It’s finally here. It only took a year. Somebody buy me a beer. Soon, it will all be clear!

Yes, the semi-finalists are about to be announced and I wanted to give you a heads up on how this is going to work. For those that don’t know, I had four piles for my contest. A “YES” pile. A “HIGH MAYBE” pile. A “LOW MAYBE” pile. And a “NO” pile. On Monday, I will be revealing scripts that landed in the “YES” pile and the “HIGH MAYBE” pile.

As of this moment, there are 5 scripts in the “YES” pile and 38 in the “HIGH MAYBE” pile. Those numbers might change over the weekend as I’ll be reading the remainder of the entries. My plan for the next round is to read to at least page 60 on all the high maybes and read the full script of all the yes’s. I’ll give you a post date for the finalists and winner on Monday.

Unfortunately, people in the LOW MAYBE pile will not get shout-outs but that does not mean you aren’t still in it. Low Maybes consist mainly of concepts I liked where the writing wasn’t up to par (in the first 10 pages at least), and strong voices who don’t yet have a feel for how to write a screenplay. There are currently 73 entries in my LOW MAYBE folder. I’m going to give LOW MAYBES at least 10 more pages to see if they hook me. The chances of advancing to the next round are slim but you’ve still got a shot!

Buckle up. Monday’s going to be fun!

Good news! It looks like I’ll be posting all scripts that made it into the next round in The Last Great Screenplay Contest THIS MONDAY. Mark your calendars!

I was perusing Youtube as I am wont to do when I’m in Procrastination Mode, which is pretty much all the time. And I came across a video with the title – “What Did Darth Vader Do In His Free Time?”

I found myself fascinated by the question. We know Vader reluctantly attends meetings with regional generals. We know he stays updated on rumors of where Luke Skywalker might be. We know he meditates in that egg-shaped cryo-chamber of his.

But that only accounts for what? 30% of his day? Okay, let’s be generous and say 50%. What does he do with the rest of his day? I don’t think they have internet in Star Wars so he can’t sit around and waste time. He possibly has a few more meetings to go to than the ones they show. I could see him seeking updates on the performances of all his generals, since he doesn’t have time for a shred of ineffectiveness.

What else, though? If you were to chart Darth Vader’s day from 6 in the morning to 12 midnight, what would each hour look like? Does he shower? Does he read? Does he eat lunch? Come to think of it, I’ve never seen Darth Vader eat. How does he eat? Is it all intravenous? And does Darth Vader do anything for fun? Actually, “fun” is a misleading word. Does he do anything for enjoyment?

I am asking these questions because I’m genuinely fascinated with the subject matter. But I’m also bringing your attention to a lesser-known strategy for writing strong characters, and that is to know them beyond the scenes they’re in.

I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that the most important part of a screenplay is character. A script can survive a bland concept. A script can survive an average plot. But a script cannot, under any circumstances, survive weak characters.

Now normally when we discuss strong characters, we go to the staples. Character flaw. Unresolved relationships with other characters. Addictions. Unresolved conflict with the past (trauma, death). But you can still do all of that stuff and your character feel bland. There’s a reason for this. You may know the psychological makeup of your CHARACTER when you apply these things. But you don’t yet know the PERSON. To find the person, you have to figure what their life is like beyond the page.

Now, there are a few ways to do this. The most common way is to write out a biography for your character. I like character bios but it doesn’t always give you what you want because the directive is vague. Covering 20-30 years of a character’s life in 5-10 pages can be daunting. What do you focus on? What do you leave out? And since your summarization is spanning so much time, are you at risk of resting on cliche (her parents died in a car crash, for example – a backstory I see in about 1 out of every 5 scripts).

The most helpful option I’ve found is to chart out an average day with your character. I’m talking about a day BEFORE your movie started. Start from the top. 7 am. They wake up. What’s the first thing they do? From there, assuming they have a job, what’s their pre-work ritual? Do they make breakfast or does their spouse make breakfast? If they make breakfast, do they go the fast and processed route – Pop-Tarts? Or do they take their time and cook a fluffy healthy omelette?

This may seem like overkill but think about it. How much can you learn about a person through what they eat? My experience is that you can learn a lot. Let me prove it to you. Here are two breakfast meals for two different people. Our first character gets their meal on the way to work. He goes to McDonald’s and gets a Hotcakes meal with two extra sausages, along with a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese McGriddle, along with a large Diet Coke. Our second character makes a green smoothie along with some steel cut oatmeal with a chopped up banana and a drizzle of peanut butter. Along with two hard boiled eggs.

You tell me you can’t envision these two people from these two meals. And had you never had a breakfast scene in your script, you never would’ve known this. Talk about an effective exercise! You’re already learning things about your character and you haven’t even gotten to work yet!

From there, what time do they go to work? And where is work? Is it an hour commute in heavy traffic or is it the 12 feet between the bed and the couch, like the commute your friend Scriptshadow enjoys? If it is an hour commute, what do they do during that hour? Do they listen to music, podcasts, sports radio? Note how each choice further shapes your character. A guy who listens to NPR segments about water shortages in Africa is a different beast than one who’s obsessed with whether his Dodgers picked up a new pitcher by the trade deadline.

Or what if they drive in complete silence? Good god, how creepy is that? This would be the choice I’d come up with for a serial killer.

Once they get to work, what’s the first thing they do? Do they say hi to others at the office or do they avoid everyone? Is there someone at work they like to flirt with? Do they seek her out and say hi?

This is going to be a grandiose statement but I’m going to say it anyway. If you don’t know what your hero does at work on an hour by hour basis, you don’t know character well. I can feel your resistance already. But trust me. You don’t. I have 7000-8000 screenplays in my rearview mirror as evidence. Most people spend more hours at work than they do at home. So if you don’t understand that part of their life, do you really understand them? Me says no.

Really figure this out. Know what they do. I know it’s annoying because we’re often writing about jobs we have no experience in. But that’s exactly why you’re avoiding it. Because researching it is too difficult. Well guess what. That bored audience member doesn’t have any sympathy for you. They’re not going to give you a break because figuring out what a regional manager does all day is “weally weally hard.”

Where do they go to lunch? What do they eat (again)? You can learn so much about a character from these moments in their day. For example, you might realize that your hero is trying to eat better. So they bring a healthy bagged lunch. Then they have to eat with everyone else in the break room who have all ordered pizza. Just the way your character stares at that delicious pizza they’re not allowed to have tells you so much about them.

Do they check in with their spouse during the day? When they get out of work, do they go straight home? Do they pick up the kids from their practice or activities? Or do they leave that duty for their spouse? These choices matter. They give us further insight into who your character is. Maybe your character *could* do that but they’re selfish so they leave it up to their overworked spouse.

Or maybe your hero usually stays late at work because they hate their home life. They’re bummed when they run out of work to do and everyone else has left because now they actually have to go home. Or maybe they’re the opposite. They hate work more than anything. Or love their kids more than anything and therefore leave the second the clock strikes 5pm.

Once they’re home for the night, is it a family dinner where they all sit at the table and talk about their day? Or does everyone scatter off and do their own thing? Does their rebellious teenage daughter secretly order Doordash every night, compounding an insane food bill that infuriates both parents? Do you see how much we’re learning about this person’s life through these questions?

And all we’ve done is gone through their day. So I implore you to RIGHT NOW drop whatever you’re doing and write out an average daily schedule for the hero in your current screenplay. Come back to these comments and I promise you – PROMISE YOU – you will happily concede that you learned a few new things about your character. And once you’re finished, do it for the next three biggest characters in your script.

It doesn’t take long. What do you have to lose? Besides your lightsaber-wielding son.

Genre: Period
Premise: Set in 1862, after his sister is kidnapped by soldiers, a half-white, half-Comanche teenager teams up with several members of his tribe to track the soldiers East in an attempt to rescue her.
About: Today’s script finished with 6 votes on last year’s Black List and has a pretty good pitch – from the Black List: “A reverse SEARCHERS from the perspective of the Natives going East into the unknown, the metropolis, the belly of the beast, late 1800s New York City.” Screenwriter, Esteban Orozco, has written several successful TV shows, the most popular of which is “El Chapo” on Netflix.
Writer: Esteban Orozco (based on a story by Esteban and Felipe Orozco).
Details: 6/29/19 draft (107 pages)

I got the message loud and clear yesterday.

Superhero = bad.

Bad, Carson!

So I decided to go 180 degrees in the other direction. The only superpower you’re going to see in today’s script is the power to watch pretty sunsets. The power to ride wild horses. The power to eat buffalo meat.

The year is 1862.

The Comanche tribe’s numbers are dwindling. Just a few decades ago, they had all the buffalo they could devour. Now, the herds have dwindled, creating a situation where the last active nomadic tribe in America has to constantly be on the move in order to stay fed.

That’s how we meet them in this story, settling in an area where there were SUPPOSED to be buffalo, but there are none. The Chief is yelling at his main buffalo guy, Yapa, about it. Now they’re going to have to move AGAIN.

The Chief thinks his half-white son, 14 year old Naconi, should be on the next hunting trip. They head north, finally run into some buffalo, but Naconi makes a crucial mistake and almost gets himself and the best hunter in the tribe, Quan, killed. He’s so embarrassed that the very next night he hops on a horse, determined to leave the tribe forever.

However, his 8 year old full-Comanche sister, Etenia, sees him and follows him out. After he tells her to go back home, several members of another tribe take her. And then that tribe is attacked by American soldiers, who take her.

Once it’s determined that not only did American soldiers take Etenia, but that they’re heading east fast, the Chief teams Naconi up with Quan, Yapa, their medicine guy, and 15 year old Tenewa, a young female warrior who thinks guys are gross. They will be tasked with getting Etenia back.

The group tracks the soldiers all the way to Oklahoma City, where they learn they’re too late. The soldiers boarded a train and went back to New York City. Team Comanche has never even seen a train before. And they realize that going to New York is suicide. Comanches are not thought of well during this time. But Naconi is determined to right his wrong, and lead the group into the belly of the beast.

Simple story. Complex characters.

Let me say that again.

Simple story. Complex characters.

This is the recipe for most great screenplays.

Lots of writers are afraid to give you a narrative this simple – “Go retrieve sister” – because they believe that great writing needs to be complex and multi-layered and have twelve themes running underneath it at all times. Complexity has its place in writing. But it’s best saved for the characters. Give us someone like Beth in The Queen’s Gambit who had this crazy mom who tried to kill the both of them and she’s a math genius and she feels no emotion and she’s thrust into the world of a sport dominated by the opposite sex. There’s so much to delve into character-wise there that you don’t need a bunch of complex plotting.

Ironically, we have the same thing going on today that we did yesterday. A young girl has been kidnapped. That’s not a coincidence. The reason so many writers do this is that it creates a simple, powerful, narrative that’s easy to understand.

One of the problems I’m constantly running into with the contest submissions is that I’m getting confused about what’s happening. And that’s just in the first 10 pages! I can only imagine how lost I’d be if I had to read all of these scripts cover to cover. Writers are obsessed with cramming a million things into the first ten pages and then they’re surprised when you can’t keep up.

I was so at ease reading this because I understood what was going on immediately.

Another thing I like in scripts is when the task seems impossible. The more impossible you make it, the better. Orozco establishes early on the Comanche are persona non grata. They have a bad reputation with Americans so when they’re caught, they’re killed. Or enslaved. And now you’re telling us that, in order to save this sister, we have to go to the most populated place in all of America?? Of course I’m going to keep reading to see what happens.

However, Nomads makes a crucial structural error that keeps it from reaching double worth the read status. It puts us in New York City a little after the midpoint.

Yikes.

Why is this an “error?” Well, the script is designed around geographical momentum. We’re physically getting closer and closer to our destination, encountering obstacles along the way. Once you put us in New York City, there is no more movement. It’s all waiting. Waiting sucks away plot momentum. And the script nosedives as a result. It’s clear Orozco doesn’t quite know what to do because, after having his characters set up shop in a warehouse, days start going by. Then weeks. Then whole seasons!

Waiting…waiting…waiting…

What do I always say? WAITING NARRATIVES ARE HARD TO MAKE WORK. And here they’re waiting for some ship to come into port that they heard Etenia is going to be placed on. So Etenia is actually somewhere around them, but they don’t know where. Yet they hear she’ll be put on this ship once it arrives. So they have to wait for that ship. A quick Carson consultation could’ve solved this issue pronto. This decision killed much of the story’s momentum.

So when should the plot have got to New York? It’s simple. The third act! The break into the third act is when you want to get to your final destination. From there, you still have 25 pages to have them locate the sister and rescue her. That’s plenty of time.

This script was good. But it could’ve been really good.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I find that some writers are reluctant, when writing period pieces, to include urgency. I get it on some level. The further back you go in time, the slower the world was. So it seems inauthentic to add some highly urgent timeline. I mean, it took 4 days by train to get to New York from Oklahoma. If they get to New York and learn that they only have 30 minutes to save Etenia, the audience would be like, “Excuse me, what?” HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean you should employ the opposite tactic – giving your heroes months to “solve the crime.” The way you want to do it is to add as much urgency as is acceptable in that time period. I think a few days would’ve been perfect. It still seems like time is running out in 1864. But it’s not so immediate that it comes off as unrealistic.

Comic legend Todd McFarlane believes his new version of Spawn will be the next “Joker.” Is he right?

Genre: Superhero
Premise: When a cop’s daughter disappears, he moves into a low-income apartment building that houses a strange being who wants to help him get revenge.
About: Spawn creator Todd McFarlane has adopted the mantra, “If nobody else is going to do it, do it your darned self.” McFarlane is moving out of his comic book comfort zone to both write AND direct a new version of Spawn (side note: McFarlane has never directed before). McFarlane believes that the key to Spawn working is an R-rating. And after the success of Joker, everyone agreed with him. He’s since brought on powerhouse production company, Blumhouse. And now it’s a matter of navigating Covid for a production start date. Spawn will star Jamie Foxx (as Spawn) and Jeremy Renner.
Writer: Todd McFarlane (based on his own comic)
Details: 116 pages

What if I told you I just read a script I’d characterize as The Equalizer meets Taken meets The Joker? Would that get you interested? It got me interested.

Funny enough, this Spawn script got lost in my hard drive for months because whenever someone mentioned a “new Spawn movie,” I upchucked on the memory of that 1997 abomination that starred John Leguizano. If I remember correctly, Spawn’s super power in that movie was farting? Or wait. That was the villain’s superpower. Played by John Leguizano?

Oh who cares. The quicker we can erase that movie from our data banks, the better. And that’s exactly what McFarlane set out to do with this script.

Police officer Max “Twitch” Williams has the perfect life. He’s got a wonderful wife, Kate, and a beautiful young daughter, Lauren. But Twitch has a flaw. He’s a workaholic. As much as he hates to admit it, work always comes first. And that’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Because one day when he’s supposed to be picking up his daughter, he’s out on one last call. Without him there, someone kidnaps and kills his daughter.

Cut to four months later and Twitch is just now coming back to work. He’s embroiled in an ugly divorce with his wife and the lawyers are bleeding him dry. Twitch is expected to come back and be a cop again but everyone knows what Twitch is really going to do – he’s going to look for who killed his daughter.

Twitch’s partner, Danny, begs Twitch not to look into it. They have an entire investigative team trying to solve the case. Any interference from Twitch could get them in trouble. But come on. Like Twitch really isn’t going to look? He has his sights set on the evil local crime boss, Jeremy Dillon. Dillon has always hated Twitch because Twitch is the one cop he can’t control. Which is exactly why Twitch thinks Dillon had something to do with Lauren’s death.

Meanwhile, Twitch moves into a low-income housing building and befriends many of the low-lifes there. These are people who have either given up on life or are about to. One of those tenants is the reclusive and mysterious Al who lives upstairs on the fifth floor. What Twitch doesn’t know yet is that Al is a unique type of superhero. One determined to rid the world of evil. He wants to start with the people who killed Lauren. This is how their one-of-a-kind friendship begins.

The biggest surprise in this script is that it’s a straight up no-holds-barred character piece. I was expecting something with big vapid Marvel set pieces. As each new scene arrived, I asked myself, “Where’s the crazy car chase?” “Where’s the fight scene on a nose-diving airplane?” “Why doesn’t anyone have heat-vision?”

Instead, the story was slow. The plot was methodical. And I felt myself getting impatient.

But then a strange thing happened. I recognized that the script was, indeed, a character piece. And that the central pillars of that examination were in place: We like the hero and want to see him succeed. We dislike the villain and want to see him go down.

As long as you have these two things in place, your screenplay *should* work. In fact, the degrees to which you can make us like the hero and hate the villain define just how much we enjoy something. I wouldn’t say that Spawn is all the way up there in great territory. But it’s pretty darn good.

What caught my attention was that instead of using Lauren’s death solely as a plot motivator (a plot motivator is when you have something happen to give the hero a goal – in this case, avenge the death of his daughter), McFarlane had Twitch really sit in that pain. Twitch is trying to get his life going again (remember our tip from yesterday – if your hero falls down, make sure they get back up and keep trying). But he’s tortured by the loss. We see how it affects him in everything he does – from trying to make new friends in the apartment complex to demanding his precinct do more to find the killer.

Why does fighting the pain matter? Why must it always be present? Why must it always torture him?

Well, one of the things that separates great writers from good writers is great writers understand the reality of a situation and embrace it. As opposed to use it as a means to move their plot along. You’d think in some of the amateur screenplays I read that people can conquer grief in 48 hours. Lose a daughter? No problem. A quick montage of them getting wasted on whisky and a single uplifting talk with a neighbor and they’re ready to go again!

Obviously, every movie is different and you have to work within the parameters of your genre (you don’t have a lot of time to mourn death in action-adventure movies) but when you’re writing character pieces, you better treat death and loss like a real thing. Because if your characters aren’t that broken up about it? Why should we be?

What I also liked about Spawn was that it used one of my favorite structural approaches. One goal. One mystery. The goal is to get revenge. The mystery is, who is Spawn? Who is this guy who keeps showing up in the shadows and helping Twitch? The reason this dual-structure works should be obvious. Why give the reader one reason to keep reading when you can give them two? Imagine this movie without the mystery narrative. It’s just another “cop looking for revenge” movie. Not as intriguing, right?

Maybe the strangest thing about this script is Spawn himself. I confess that I thought Twitch was going to turn into Spawn. I didn’t know Spawn was his own entity. And, to that end, he’s unlike any superhero we’ve seen before. There’s something… picky… about the way he deals with each situation. Sometimes he goes all in. Other times he waits in the shadows, allowing Twitch to deal with it.

I love characters you can’t predict. The second I can consistently predict what a character is going to do is the moment I lose interest in a story. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Spawn would do next. When he would appear. What his plan was. If he was even real. In one of the cooler twists in the script, Al’s apartment simply disappears from the building. Twitch goes to the landlord and asks where Al went. The landlord’s never heard of Al. “He lives on the fifth floor,” Twitch demands. “Fifth floor?” The landlord replies. “We don’t have a fifth floor.” Twitch runs outside to see that, sure enough, his building only has four floors. Is Spawn even real??? Talk about a mystery box.

(Ending spoiler) The script has a great finale involving Spawn trapping all the bad guys in the building and slaughtering them all. Would it surprise you that this is the only set piece in the script!? That’s it! Everything else is a straight-forward investigative cop drama.

And yet I can say, with certainty, that this version of the story is better than any big budget superhero version they could’ve come up with. Which goes to show just how important focusing on character development and character relationships is. We all assume it’s the crazy wild set pieces that hook’em when it’s the opposite. Get the character stuff right and you’ve got us. It proved true yesterday with The Queen’s Gambit. And it proved true today with Spawn.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Grab some extra mileage out of your betrayals. In a lot of these cop movies, there is a major betrayal. Usually, someone close to the hero turns out to be working for the other side. What most writers do is they reveal that betrayal to both the hero and the audience at the same time. BEST FRIEND NICK IS WORKING WITH THE VILLAIN! WOWZERS! There’s another, some would say more effective, way to do this, however. 20-30 pages before you reveal to your hero that the friend is working with the bad guy, reveal TO THE AUDIENCE the friend is working with the bad guy. This creates a scenario of dramatic irony for the next 30 pages as we know that the best friend is screwing over our hero but the hero does not. (Spoiler) That’s exactly what they do here. We’re told after the mid-point that Danny (Twitch’s partner) is working with Dillon. Only later, in the third act, is this information revealed to Twitch.

A case study in how to create a sympathetic protagonist.

Genre: True Story/Sports
Premise: Set in the 50s, a young orphan girl must rise out of the confines of her orphanage to realize her unparalleled talent in the sport of chess.
About: If we are all looking at the best case scenario for what our proposed screenwriting career looks like, Scott Frank is a great comp. He wrote Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, and, most recently, Logan. He’s now teamed up with Allan Scott to adapt the 1984 Walter Tevis novel, The Queen’s Gambit, for Netflix.
Writer (pilot episode): Scott Frank
Details: 60 minutes

Here’s the rule.

If there is a Netflix show or movie that makes it to #1, which then gets dethroned due to some other new Netflix entry, but then makes it BACK to #1? It’s always a great show or movie.

This rule stands until it can be disproven!

That’s exactly what we have today. We have The Queen’s Gambit shooting up to #1 early, getting dethroned by some new Netflix drivel, then charging back to take the top spot again. Check mate, my dear.

Check. Mate.

I didn’t have a lot of interest in this show until I found out Scott Frank was involved (and heard a few of you championing it in the comments section). Frank is a hell of a writer. And now that I’ve seen the pilot, you get a really clear look at what good writing does for a show. Cause everything else at Netflix is so far down the ladder, Queen’s Gambit is looking like Chinatown. If you’re a writer, you’ll definitely want to check it out. Especially if you struggle with writing compelling characters that readers root for.

Beth Harmon is 9 years old when her parents die in a car crash. Beth was in the car too but miraculously survived without a scratch. It’s not clear whether that’s a blessing or a curse. The next thing she knows, she’s thrust into an orphanage that has a pretty good vibe going. Oh, except for the fact that they force their girls to take tranquilizers every day. 1950s America had some radical ideas on how to raise our youth, that’s for sure.

Because Beth is high all the time, she stumbles around the grounds in a spaced out state. But she eventually finds her way to the basement where the janitor, an introspective sad man named Mr. Shaibel, plays chess games against himself. Beth asks him to teach her and while he’s reluctant at first, he soon realizes she has a generational talent for the game.

While Beth struggles to feel emotion after the loss of her parents, it’s clear she enjoys learning the game. Every night before bed, she takes a couple of the tranquilizers she hid, gets high, and envisions a chess board on her ceiling so she can go through all the possible game scenarios. It isn’t long before she’s easily beating Mr. Shaibel. This leads to Shaibel connecting Beth with a chess club friend who works at the high school. That friend asks Beth if she’d like to come play against some new competition. Sure, she says, and promptly beats the school’s ten best players… all at the same time.

Meanwhile, the state suddenly decommissions the use of tranquilizers on children, and Beth is besides herself. She’s come to depend on those pills and now she’s forced to be stone cold sober. Determined to keep her high going, Beth sneaks into the back room where the pills are kept, and jams a large handful of them down her throat. Just as the headmaster reaches the room, Beth OD’s. End of episode.

If there is a super-hack to screenwriting – a singular element that ensures screenplay success – it is a sympathetic protagonist, someone we care about and who we want to see succeed.

If you do that right, it feels to the reader like they know the person. Which means you’ve broken the 4th wall. Of course we want to see them succeed. We feel like we know them!

Unfortunately, the formula for writing that character is elusive. Making your hero funny and giving them a ‘save the cat’ moment will make us care about them, yes. But it’s the degree to which we care about them that matters. If we only “kind of” care, then we’re only “kind of” interested in what happens to them.

And since we’re all so movie savvy, we don’t react well to cliche versions of these constructions. For example, everybody can tell you the reasons why Indiana Jones is [arguably] the most popular movie hero ever. Yet every time someone tries to clone those aspects of his character (charismatic, sarcastic, rebellious, roguish), it doesn’t work.

So how do we create a hero that audiences truly care about? The Queen’s Gambit is a great example of how to pull it off. First, Scott Frank creates a sympathetic situation. Beth loses both of her parents in a car crash. I’m going to come back to that car crash in a minute because I find car crash backstories to be cliche. But Frank does something to make it work which I’ll explain.

In regards to the sympathetic situation of losing your parents, there’s one extra thing you need to do if you want us to really care about that character. Which is this: SHE DOESN’T FEEL SORRY FOR HERSELF. That is so pivotal, I can’t emphasize it enough. Where so many writers get it wrong is they create a character who has experienced trauma or loss… and then they double down and have them feel sorry for themselves. The secret ingredient to creating a sympathetic protagonist through trauma/loss is making sure they don’t lean into that loss and play the victim. We don’t root for those people. I don’t know the science behind it but we just don’t.

And it doesn’t have to be exactly like Beth. Beth isn’t the most joyous person. She’s pretty even keel. But you can have your character be more joyous, depending on the genre and story. The main thing is don’t allow them to be sorry for themselves. We like people who fall down but keep getting up and trying. Not people who fall down and start crying and say they can’t do it anymore.

There’s one more thing you need to do to really kick your character into high gear. It’s not easy to define but I’ll try. You need to introduce one (although more than one is fine) extra element into your character that is offbeat in some way – that takes the character further away from the generic version that everybody else writes. Cause I’ve read a ton of “prodigy” scripts and, trust me, 99% of the time, everybody writes the same prodigy character. You need a mutation if they’re going to feel real.

That comes in The Queen’s Gambit when a fellow orphan asks Beth what the last words her mom said to her were. We then do a brief flashback from within the car, right before it crashes, and the mom says to Beth in a sad defeated tone, “Close your eyes.” Right then we realize the crash wasn’t an accident. It was a full blown murder-suicide attempt.

Before this revelation, it was just another “parents die in a car accident” backstory. But when we see that the mom was actually trying to kill them all, then it becomes a lot more sinister, and creates feelings from the daughter that are way more complicated. A single feeling (sadness) is often boring. But two conflicting feelings (sadness and anger) can ignite a character, since it places them in a constant state of conflict. This was the thing that elevated the character, in my eyes. She truly felt different after that.

In addition to that, Frank does what I tell you guys to do all the time – make unconventional choices throughout your story. Turning your 9 year old heroine into a full-blown drug addict was very much an unexpected choice. And even the orphanage itself – which was a safe and loving place, for the most part – was an unconventional choice, seeing as 9 out of 10 writers would’ve turned the headmistress into Miss Hannigan.

My only issue with the show so far is that it isn’t clear if the drugs help her play chess better or she’s just hooked on them and needs them to feel good. I’ll be disappointed if she needs them in order to play well.

But regardless, I thought this was strong! Nice to see a good show on Netflix again!

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Is there better actor catnip than the tortured genius? There isn’t an actor in the world who doesn’t want to play that role. So if you’ve got an idea with a tortured genius in it? Go ahead and write it. You’ll have WME, CAA, and UTA kicking down your door to get their client attached.