitude and thoughts and feelings. So should your character. These things are normally closely related to the character’s backstory. The backstory is the reason for the particular point of view and attitude the character has. A woman who has been cheated on by her last few boyfriends is likely, and acceptably, going to have a dim point of view towards men. Use the character’s backstory to create their point of view and attitudes.
Revealing Actions
Actions speak louder than words. You judge a character on the way they act, not on what they say or think. Imagine a character who dreams of committing murder every night, and is constantly thinking of ways to kill people…yet never does so because he realises it is wrong. Now imagine the opposite, a character who thinks and dreams of “normal things” yet one day, for no reason, goes out and knifes an innocent person to death. Who is the evil character?
Your characters (especially your main one) should always be willing to act, even if they don’t act in the way they directly think.
Growing Room
A “perfect” character is a boring character. They have everything they want and need so there’s no story to tell. Everyone knows someone whose life seems to go great beat for beat, you find yourself envious of them and willing them to fail. Instantly you should see from this that a good character should be imperfect. They have to be willing to try and change themselves for the better. Often they will try too hard and end up realising they were fine as they were, even if still aren’t perfect.
Plausibility
There’s a major difference between a character in a screenplay and a real life person. A character is single focused solely on attaining their goal while a real life person often have a lot of balls to juggle at once, causing a lack of focus. However you can make your character more plausible in a number of ways.
A character should have human emotions. If they stand there stone faced as the world is destroyed then they aren’t human, they’re a robotic character. Let them recoil in terror, or scream in anger. Let them react to situations the way a real human would. Remember though that humans often fight their emotions or try to hide them, but they still seep through.
They also need to have human traits and values. Your character could be a mean old grouch amongst those he works with yet have a heart of gold when with his family. This doesn’t mean the character is schizophrenic, just that he hates work and loves spending time with his family. Every character has a dark side and a good side. Even the “bad guy” has a glimmer of hope inside, even if its just the way he treats his plants. Plausibility means shades of grey, not blank and white.
Details
Details are the little things that make up life. They are the mannerisms, quirks, habits, idiosyncrasies and imperfections that make a character human. Along your way through life you pick up some very unusual traits. If you’ve seen Stranger Than Fiction you might remember that Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) brushed each of his thirty-two teeth seventy-six times. Everyone has something peculiar about them, you need to bring out those small details in your character.
Research
To create a great character for your screenplay you need to put time and care into them. This means a lot of research. There are two types of research. One is general research, the other is specific research.
You’ve got a great idea for a script. Your main character is a hotel manager who, with sheer will and determination, wants to become the owner of the biggest chain of hotels in the world. Okay, so that’s not a great idea but you get my point.
Every script needs a main character to drive the story along. The main character should be, in general, the deepest and most interesting character. When you finally get to sitting down and starting the scriptwriting process you realise that you don’t know the first thing about running a hotel. Bit of a stumbling block, don’t you think? This is where character research comes in.
You need to find what drives these characters, what their concerns are, how they keep going, what their goals are. It is only in getting to grips with your character that they will light up your script rather than dragging it along with them.
General Character Research
The one great thing about general character research is that you’ve always got something to fall back on. Remember how your grandma would always say goodbye to her cat before leaving her house? Or how your friend would always sit on certain seat on the bus if it was available? These are all general character traits which can be noticed while people watching.
Most writers are people watchers. Every little quirk you see in people you know, or people you don’t, can’t be used to flesh out the characters in your script. I assume that more or less everyone who’s reading this went to a school of some sort. If you’re writing a script with a couple of schoolchildren in then you can draw on your personal experience and memories and create a couple of solid characters with fun tails of pranks and mischief.
Everything you experience in life can be taken as general character research for scriptwriting. Every emotion you’ve felt, every relationship, every job provides with a broad background of character knowledge you can draw upon.
Specific Character Research
I’ve heard a few times that you should “write what you know” and while there is merit in that, part of the fun for many scriptwriters is immersing themselves in a new environment.
Using my opening idea of a hotel manager I’ll highlight what specific character research is. I don’t personally know any hotel managers but that does not need be a stumbling block.
Information is easier than ever to access. I’m sure if you were to search the internet they’d be a blog of a hotel manager, a myspace or facebook page or maybe even a forum full of hotel managers…which is a scary thought. You could strike up an online rapport with one of these hotel managers and have a wealth of information at your fingertips.
Go down to you local library (if you want to be a scriptwriter try to avoid ever paying for anything!) and read a book on business management. Depending on how good the library is they may even have one specifically on hotel management.
My favorite approach though is the personal one. Treat yourself to a short break and stop in a small hotel. Get talking to the manager and let him know you’re a scriptwriter, you’d be surprised how open people will be with you especially if you offer to take them for a meal or a coffee. When people hear you’re a writing a script and they can help you the lure of their having some portion of their life on the big screen is just too much for most people to resist.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this piece on character research. Stay tuned because there’ll be more to come.
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