Film Courage: What does character development entail?
Are you writing a backstory?
Scott Myers, DePaul University Professor/Screenwriter/Creator Gointothestory.blcklst(dot)com: To me that’s
everything, it’s everything.
Here is another one of my sayings, you ready?
“Begin with character, end with character, find the story in between.”
I don’t know what paradigm people have in terms of story structure.
How you get there is critical.
And so you start with your characters, that’s my take.
Again, there is not one right way to do this.
I’m just saying that this is a smart way to go about it because the characters, it’s
there story.
If we’re writing a story, we are assuming that in some magical, mystical way that story
universe exists, those characters exist.
And if it’s their story, they know it better than we do and so character development is
about getting curious.
It’s about asking questions.
It’s about spending time with the characters.
And so the typical things we see like biographies and questionnaires, those are great.
I call those indirect engagement exercises because you are reflecting on the character,
you are thinking about the character, as opposed to direct engagement exercises.
So for example what if I have a character in mind, I’m going to imagine I am a psychiatrist.
This character is my patient and if they’re reticent to talk to me I can even go one step
further.
They have been court-appointed to appear with me as a psychiatrist and they have to answer
my questions and if they don’t they will stay stuck in the situation until they do.
So you just create a situation in which (like I was saying earlier) you just ask questions,
you get curious.
That was a lesson I learned when I was an Air Force brat, you just keep asking people
questions and getting them talking.
And so you just type, you let it go.
You can even do something that is a little bit spiritual I suppose you’d say in a way
where you are going to do either a monologue or a stream of consciousness with a character.
It’s sort of like a Vulcan mind meld, you know like in Star Trek where you get a character
in your mind and you do some deep breathing you get yourself so you are transitioning
out of the busy world and you are going to be here now with this character, you set your
timer for like 15 minutes and you put your fingers on the keyboard or pen on paper, you
close your eyes and you just type and you just type.
And your mind will go “I’ve got to get groceries or the cat…(whatever).”
Let that go, you don’t get attached to it.
You just keep coming back to this character and you get done with this.
So you’ve got all these words that you’ve typed out some of them are like dialogue like
a monologue and some of them are just like stream of consciousness.
80% of it may seem like gobbledygook to you, maybe 90%?
But 20% or 10%, there is something really interesting that popped out there and that’s
getting in touch with the characters in a subconscious level and they start to talk
to you.
I’ve seen this happen time and time again.
I created a prep class 10 years ago that I teach online (a 6-week workshop) taking a
story from concept to outline.
The first four weeks are all character development, the second week is brain storming.
That’s all they do it brainstorm and I’ve had hundreds of people tell me that was the
most eye-opening experience for them was doing that type of work.
Again, the characters exists, we act on that belief and we reach out to them and get them
talking to us so the character.
So the character development, those are some great examples for character development.
What can happen out of all of that is if you identify a protagonist in particular their
state of disunity where they are disconnected from their authentic nature and that can inform
(if you know what the disunity state is) that can inform where the unity state is.
And so now they are not going to just jump there.
Then you’re going to say Okay these plot elements and the characters with whom they
intersect they are going to deconstruct their old ways of being because they don’t work
out here in the new world.
But in the process of that they are going to uncover their need.
Their need is going to start to emerge.
This is very Jungian.
Jung talks about (he says) “When an inner situation is not made conscious (and he’s
talking about like conflict or inner conflict) it happens outside as fate.”
Now I don’t know if that’s in the real world, but that’s the protagonist story.
The protagonist starts off in a state of disunity and what happens is the plot is informed by
that, there’s a synergy between it.
It’s not just these random events.
It’s like these characters that they intersect with and the events that they go though that’s
going to provide the basis of their transformation and so there disunity that gets deconstructed,
well now this stuff starts to come out into the light of consciousness (their need) and
then they move into reconstruction, now they are moving into their new mode of being and
eventually toward unity.
So you can take that raw material that you get with your characters and see how that
starts to shape the nature of the plot (the story structure).
And it’s not just plugging this into ‘this has to happen on page 25 - the break in the
Act 2.’
No, you are doing it through much more of an organic fashion with your characters and
letting them inform you what the structure will be.
The final value of that is that you’re writing multi-layered, richly textured characters
who actors want to play.
So character development to me is like everything.
It’s absolutely critical.