A long-time Scriptshadow reader e-mailed me yesterday with this question: “Carson, something I’ve been thinking about but want your insight. What do you think is the skill in the screenwriting profession in which demand is higher than supply? I know in general that it’s a buyers market but there have to be certain skills that provide the most value to a producer, studio, actor etc. Just want to know what you think that is.”
I wrote my reply within five seconds of reading the question. This is what I said: “Character! Character character character. Creating characters that audiences care about, that move audiences, that feel like real people. It’s the one area that only a few screenwriters truly know how to do. Master character and Hollywood will throw millions at you.”
The truth is, Hollywood thinks they’ve got the concept thing nailed down. Every executive in every office in ever major studio believes they have a dozen kick-ass movie ideas. These executives also each know a dozen screenwriters who can adapt their idea into a structurally solid screenplay.
But you want to know what they can’t do? What they don’t have a recipe for? CHARACTER. They’ve seen it time and time again. They come up with a concept. They get a writer to write a fully-functional perfectly-structured screenplay. And yet when they send it to their bosses and their peers, the reaction is, “Ehhh.” Or “It was all right I guess.” Or “Not bad.”
What happened? Why the apathy?
The apathy is because there was nobody in the story who made you care. Made you care about them, made you care about what they were doing. The characters were empty vessels – plot pieces constructed to move the story forward and nothing else.
The reason you can do so many things right and still come up with a lame screenplay is because you haven’t constructed characters THAT MAKE US FUCKING FEEL ANYTHING! If we’re not FEELING SOME KIND OF EMOTION while your characters move through the story, you don’t have a script.
Let’s make that clear. If you’re not eliciting emotion through your characters, nobody will care about your script. This is the million dollar secret sauce that will make you a professional screenwriter.
Make us fall in love with and care about your characters like real people and I PROMISE YOU you will be living in the Hollywood Hills. Because VERY FEW SCREENWRITERS can achieve this. In fact, I’d say there are maybe 20 in all of Hollywood who can build characters and make you care about those characters on a consistent basis.
So how do you achieve this? It’s not easy. Part of creating great characters is this innate ability to turn thin air into a living breathing individual – to create someone with depth and specificity who’s original and compelling. And some writers are better at that than others. But there are some things everybody can do to tip the character-creation scales in their favor. Let’s take a look at them.
Authenticity – This is the #1 thing you have to get right. If we don’t believe the character really exists, then none of the other things I list below will matter. So how do you create an authentic character? Simple. With every action they perform, with every line of dialogue they say, ask, “Is this what they would do in real life?” The classic example of this is when a street thug puts a gun to your hero’s head and your hero says, “Do it. Pull the trigger.” BULL-FUCKING-SHIT. Nobody does that in real life. In real life, when someone puts a gun to your head, you cower like a little girl. The further away your character’s reactions are from reality, and the more instances where they do unrealistic things, the less we believe in them. If you want to see a movie where the characters act as authentic as I’ve ever seen, watch Room.
Specificity and Originality – 99% of writers offer up general characters who we’ve seen before. If they’re writing a Western, the main character is a mysterious man who comes into town with an axe to grind. If they’re writing a buddy-cop movie, one character is a loose cannon who says what’s on his mind while the other is a conservative who always gets the job done. It’s not that you can’t make these characters compelling. But when you give us something that we’ve seen so many times before, we become blind to the character. They can be wonderful but all we see is the 30 other characters they was based on. You have to give us characters who don’t feel like people we’ve seen before. Yesterday, we had a 13 year old female serial killer. I haven’t seen that before. — On top of that, you need to build specificity into your characters. If a character doesn’t have anything uniquely him, how is he going to stand out? Do me a favor. Think about the strangest person you know. Right now. Write down the five strangest things about them. Now let me ask you, have you ever incorporated anything like these traits into any of your characters? I’m guessing no. Yet it’s specific things like this that make your characters feel different. And characters who feel different? FEEL LIKE REAL PEOPLE.
Sympathetic or Fascinating – Your character has to be one of these two. If they’re not, we won’t care where they go, who they talk to, or if they get the god damned Golden Chalice or not. Sympathetic meaning we feel for their situation. Whether they’ve been taken advantage of, beaten down by life, or just have to deal with a dickwad boss every day, sympathy is one of the easiest ways to get us to care about a character. “Fascinating” refers more to villains and anti-heroes (but can refer to the occasional traditional hero as well). These are people who don’t get our sympathy vote, but who are so interesting, we want to watch them regardless. Figuring out how to make a character “interesting” is a bit like trying to catch a chicken, but one of the classic ways is to have the character battling two-extremes inside of themselves. Darth Vader, Michael Corleone, even Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Note how all of them are fighting themselves on some level. That’s interesting, isn’t it? On the contrary, when you just try to make your anti-hero or villain “cool,” that’s when we don’t give a shit (see the weird ninja villain in Elysium for reference).
Action and Choice – Compelling characters don’t go around saying, “I love you more than the wind and the moon” to their son. They rush to the son’s aid when the son is in trouble. Compelling characters don’t philosophize on what they would do if their wife was held hostage. We see their wife held hostage and watch what they choose to do. Action and choice are the best ways to tell us about your character. Both have their roots in the “SHOW” half of “show don’t tell.” In every scene you write, before you try to convey who your character is through a line of dialogue, first ask if there’s a way to convey the same thing through an ACTION or a CHOICE.
An unresolved inner struggle – Good characters are battling something inside of themselves. This battle can be broken down into four options. Option 1 is the past. Something has happened in the past that they haven’t resolved. They haven’t let go of a family member’s death, for example. Option 2 is a vice/addiction. Alcohol, drugs, sex. As long as you treat this with TRUTH (see above) and not simplistic casualism, this can work well. That’s because so many damn people can relate. Option 3 is a flaw that the character is aware of. A character who knows that people step on him and he doesn’t do anything about it, for example. And Option 4 is a flaw that the character isn’t aware of. This may entail a character who’s selfish. But it’s really up to you. Heck, you could make the Option 3 character the Option 4 character, and have no idea that he lets people walk all over him. — The idea with the unresolved inner struggle is that we’ll want to see if they can overcome the struggle. And, again, if it’s dealt with in a realistic way, and not a Screenwriting 101 way, this is the component in your screenplay that’s most likely to make your audience feel something. So it’s really important.
Unresolved Relationships – The more relationships in your hero’s story that are unresolved, the better the chance you have of delivering an emotionally compelling story to your audience. Fucked up Father-Son relationships are great for this. Fucked up Father-Daughter relationships as well. But it could be any relationship. It could be between two best friends who, after 30 years, don’t talk to each other anymore. As long as you do a good job setting up the situation, we’ll want to see if these two can find common ground again. This, along with overcoming one’s flaw or vice, is up there as one of the top ways to emotionally affect the audience. I read an amateur screenplay last year that was about this daughter whose father was a massive drug addict. And she kept trying to love him and trying to love him, but every time, he’d let her down. He’d choose the drugs over her. It was heartbreaking but also EXACTLY what you’re trying to achieve as a screenwriter. Create that unresolved AUTHENTIC relationship, draw it out over 2 hours, and we will be staring at our laptops with tears in our eyes when the script is over.
Now that you have a baseline to work with, you’re probably asking, where does everybody go wrong? Most screenwriters on scripts 1-5 believe that on the nose melodramatic scenes are the way to create great characters. For example, place a son and his father in a room and write a scene like this: “I loved you so much. But you never tried hard enough.” “Maybe if you would’ve encouraged me more.” “That’s what your mother was for.” “Until you left her.” Beat. “I still love you, dad.” “I love you, too.” Like, go fucking kill me and feed my dead body to the pigeons outside of the abandoned brad-making factories.
Characters talking deeply or talking about their feelings or saying what’s on their mind – These scenes create THE OPPOSITE of emotion in an audience. Since nobody talks like this is in real life, it’s the equivalent of announcing, “THIS IS A MOVIE!” which means the spell is broken and the audience no longer believes what they’re looking at. Creating realistic characters we’re emotionally rooting for is a lot more complex. Even more complex than what I’ve outlined here today. But at least now you have a starting point. Feel free to offer your own tips for creating realistic emotionally-affecting characters in the comments section.
Because, again, if you can master this one area, you will be in high freaking demand. Nobody knows how to do this shit right. I even see professionals screwing it up on a weekly basis (see all the over-cooked on-the-nose scenes in Batman vs. Superman for reference).
