Developing great characters, Part 5 – Your characters’ external world

Continuing my series of posts on character exploration and development: 

Placing your characters into their own unique social contexts--the external life circumstances your people have lived through and are currently involved in—is essential.   By doing so, you'll start seriously to dig into their lives and begin asking some critical questions about the forces that have shaped them and that continue to influence how they think and act.  Every person has a definite set of social circumstances that has helped define who he or she is.  I suggest you need to have a pretty good idea of what these are for each of your people.

For starters, make some choices about each character's own blood family circumstances.  There are a whole set of crucial questions you need to think about:

Developing great characters, Part 4 – Putting them in front of you

     Continuing my series on character exploration: 

     I find that the more complete a visual picture I can create of my characters, the more they come to life for me.  Although I don't usually write for specific actors, I do try to see real people in my mind's eye, most often totally fictional, but nevertheless real--as people often appear in my dreams. I'm talking here about actual physical appearance--height, weight, hair and eye color, skin tone, posture, grooming, attractiveness, sex appeal, degree of ruggedness or refinement, clothes choices, and so on. 

     Here’s a simple exercise that might help open the floodgates.

Developing great characters, Part 3 – physical characteristics

            Continuing with this series of posts on character development and exploration, I’m going to walk you through the various aspects of what I call the short-form biography, beginning with your characters’ physical characteristics. I acknowledge a debt here to Lajos Egri who first presented this basic approach in his all-time best-selling book The Art of Dramatic Writing, first published way back in 1941 (and still in print).  The short-form biography is adapted from and an expansion of the three-part character breakdown Egri calls "the bone structure" of character.

     I should also mention upfront that as we take a closer look at the various elements making up the short-form bio, keep in mind this early character work is just that:  a starting point.  As you explore your people more fully and get to know them intimately, these initial sketches will most likely have to be adjusted to fit the fuller personalities you uncover.  And as your idea is developed and refined, your people may very well have to change to fit into what your script is becoming.  For now, however, the important thing is to get the exploration started.

Developing great characters, Part 2 – the short-form biography

     Here’s the second installment in a series of posts I’m doing on character development/exploration:

Once you’ve formulated a workable idea for a script—a framework for your story, a point of reference, a strategy for the tale’s telling—it’s time to expand it into a bigger and richer dramatic field, to dig deeper into the possibilities you've sketched out and discover what you really have to work with.

Developing great characters: the heart of scriptwriting, Part I

     One of the most critical phases in the writing of a first-class script is the upfront character exploration work that is done before a draft is tackled. Different writers approach this in different ways.  Some do extensive work and others very little if any at all.  In my next several blog posts I’m going to lay out an approach I’ve developed in my own writing and that I’ve “field tested” and refined with hundreds of scriptwriting students and clients over the years.

     So, starting at the beginning:

     What’s in a name?

Locations and your script

     It goes without saying that as a screenwriter works away in isolation on a project it’s important to give serious thought to the locations where scenes are set. Imaginative and unusual settings can help raise the stakes in a story and at times can even play a significant role in moving the story’s plot forward. But it’s also worthwhile to keep in mind that once a script is greenlit and pre-production gears up, those carefully considered locations in the screenplay may very well be drastically altered as location scouting for the production commences and new and exciting possibilities start presenting themselves.

     This is exactly what happened on our feature The Sensation of Sight. The movie was set entirely in a small New England town.  Once we located the town where we wanted to shoot the film (Peterborough, NH), we set about looking for locations that would work for us.  Our locations manager Nick Koloski, writer/director Aaron Wiederspahn, and DP Christophe Lanzenberg spent many days investigating various possible settings for scenes and they found some wonderful surprises.  In fact, a number of the key scenes in the film were shot on locations that didn’t exist in the script—locations that actually demanded that the script be altered to include them. 

The script as a means to an end

     Last week I sat on a scriptwriting panel at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.  The focus was on the process of writing a screenplay and there was a lot of lively give and take among the panelists and with our audience.  Many interesting and useful points were discussed and I think everyone in attendance left with ample food for thought. 

     However, as the two-hour session progressed and the discussion got ever deeper into the screenwriting process, one overriding thought began to nag at me.