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Depth-charging your characters…

Been an interesting week… Only one comment (and not real one at that) but a lot of email… Oops. Just got another one. LOL.

I’ve answered questions ranging from what color are my eyes (blue)… All the way to will you shop my spec screenplay around?

Nope… Sorry.

I will admit… Occasionally, I get an email where you can just tell that the person who sent it really has their shit together… I like emails like that and when people like that occasionally catch me in a good mood, you never know what can happen…

Screenwriting Scoop! still going strong… Again, I appreciate the interest…

Anyway back to characters…

This is going to be a free-for-all post… i.e., I’ll just throw the rest of the spaghetti up against the wall and hope some of it sticks. I do have a list of questions that I use to create character bios that I will go ahead and slam up here as the next post…

I want to end this discussion on Character by pointing out that most spec screenplays I read suffer from boring characters. They don’t move forward. They’re too passive. They simply react all the time without ever making a decision. They avoid conflict or the screenwriter avoids throwing conflict at them.

This is interesting because from my own observation of people in general, I would have to say that the average person goes out of their way to avoid conflict… And, when I think about it, the average spec screenwriter I meet also goes out of their way to avoid conflict and not surprisingly, it ends up showing in their screenplays more often than not… Again, that’s just MY EXPERIENCE. LOL.

Conversely, those screenwriters that look right into your eye and tell you everything they can about their story seem to have a little better handle on creating and increasing conflict against their characters…

Of course this is no scientific experiment on my part… LOL. Just an observation but wow… Think about it… Those screenwriters that I’ve met that would never walk away from a fight, always seem to have the best characters.

A correlation? You never know.

Just remember that your characters… At least your main character i.e., your Protagonist (not necessarily a hero), always needs to be moving forward… Forward movement is the result of dialogue, decision making, overcoming conflict, and even if you’ve written a passive character, let him or her be passive in such a way that it’s OBVIOUS to us that he or she goes way out of their way to do so…

Remember those old alphabet magnets we used to spell words on the fridge with? Okay, so I didn’t really spell a lot of words with the ones in our house… I always took the little cylindrical magnets out and played with them… My favorite part of playing with those magnets was turning them AGAINST each other.

Remember how you could turn two of them a certain way and the magnetic force would repel them away from each other? I remember pushing them together and holding them for an hour sometimes WONDERING if they would just fucking give up and stop pushing away…

Nope.

Well that’s kind of how your characters should be… Maybe not all at once but occasionally (when needed), they should reveal shades of this kind of behavior.

I’m not merely saying that your Protagonist should automatically repel from everyone but what I am saying is to simply keep that visual image in mind while you’re writing. What I liked best about playing with those old magnets was how you could set up several of them in a line just right, then take YOUR main character magnet and push it right down the center toward the other magnets and the main character magnet would push them right out of the way…

In other words, your main character carves their own path out of the life you give them… Sure, the life you give them is one you made up… Cool. But get to know your character so well that as you’re writing them on the page, they do occasionally surprise you… I have a few writer friends that I’ve tried to discuss this with and there’s at least two of them that just don’t get it… They absolutely REFUSE to give their characters any freedom to surprise them. Now of course, even the surprises come from your own conscience or subconscience… Of course it all comes from the writer but what I’m saying is that some writers refuse to go that deep and while I would never propose to say that this is wrong, what I can say is that from my experience, the best writing I’ve read and done always seems to come from those depths… It’s that extra 15% to 25% of depth that comes from really TRULY knowing your characters that allows them to make the kinds of decisions WE would never make in real life but are absolutely consistent with the character in question.

DEPTH-CHARGING

It’s when you hit these depths that your characters usually STOP becoming one dimensional and start exposing those layers of depth that only multi-dimensional characters possess… I’m not a television writer by ANY stretch of the imagination and one of the reasons I’m NOT is because I grew up watching those one dimensional type characters…

Remember Archie Bunker? If you watched the show for any length of time, you certainly could predict almost exactly what Archie would do with any given situation, right? Hell, that was even true of Meathead… LOL. He was simply the exact opposite of Archie and no, I’m not saying anything bad about that writing… It was ground-breaking at the time but what I am saying is that we might not always want to write characters like this for spec feature screenplays. For those of you NOT familiar with ALL IN THE FAMILY, I’d be willing to bet there are still situation comedies that write their characters this way… So take your pick.

Those kinds of characters are exactly that… CHARACTERS. They are a TYPE of CHARACTER and in a movie, usually fucking boring as hell and that’s okay for a certain part of the movie to show us where that character is starting from but they gotta keep going and showing us even MORE so that we can get on board with them for the rest of the film.

I have an actor friend… You might have heard of him… . If not, he’s been in a hell of a lot of movies and is one hell of an actor… Check his resume out on . Anyway, one of the things I’ve learned from Tom is in how he approaches playing a character. Often, he doesn’t really want to know anything about the character and would rather go about playing the character exactly the opposite from the way he’s written on the page. He calls it and it’s absolutely amazing to watch. He might take a scene that the writer wrote for the character to be played out quietly and turn right around and play it exactly the opposite to see what develops.

From that experience, I very often approach writing my characters in much the same way… What are the OBVIOUS PREDICTABLE DECISIONS this character would make right now? Figure those out and write exactly the opposite! It doesn’t always work but more often than not, I end up with some amazing decisions that I can use to brainstorm other decisions that help peel back the layers of dimensionality. And yeah, those decisions immediately make their way into my in the post below.

This goes back to previous posts about knowing your characters at least as well as you know your family, friends, and assholes… I mean, associates… Notice I said, AT LEAST.

With DEPTH-CHARGING, you gotta go DEEPER. You gotta know your characters BETTER than you know your family, friends, and associates.

Better?

You betchya.

Deeper means putting them in situations and seeing how they handle those situations… Situations that may NEVER EVER make it into your screenplay in an obvious way but these depth-charging details do serve to add dimensionality to your characters.

This is in fact, another way to use the Character Decision List in the previous post… Once your list has grown large enough, you can use it to create additional backstory on your characters… Maybe your Protagonist played around with hookers for six months while he was going through a divorce… Maybe she WAS a hooker for six months… Maybe your Protagonist went to medical school for a year and dropped out. Maybe law school. Who knows? Just throw it at them and write a one to five page short story about it and see what you come up with…

What’s so funny about this advice is that it does in fact work but I meet a lot of would-be screenwriters that simply REBEL against such exercises yet they wonder why people have problems with their screenplays…

What IF the exercise works?

Don’t tell me you tried it once or twice and it didn’t work for you… Don’t tell me that you sit around and THINK about your characters all day and all night and you know them better than you know your family, friends, and associates. Unless you are taking enough time to kick back and THINK YOUR CHARACTERS into backstory situations and work out how they maneuver that backstory situation and absolutely commit it to memory, you aren’t depth-charging your characters.

If I were to sit down with you and ask you to tell me about your Protagonist but NOT tell me anything about his or her role in your screenplay, WHAT WOULD YOU TELL ME? Could you keep me captivated for an hour? Two?

If not, WHY NOT?

Unk

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Wednesday: 17 January 2007|1825|Under Characters

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15 Responses to “Depth-charging your characters…”

  1. Webs on Wednesday: 17 January 2007|2355

    I did that – with the script I keep rewriting to help me avoid some significant emotional issues with another script I keep putting off.

    I used these alternate stories as thought experiments – I didn’t write them down, but I thought of how my characters would react.

    And then, in my mind, one of them died.

    It brought a lump into my throat. How horrible that this charismatic little fellow could be rendered so lifeless.

    Now, I’m not really too emotional a guy, but I’m not a robot either. It takes something of significance to make me get that lump, but that lump can appear. So this, I thought, was gold.

    I rewrote that screenplay, but this time killed off that fun guy. It’s shocking. It comes out of the blue. And it ratchets up the emotional stakes of my script by an order of magnitude (I hope).

    And it never would have occurred to me had I restricted my thinking to the box.

    Just wanted to share that with you. And probably others. In fact, I’ll go post this on me blog.

  2. Moviequill on Thursday: 18 January 2007|0619

    During each re-write I still let my characters dictate, the surprises keep coming like a runaway David Lynch freight train… I might have a guy playing with a knife for a few run-throughs, then all of a sudden the bastard decides to throw it at his mother in law’s head in the next version… love these surprises

    “I like emails like that and when people like that occasionally catch me in a good mood, you never know what can happen…” BTW, for me what usually happens is a TRO, taser event and a universal ban from a major department store

  3. Joshua James on Thursday: 18 January 2007|0828

    And, when I think about it, the average spec screenwriter I meet also goes out of their way to avoid conflict and not surprisingly, it ends up showing in their screenplays more often than not… Again – that’s just MY EXPERIENCE. LOL.

    Conversely, those screenwriters that look right into your eye and tell you everything they can about their story seem to have a little better handle on creating and increasing conflict against their characters…

    LOL! Man, I can’t tell you how much I needed to hear that . . . there are those folk out there in d-land who are a bit taken aback when meeting a writer who knows their story well and is secure in that . . . it’s always made me feel as though I should try and be one of those shy type writers . . . you know, right?

    Sorry I’ve been MIA as of late, Unk . . . there have been some interesting doings here and there . . . hopefully I’ll be able to email you with some news soon . . .

    Thanks for this post!

  4. Tom on Thursday: 18 January 2007|0928

    “It’s that extra 15% to 25% of depth that comes from really TRULY knowing your characters that allows them to make the kinds of decisions WE would never make in real life but are absolutely consistent with the character in question.”

    I’ve always thought of screenwriting part wish fulfillment. A great example of this is Jerry McGuire. Who would actually write a manifesto completely trashing the ethics of the business you’re in and distribute it at a conference. No one. The interesting thing about that script is that it played that dream scenario out as if it happened in real life… which made for some interesting drama.

    I’ve also had characters make decisions that I’ve actually made, but looking back, obviously shouldn’t have. One particularly painful memory has served as the inspiration of the climatic scene in my current script. I’ve found it very therapeutic.

  5. Tom on Thursday: 18 January 2007|0930

    “I might have a guy playing with a knife for a few run-throughs, then all of a sudden the bastard decides to throw it at his mother in law’s head in the next version… love these surprises”

    Have the in-laws in for the holidays?

  6. emily blake on Thursday: 18 January 2007|1027

    Thanks. That post gave me an idea for my current script. I love when that happens.

  7. Clayton Harper on Thursday: 18 January 2007|1541

    TOM NOONAN RULES! Seriously, I was rewatching Heat the other day and his performance caused me to pause the movie and go right to imdb.

  8. MaryAn on Thursday: 18 January 2007|1902

    My name is Mary Anita Batchellor and I write shallow characters.

    Whew. Glad that’s behind me.

    Okay, on to step two…

  9. Ann Wesley Hardin on Thursday: 18 January 2007|1910

    LOL, MaryAn. Shallow character writer or not, you always make me laugh.

    Great ideas I’m gonna use, Unk. I’m mid-book right now and need to get a better grip on both the lead characters. How’d you know? No longer UnkDead, you’re now Unknowing.

  10. Unk on Thursday: 18 January 2007|2109

    Webs…

    Sounds like you went way deep!

    MovieQuill…

    I was banned from a SIZZLER’S for dumping a huge container of pudding on someone. Better that than a trip to the hospital I guess… And I don’t mean me… LOL.

    Josh…

    I always marvel at somebody who sits down, writes a screenplay, and then can’t even tell me what the damn thing is about… Happens all the time… The most they can scratch out is a couple of action scenes where SO AND SO does this and SO AND SO does that… WTF?

    Tom…

    Wish fulfillment is definitely one way to look at it… No wonder so many characters in my scripts get killed. LOL.

    Emily…

    GO FOR IT!

    Clayton…

    Tom Noonan does rule… Loved him PHOENIX with the lisp. Highly UNDERRATED.

    Mary Anita…

    Belief is a powerful thing. Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t… you’re right. Now go deep!

    Ann…

    Mid-book? Only as deep as I look can I see…

    Whew… It’s hard to be pithy…

    Unk

  11. TCinLA on Thursday: 18 January 2007|2345

    I just wanted to say thank you very much for this post. I’m just coming back to “operational readiness” after two weeks with The Other Flu (In case anyone’s interested, this year’s flu shot covered one of two flu bugs out there – coverage for the second was a crapshoot. Which I lost. Big Time.) Trying to write a romantic comedy while believing Death Is A Viable Alternative Here is hard, but I did spend the time thinking about the characters, since I had been quite frustrated with the stuff just before getting sick. (Writing on a production deadline always makes this stuff harder for me) But one night, I wasn’t certain if it was me or the 102F fever, all of a sudden I got to that place where I know I am safe: the characters woke me up and started talking about what they’d been doing. When the characters are right, they know what’s wrong, and in 20 years’ experience, I have learned to listen to them. In fact, I know when they aren’t waking me up at 3 a.m., I have not done my homework.

    I have a joke about why screenplays get rewritten by others. It’s for one of three reasons (or any combination of all three in no particular order,it gets scary when the script is at the “we’re going to do this” stage and it suffers from all three): a) The writer forgot that American screenplays are written in English; b) The writer forgot that the word “movie” is a contraction of the words “moving pictures,” the method by which we tell our story, and has provided no clues; c) the writer has confused the words “character” and “caricature.” In my experience, “c” is always involved, followed closely by “b” (which is why I tell young writers to go buy a camera and learn to see pictures and take them).

    You’re also right about a fight. William Goldman once said a writer has to defend “the spine of the story” to the death, though he never defined what that term meant. I think I finally came up with an operational definition: “the spine of the story” is that thing, whatever it was, that made you want to sit down and write the screenplay. (And it better not have just been the money.)

    Thanks for the site. It’s going to take a long time to crawl through it, but it definitely looks worth the effort (Old Hollywood Rule: the truth is always the best kind of flattery.)

    “I’ll be back.”

  12. Unk on Friday: 19 January 2007|0943

    TCinLA,

    Get well and WRITE!

    Unk

  13. Eric on Sunday: 21 January 2007|1152

    Unk,

    One tool that I’ve adopted is actually from the Scientologists. They publish a booklet called The Emotional Tone Scale, and it ranges from 40.0 to -40.0 (with 40.0 being “Serenety of Beingness” and 0.0 being “Body Death”).

    Lest you think I’m preaching, I’ll just comment up front that the portion of the scale that is actually useful to us as screenwriters happens from 4.0 — Enthusiasm to .05 — Apathy.

    I suppose you could take it to 0.0 — Body Death; but then you lose your character.

    The aim of this is similar to the Maslow’s triangle: sending your character on a journey up or down the scale to show their emotional path through the story.

    In any event, you can find the list here, and if you’re really into it, you can buy L. Ron Hubbard’s book on it at Amazon.

    - E.

  14. The Central Question | on Sunday: 20 July 2008|1455

    [...] automatically ask ourselves if this quintessential character is going to REMAIN the same. If you go DEEP ENOUGH with your character, thereby making him or her quintessential, we will almost always subconsciously [...]

  15. Jonny Atlas Writes » Blog Archive » Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards Script, and the “Semblance of Truth” on Tuesday: 12 May 2009|1642

    [...] reading Unk’s writing for very long, go read his posts on Depth Charging your characters – parts 1, 1.5 and 2. That is some seriously required [...]

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