One of my favorite characters from 2023 (Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things)
Okay, it is WEEK 3 in our WRITE TWO SCRIPTS IN 2024 Screenwriting Challenge. Week One was playing with possible concepts. Week Two was solidifying a concept. And now we’re on to Week Three – FIGURING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS.
Usually, when writers write scripts, they start writing IMMEDIATELY after they’ve come up with their idea. This is almost always a mistake. When you jump into a script too quickly, you burn out fast. You’ve got a runway of about 20-40 pages but you never build up enough speed to take off.
You erroneously figure your premise is too weak and you abandon your script like an alcoholic abandons their family. Whoa, that just got dark. Disregard that. Actually: REGARD IT. This post is about character. And character flaws are crucial to understanding your next steps.
This is the part of script-writing NO ONE WANTS TO DO – the character work. It’s boring. It’s hard. It doesn’t allow you to have any fun, since it’s all backstory and, therefore, doesn’t fill up any pages. Yet, it’s probably the most important work you can do for your script.
In my experience, getting the characters right is the single most important aspect of a screenplay. You can have a bad plot, but if you have great characters, you can write a good screenplay. Meanwhile, if you have bad characters, even if you have a great plot, the screenplay will suck. The reader will not care what happens unless they care about the people taking us there.
If you create a character who we like, give them some kind of resistance within them that they’re battling, and show them succeed – if you get that right, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.
However, we need to do a deep dive to get there. I don’t need to know when your character had their first kiss (unless it’s relevant to the story) or what their favorite food is. That stuff does help. And if you want to do that work, I’m all for it. But I’m looking for something more important.
Here’s what I want you to do this week. You’re going to make a list of your 4-5 major characters – the ones who have the most screen time. You’re then going to figure out the five major character pillars of each. These five pillars are…
Likability
Personality
Flaw
Arc
Central Relationship
Let’s go through these one at a time.
LIKABILITY
I got news for you. If we don’t like your main character, there’s a very good chance we won’t care about ANYTHING they do. Which means you can write the greatest story ever and we’ll still hate it because we don’t like the person. Go back through all your least favorite movies and I can pretty much guarantee you didn’t like the hero. So you have to figure out why your character would be liked by others. And no, you don’t get to ignore this one if you’re writing a dark comedy and your hero is a tough pill to swallow. You then have to figure out how to make your hero sympathetic. If they can do it for Joker, you can do it for your script. You want to have such a solid reason for why your hero is likable or sympathetic that, if you were taken to court on the matter, you would win the case hands down. That’s how persuasive your argument should be.
Here are a few recent movies and why their characters were likable or sympathetic. Willy Wonka – The nicest kindest person you’ve ever met. Ken in Barbie – All he cares about in life is getting this one person to notice him but she won’t. We can all sympathize with that since we’ve all had that person (people) in our own lives. John Wick – He’s sympathetic cause his wife died and they took his dog. He’s also likable because he’s a nice guy with good morals. Robert McCall (The Equalizer) – One of the most likable characters in movies because all he cares about is helping people who can’t help themselves, to the point where he’s willing to risk his secret identity to do so. Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler) – He’s the ultimate underdog in this night-crawling business (audiences love underdogs) and he’s obscenely driven (audiences love characters who are driven, cause driven people are active, and audiences love activity).
PERSONALITY
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of character creation in screenwriting and if you don’t pay attention to it, you are likely to have a boring main character. This happens ALL THE TIME in the amateur scripts I read. The writer makes all the surrounding characters fun and interesting but they assume that their main character needs to be so grounded that they don’t have any defining traits whatsoever. Which is a huge mistake. You have to give your character some personality.
The best way I know how to do this is to figure out your character’s sense of humor. Your sense of humor dictates the majority of your personality. Are they sarcastic? Do they like gallows humor? Are they goofy? Are they the “dad joke” type? Are they deadpan? Are they quick-witted?
Going beyond the humor, what other aspects do they bring to the table that help them stand out in a conversation? Are they sexy, like James Bond, who has that twinkle in his eye whenever he speaks to a woman? Are they intimidatingly smart, like Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes? Are they cocky? Are they charismatic, like Ferris Bueller? Are they quirky, like Bella Baxter (Poor Things)? These are just some ways to identify your character’s personality. Define it as tightly as you can because if you don’t, your character is going to sound untethered. We’re never going to have a good feel for them.
FLAW
This is obviously a big one because it’s the thing that most defines your character within the context of your movie. Writers can get tripped up by flaws. But they’re easier to figure out than you think. The character’s journey in the movie will determine how you identify their flaw. For example, if the movie is about a banker trying to get rich, the flaw will probably be greed. If the movie is about being the best at something (Nightcrawler), the flaw will revolve around recklessness or perfectionism. If someone wants to be the best at all costs, that’s their flaw – they don’t know when to stop. If the movie is about a “my way or the highway” coach who’s trying to take a basketball team to the championship, the flaw would be stubbornness. He’s not able to listen to anyone else but himself.
Think of the flaw as the NEGATIVE part of your character’s personality. They have good things. But this is their one bad thing. And it’s usually the most dominant part of their personality. Some writers have asked me if addiction is a flaw. It can be. But it’s usually what leads to the addiction that’s the flaw. So if someone struggles to connect with others but can connect with them when they’re drunk, then they might develop an alcohol addiction. But it’s not the alcohol that’s the flaw. It’s their fear of connection. That’s what they need to overcome. Not the alcoholism.
ARC
Now that you know the flaw, you have to figure out how you’re going to arc your character over the course of the story. A well-constructed character arc is one of the most satisfying storytelling experiences an audience can have. We audiences love to see that broken character overcome that flaw that’s been holding them back the whole movie (which we extrapolate to mean ‘their whole life’) and finally change. It’s not the good guy beating up the bully at the end that gets us. It’s that our good guy’s flaw was that he was a coward and he’s finally overcome that cowardice to become brave, which gave him the strength to stand up to bully at the end. THAT’S WHAT GETS US. When George McFly punches Biff after being Biff’s punching bag the whole movie, we cheer because George has finally overcome his flaw, his cowardice.
Unfortunately, an arc isn’t just about establishing a flaw at the beginning and having them overcome it at the end. There’s all that in-between time as well. This is your second act and you want to set up three to four big scenes where your hero is faced with the opportunity to overcome their flaw but they fail. We need to see these little failures along the way for the big final change to feel genuine. So, as you’re constructing the arc, I want you to think about these 3 or 4 scenes in your script where you’re going to challenge your character’s flaw. And then, also, figure out what that final climactic scene is going to look like where your hero is faced with that opportunity to change once more and he finally does.
CENTRAL RELATIONSHIP
There are no characters in a vacuum. You can’t express a character unless they’re bouncing off other characters. So you want to figure out what the central relationship in your movie is, then strategize how to get the most out of it. For example, in Titanic, the obvious central relationship is Jack and Rose. You don’t want to wait until you start writing to figure out how that relationship is going to work. You want to identify what the major source of conflict is in that relationship so that whenever the characters are together, they’re dealing with that conflict.
In that movie, Jack’s the kind of guy who lives by the seat of his pants. He does what he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. Rose is the kind of person who plans 8 moves because she has to. She’s in a prison – a bunch of rich people who live a highly structured life. And that’s what makes their relationship interesting. Their worldviews are opposite. If James Cameron had envisioned Rose as this cool chick who is more of a rebel, then Rose and Jack are too similar and you don’t get as much conflict. More recently, you can look at Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Stark is willing to get dirty to get the job done. Rogers plays by the rule book. Those worldviews are what creates the conflict that drives that relationship.
Figure out these five pillars for, at the very least, your hero and your biggest secondary character. If you can extend it out to more characters, even better. I promise you that the more you know these five pillars, the more confident you’ll be going into your script. What you have to remember is that there’s the story being told by your plot (Save Barbie Land) and the stories being told within your characters themselves (Ken – must overcome his feelings of worthlessness and find purpose if Barbie doesn’t want him). If you can create a great character story, your script will be impervious to plot issues. I know that sounds crazy but it’s true. To this day, Swingers is one of my favorite movies. It also has one of the worst plots I’ve ever seen in a script. But it works because the characters all have their clear through-lines.
Okay, get to it! Next Thursday, we’re outlining our plot. Which means that, yes, you finally get to start writing your script in Week 5. Can’t wait!
