GET THOSE LOGLINE SHOWDOWN ENTRIES IN! DETAILS BELOW!
The August Logline Showdown deadline is TONIGHT at 10pm. For Logline Showdowns, you send me a logline for a script. I then pick the best five loglines and they compete on the site with you guys voting. Whoever wins gets a script review the following week!
What: August Logline Showdown
Enter: Feature Screenplay Loglines Only
Deadline: Thursday, August 24th, 10:00 PM Pacific Time
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Okay, on to today’s topic!
Lately, I’ve been reading too many screenplays where I haven’t been able to connect with the characters. Whenever this happens, I go to this place where I think I can’t enjoy screenplays or movies anymore because I’m too deep inside the screenwriting matrix. I only see writers making choices rather than getting lost in a well-told story.
But then I’ll watch or read something good and realize that, no, it’s not that I’m emotionally dead inside. It’s that the writing isn’t good enough. The specific place where most writing goes bad is in the characters. The vast majority of the characters I read in screenplays are some combination of uninspired, boring, simplistic, and weak.
But the worst characters I see? Are the ones who are just *there*. That’s it. They’re on the page. They’re in the script. But they lack any sort of quality that pulls you in and makes you care about them. There are only 2 scripts on last year’s Black List where the writers wrote characters that I actually cared about. They were…
There were other scripts on the list that made me interested in the characters. But here’s why I’m writing today’s article. Making readers interested in your characters isn’t the same as making people *care* about your characters. It’s the difference between characters charged with TNT and characters charged with plutonium.
When you make the reader care about a character, they are EMOTIONALLY ENGAGED in your screenplay, which makes the story a thousand times more potent.
And writers just don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t fault them for this. The biggest thing I’ve learned about screenwriting since I created Scriptshadow is that the hardest part to get right is the characters. That’s because you’re trying to represent a 659-dimensional human being in two dimensions. Our lives are hundreds of thousands of hours long. You think it’s easy to emulate that within two hours? It takes all sorts of writing knowledge to figure out how to condense the vast complexity of someone’s life into an artificial person who only exists for two hours.
But here’s the good news. I’m going to tell you how to do it. Right here. Right now. There are seven key things you gotta focus on. You will not be able to include all seven every time you construct a character. That’s because each script is different. But you should try and include as many as you can. Are you ready? Here we go.
A PAST
Give your character a past. Make that past as specific as possible. Because the more you know about that character’s past, the more you can include it in who that character is right now. If your character used to sell drugs on the street before becoming a big successful businessman, maybe he still has some of that “street” in him. Maybe he uses more slang. Maybe he’s not so prim and proper. If you know 19 other things about that character’s past and all 19 of those things have some echoes and remnants that have made it into who your character is today? I guarantee they’re going to be a more fleshed-out character than 90% of the characters the average script reader reads.
A SPECIFIC JOB
I just read this script where it wasn’t clear what the main character’s job was. I don’t think the writer knew. You can’t make this mistake. A character’s job is one of the easiest ways to add some specificity to them – to make them stand out from other characters. We spend half our lives at our jobs. So our jobs have a big influence on who we are, what we talk about, what we’re interested in, how much time we have for others. There’s a reality show I watch where this person used to be a bartender 12 years ago. And when he was a bartender, all he cared about was getting drunk and scoring chicks. In the latest season of the show, he’s become a bar owner. Now, all he cares about is where to score more investment money and ways to get more people to show up at his bars. Same person, but his job has created two completely different versions of him. For a writer to not be absolutely clear on what his main character’s job is and what that job entails and how it shapes his character is criminal. You’ve got to know!
DETAIL
I’m not exaggerating when I say that 99% of the scripts I read don’t include enough detail about the characters (specifically the main characters). Give me the details! Don’t tell me he’s wearing a “nice outfit.” Tell me what the outfit looks like. Is he wearing a blazer? If so, what color is it? That’s going to tell me something about him (if it’s lime green, I’m going to know that he’s eccentric). Is it a cheap blazer or an expensive one? Cause that’s going to tell me if he has money. Is it tailored or is it ill-fitting? That’s going to tell me if he cares about his appearance. And I’m just talking about his outfit here. Detail extends far beyond that. I want to know the details of his place. I want to know if he walks slow or fast. I want to know if he speaks with a lisp. Every detail you give is an opportunity for us to understand your character better.
ACTIVE
Make your character active. This is the one that most writers get right because it’s often a function of the screenplay. Most screenplays have a goal that needs to be achieved (Take down Thanos!). So your characters have no choice but to be active when they pursue this goal. Active characters are way more interesting than passive characters. Of course, there are rare stories that require a passive protagonist. That’s fine. But I promise you that for the 99.9999% of stories out there, you want your character to be active. It’s one of the easiest ways to make the reader connect with your hero. People like people who go after things.
A PERSONALITY
Ever go on a date with someone with zero personality? It’s misery, right? Same thing goes for movie characters. If they don’t have personality, we’re not going to like them. When I said above that I read too many boring characters, “boring” referred to “no personality.” Personality does not mean a super charming funny person, like Ryan Reynolds, by the way. I just mean they have to have some identifiable characteristics that make up a cohesive persona. They can be quirky, like Juno. They can be confident and assertive, like Ethan Hunt. They can be creative and ambitious like Tony Stark. They can be free-spirited, like Jack Dawson in Titanic. They can even be internal but tough, like James Bond. The point is, YOU NEED TO KNOW what those characteristics are. If you don’t know, there’s a good chance they’re going to be blank as a piece of paper.
A FLAW OR AN INTERNAL CONFLICT
Characters tend to be more interesting if they’re battling something internally. That battle might be a flaw (they’re stubborn). Or it might be an internal conflict (they haven’t properly mourned the death of a loved one). The great thing about flaws and internal conflict is that even when the story strops, your character’s struggle is still moving. You may be able to escape the bad guys for a while. But you can’t escape your thoughts. Or your weakness. It’s always there. So it’s downright silly not to include one of these for your character. I guarantee they’ll become more interesting once you do.
UNRESOLVED RELATIONSHIPS
One of the most relatable things on this planet are these universal struggles we have with other human beings. Old friends whose relationships we haven’t repaired cause we’re too stubborn. Mothers who won’t let their daughters stop thinking about getting married or having children. Divorced couples who wonder if they did the right thing. Being betrayed by someone you loved. Letting jealousy seep its tentacles into your marriage. Religious differences. Long distance relationships. Sibling rivalries. If you want the secret to pulling readers into a character, give that character a compelling unresolved relationship with another character. Take the most successful movie of the year – Barbie. Ken is in love with Barbie. He just wants to be Barbie. And she doesn’t want him. That unresolved struggle informs his entire storyline. It created an iconic character.
These are the ingredients. It’s up to you to decide how many to use and how to mix them. I encourage you to try and include all seven. Because the biggest mistake I see writers make when it comes to character is that THEY JUST DON’T TRY HARD ENOUGH. They don’t put in the effort. I read some scripts where I can tell the writer didn’t take a single minute before writing the screenplay to think about who their protagonist was. Trust me when I tell you, if you do that, that’s exactly how that character will come off to the reader – as someone who a writer did not put any thought into.
As I’ve said before, a movie can survive an average plot. It cannot survive an average protagonist.
Good luck and see you tomorrow for Logline Showdown!
