Decisions, descisions… #2

I’m sitting here after a friggin’ marathon rewrite session totally exhausted but can’t get this blog stuff out of my head so here it is for what it’s worth…

Some of this may be a bit redundant but as I bang this rewrite out, I keep realizing that it’s the decisions that my Protagonist makes that truly defines him.

How else can we learn about your characters if they don’t make decisions? Do we really want to learn about our Protagonist from other characters in the story or do we want to see how your Protagonist makes decisions under pressure… Overcoming obstacles… In the face of conflict…

Take a hard look at the pressure your Protagonist is currently dealing with and then CRANK IT UP A FEW NOTCHES. Will he or she make the same decision(s) or do the decisions dramatically change when you crank up the heat?

And… If these decisions do in fact dramatically change when you crank up the heat, do these decisions better define your character?

Probably.

My point?

During your rewrite, TEST YOUR PROTAGONIST by cranking up the heat on each decision he or she makes… If he or she makes the same decisions when the burner is on low… Cool, you might be okay where you are but if your Protagonist makes a totally different decision when you turn the burner on HIGH, maybe… JUST MAYBE… You didn’t have the heat cranked up enough.

In other words, we do not want to see your Protagonist keep making the SAME PREDICTABLE DECISIONS all throughout your story!

BORING! FLAT! NON-DIMENSIONAL!

Ever had your back up against the wall? This is when TRUE CHARACTER REVEALS ITSELF! Back your Protagonist closer and closer against the wall as you progress through your story until at one point; THERE IS NO PLACE ELSE TO GO EXCEPT STRAIGHT AHEAD INTO THE CONFLICT!

String all these decisions from beginning to end and what do we end up with?

.

GROWTH.

.

AND WHAT DRIVES THESE DECISIONS?

MOTIVATION.

We, the audience, want to know WHY your Protagonist makes the decisions they do. We the audience, constantly compare our lives to the life of the Protagonist and while we watch your movie, we WONDER if we would be as brave… As cowardly… As disgusting… As cool… As despicable… I would even go so far as to say that we will even pick up a few “tips” on how to tackle certain life events from your Protagonist.

THAT IS IF… YOU MAKE YOUR PROTAGONIST BELIEVABLE and by believable, I mean making your Protagonist’s motivation work on two levels…

Say what?

Your Protagonist’s is the PATH to achieving their tangible, visible goal.

Your Protagonist’s is WHY he or she chooses one particular PATH or another.

OUTER MOTIVATION is most often revealed through ACTION while INNER MOTIVATION is most often revealed through dialogue and more importantly… the SUBTEXT of that dialogue.

While it is certainly true that some movie characters possess only the outer motivation, this throughline can make your story more comic book style… i.e., you’ll need to really pack in the ACTION and ACTION DECISIONS to keep us from wondering about your Protagonist’s WHY.

Not really sure where I’m going exactly because to be honest… I’m a little delirious and in need of a nap… LOL.

But what I think I’m trying to say is that even IF you decide to pack your story with ACTION and ACTION DECISIONS, I highly recommend that YOU absolutely KNOW your Protagonist well enough to know his or her WHY and their inner motivation EVEN if you decide not to show it to us on the page or in the film.

Ahhhh. Nap time.

Unk

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You don’t know your characters well enough…

I get a LOT of email and I do try to answer it all… A question that keeps popping up is Writer’s Block and how in the HELL do you deal with it?

Well I can tell you how I deal with it and this is a fucking hard lesson for most people trying to become a screenwriter because it involves WORK.

So you’re going along and you don’t know what your character does next… To me, that doesn’t sound like Writer’s Block… That sounds like a structural problem. So before I get started on Writer’s Block and how I deal with it, let me once again recommend that you decide on some kind of STRUCTURE for your screenplay before you sit down to write it.

Once you have your structure ironed out, THEN if you get writer’s block, you need to kick the shit out of your character(s).

That’s right… Kick the shit out them. Beat ‘em up. Put them through a divorce. Make them cheat on their spouse. Make them rob a liquor store on the way home from work.

In other words… KNOW YOUR CHARACTERS.

You’d be surprised at how many screenwriters trying to write and sell a SPEC just don’t know their characters well enough.

I think I’ve said this before but let me STRESS this again…

You absolutely must know your characters as well as you know ANYONE. By anyone, I’m talking about your bestest of friends… Brothers. Sisters. Moms. Dads. Girlfriends. Boyfriends.

If I were to ask YOU what your Dad would do or say if you came home one night and told him you’ve been selling sex on the street… Could you tell me? Could you predict it? Would you be correct?

Well guess what? It doesn’t matter if you’re correct. The prediction is all that you need. In other words, if you at least THINK you know what your Dad will do or say, cool. That’s a start.

Again, let’s say you have your structure totally laid out. Now you’re writing like the crazy and BAM! You hit the wall and don’t know what to write next.

Go back to your characters…

Now here’s where the hard work comes in. Open up that word processor or get out that old typewriter and start writing about your character. By now, your biography on your characters should be complete… I’m not talking about that stuff…

I’m talking about making something up. You’re a writer are you not? Good. Make something up about your character that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your current screenplay.

Let’s call your Protagonist, Joe. Joe just isn’t doing what you want him to do right now. Fuck Joe. Create a new file in your word processor and kick Joe’s ass. Hmmm. Let’s say Joe decides to follow somebody home from a grocery store one night. He follows them all the way to their house… Let’s say he even pulls into the driveway…

Write about it… Write it from Joe’s POV. Explain how Joe made that decision to follow the nice looking lady driving the Jag all the way to her house. Explain how Joe felt as he followed her. Did he watch her peering through her rearview mirror? Did she try to get away from him? Did she have a cellphone and call the police? Maybe the police were at her house waiting for him…

Write it out. Make it at least a couple of pages but the important thing is to write it through to completion. Give it a beginning, middle and END.

Now here’s the hard part…

This stuff DOES NOT GO INTO YOUR SCREENPLAY!

Sure it’s cool but it sole purpose is to simply expose more of your character to you. The more you do this with your characters, the easier it will be when you’re writing them in a scene.

Everybody has a skeleton in the closet, right?

So should your characters… Write a little two to three page story about those skeletons… Secrets. Same thing. Everybody has secrets. Give your character some dirty little secrets.

Joe’s a great guy TODAY but back in the day, he used to screw his Mom’s best friend. Zing! Pow! Bam!

The purpose of the exercise is to get to know your characters so well that their actions and dialogue literally shoot from your fingertips onto the page…

Okay… What IF you can’t come up with an event or incident to put your character through? First of all, you should be ASHAMED of yourself for even asking this question! You’re writer for Christ sakes… Or is it Christ’s sake? I keep forgetting.

If that does happen to you, spring for a newspaper… Or, if you hate paying for the newspaper, there are thousands of online newspapers… Go through the headlines looking for those weird crazy stories and find something in that story to put your character through.

Don’t ever get rid of this stuff either… It may actually be good enough to use in a future screenplay OR, if it’s REALLY GOOD STUFF, you might want to actually flesh it in but remember, the purpose of the exercise is so that you get to know your characters as well as you know ANYONE.

Unk

Drag your Hero through the mud…

The Protagonist…

Also referred to as the “Hero” of your screenplay or film… As I read a number of screenplays throughout the month, I keep noticing what I feel is an essential yet often lacking trait of the story’s Hero.

It is, in my opinion, this lacking trait that can seriously influence the marketability of your screenplay and maybe even your film.

What the hell is it?

Your Protagonist’s character flaw — also known as your Protagonist’s INNER or .

There, I said it.

A character flaw can be just about anything that has a negative impact on your Protagonist. Could be a fear, a hate, a prejudice, an anger, an obsession, an addiction, an inability to express one’s self…

Whatever.

I keep reading screenplays where the Protagonist starts out as a fairly capable person. Sometimes, almost perfect. This happens for a number of reasons but for the most part, it almost seems to me that the screenwriter subconsciously LIKES his or her Hero way too much to put him or her through complete HELL, let alone give him or her a serious character flaw.

In your screenplay or film, your Protagonist normally has a goal. Of course you throw in all kinds of physical obstacles to keep him or her from reaching this outer/tangible goal and that’s definitely good to do but don’t forget the ‘internal barriers or obstacles’ that also keep your Protagonist from accomplishing his or her goal.

For a compelling screenplay and successful film, the audience WANTS to identify and empathize with your Protagonist. That’s why they go to the theater and rent the DVD.

They want to temporarily BECOME YOUR PROTAGONIST. Hell, maybe they want to actually BE YOUR PROTAGONIST! If that’s the case, then you probably penned one hell of a screenplay…

The audience wants to take the ride your Protagonist is taking! Let’s face it… As much as we would like to… We’re not able to exact revenge, save the girl, find the treasure, etc…

Instead, we watch movies.

However, when we, as screenwriters and filmmakers, make things too easy for our Hero, the audience walks… If not in person, definitely in their minds which in turn, translates to ZERO word of mouth referrals and advertising.

This inner/character/fatal flaw should be immediately recognizable to the audience. This inner/character/fatal flaw should be something general enough that the audience is readily able to identify with it… They should have experienced it themselves or it should remind them of someone they know that has or IS experiencing a similar type flaw.

When I say “general” — I’m referring to the daily life emotions that we ALL go through… Jealousy, greed, anger, love, obsession, addiction, etc. Getting TOO SPECIFIC on something not so general could confuse your audience.

So as you take (or PUSH) your Protagonist through your story, this person should, by the end of the story, overcome his or her inner/character/fatal flaw… It should be this flaw that keeps your Protagonist from accomplishing the physical goal of the story until the end when your Protagonist finally realizes that he or she must overcome this flaw to succeed i.e., the CHARACTER ARC you hear so much about.

This ‘end of the story’ event that finally enables your Protagonist to pull his or her head out of their ass should be a culminating event… Everything prior leads up this one event. This one event is what sparks your Hero’s realization that they’ve had an inner problem all along that’s totally stood in their way from accomplishing their outer or physical goal of the story.

Pick a flaw… Any flaw.

Often, picking a flaw and threading it through the story so the audience identifies with it can be difficult at best… This is where reverse engineering comes in.

Hopefully, you have a basic idea of how your story ends. You might not have the culminating event figured out but you know the outer or physical goal you want your Hero to achieve.

Work backwards from this point. If your Protagonist ends up being strong and powerful in the end, maybe he should be weak and helpless in the beginning. This way we, the audience, actually see the character’s ARC.

That’s a pretty obvious example but I make it strictly for illustration. If your story is about jealousy and your Hero overcomes his or her jealousy at the end of the story, then it only makes sense to make this character extremely jealous in the beginning.

Working backwards or reverse engineering should easily plot out your Protagonist’s arc…

So to summarize…

Take a look at the end of your story. What does your Protagonist physically achieve?

It’s okay if he or she takes out all the bad guys and wins the girl or the boy. We like that! That’s what we go to the movies for! Just don’t make it easy on him. Don’t just let him kick everybody’s ass and get the girl. Work backwards. If he ends up being courageous, work backwards and make him cowardly in the beginning. If she ends up being honest and forthright, make her dishonest and a cheat in the beginning.

Go for a completely opposite internal turn-around and you’ll go a long way towards us loving and identifying with your Protagonist.

No… This isn’t a hard and fast rule. No, not every Protagonist has done this in every movie. Remember, we’re talking about writing and selling spec scripts…

*NOTE: I apologize for this post being similar to the AUDIENCE INDENTIFICATION post but I felt that this subject needed clarification.

Unk

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