But. We mustn’t confuse a character in fiction with personality in a living being. Personality is to character what fable is to construct. It is a chaos of possible traits and whims and mores and habits and his-tory too big to fit on the screen. Real people are too complex, too ran-dom, too contradictory to make for dramatic characters. As with fable and construct, we must choose from the virtually infinite possible per-sonality traits in an imagined person those that are useful and legible.
We approximate personhood in the creation of a fictional character by emphasizing the salient aspects of their imagined personality. We look for readily legible markers and behaviors in order to give the audi-ence, the reader, a way in, something to hold onto. A way to empathize and identify with the character. A way to understand the character. Or, even more important than explicit understanding, to give the reader a desire to understand. An interest. A vested interest in learning more.
There’s a wonderful New Yorker cartoon. Two cavemen stand in front of a wall drawing of a hunt. One holds a bit of charcoal. The other says: “Maybe you could make the hunter more likeable.”
A successfully drawn character is not simply likeable. Our relation to a fictional person is much more complicated than simple approval or comfort. We can despise a character and still be fascinated by his contests. We can be bewildered by a character and still be anxious to follow her journey.
1 The word has become a weapon in political discourse. Lack of character, the character question — which is the ultimate perversion of a complex concept into a simplistic code. Politicians challenge their opponent’s character as a way of ostracizing. A way of turning them into The Other.
Set aside simple notions of like and dislike, sympathy and antipa-thy. An audience’s reaction to a fully drawn character goes much deeper, is more complicated. And is more satisfying.
How does a reader relate to a character on the page? We can break down the possible engagements into categories of emotion:
l Comfort and familiarity. Where a character possesses passions and desires easily shared by an audience.
l Wishful identification. Where a character resides within our comfort zone of familiarity, but also possesses something we do not. A greater competence, for instance. Or greater wealth. We admire them, want to be them for the time of the telling.
l Intrigue or titillation. A character is less familiar—at least in some respects—but in ways we find seductive. Empathy feels a little like a guilty pleasure. We aren’t supposed to like them, but we do. Wouldn’t want to be them, but are glad they exist.
l Fear and loathing. Usually reserved for the bad guy. It’s a mark of a successful villain that even as we cringe at his passions, his threat to the hero, we are ever so slightly admiring or understanding.
Of course, our relation to a character is almost always a mix of these emotions. Yet usually there is a predominant emotion, one that marks the distance we maintain from a character. Are we entwined? Are we kept at a distance by peculiarity? Are we appalled and judgmental?
You need to understand the predominant emotion inspired by your character in order to draw them well and consistently. Once you have considered the impact of your character upon the innocent reader you can more easily find and focus upon those traits and behaviors that will either strengthen or violate that relation.
How do we draw character? How do we put them on paper?
As discussed earlier, you can think of a character as having two pri-mary qualities: aspect and agency. Who they are, and what they do.
Aspect entails the delineation of identifying traits—both physical and spiritual. Agency—discovering how the character responds to and gener-ates the action of the story—is the application of aspect to circumstance.
We can think of aspect as having two parts: extrinsic and intrinsic.
The external attributes of a character are perhaps the most immedi-ately obvious, and the first drawn. You imagine their physique. Tall or short? Comely or plain?
Atop this general notion of a character’s looks you layer other vis-ible manifestations of their place in society. The first among these would be their costume. What is their customary dress? Is there an item of clothing—like Indiana Jones’ fedora—that marks their job
or their attitude? Their self-image or their ambition? Dressing your character is not random.
Certain internal qualities have external consequences.
What habits can help define your character? We meet Martin Riggs smoking in bed; then he has a beer for breakfast (and mouthwash).
That tells me a great deal about him and how he lives.
What conditions impinge upon your character? Are they claustro-phobic? Afraid of snakes? Fear flying?
What part of their history continues into the present tense? Recently lost a loved one? Grew up an orphan? Suffered severe heartbreak?
These qualities—physique, costume, habit, condition, and history—
reside outside of any particular story, any particular circumstance.
They are, after a fashion, part of the fable or your construct. From these details we build a being in space, a physical manifestation of the imagined personality.
It is when we place a character within a specific context that we move from aspect to agency. Then we must ask deeper questions about the internal make-up of the character. We must fill the manifes-tation with motive and desire, with intent and direction.
What is their daimon? What drives them and defines how they will react to external forces?
At the outset of the story, what are they trying to achieve? What do they want? Is that want the same at the end?
What are they willing to do to achieve that want? What won’t they do? What are their boundaries?
In drawing a character you must focus on both their aspect—who they are as individuals and on how that individuality manifests in the fictional universe—and on their agency—what they do in reaction to the events of the plot.
Both sides of your character must be imagined simultaneously, in a continual interaction of decision and discovery, of exploration and extrapolation.
In real life what we do is often at odds with our own best intentions.
With who we think we are. In the messy world of reality, it is the rare person who’s aspect is completely in synch with their agency.
But in dramatic fiction, for the most part, there is a more strict link-age and intimacy between who the character is and what they do. This makes sense when you consider that what we choose to feature in a character are precisely those traits and behaviors that will help us to enact their inner motives and desires. To make their choices legible and sympathetic to an audience.
Every character in your script—from hero to henchman—must be given unique aspect. It could be argued that they all also have agency within their individual stories. But usually only the main characters
have agency that has a direct bearing on the story being told. The best secondary and tertiary characters are those conceived with an eye to the fact that they, too, have a story. And even better, when their story impacts directly upon that of the protagonist.
Take for example the bad guy henchman, Karl, in Die Hard. He has his own drama playing out within the movie. John McClane kills his brother. For the rest of the film that is Karl’s motive. He is the hero of a revenge subplot. And the fact that he is intent on avenging his broth-er’s murder impacts the trajectory of McClane.
When imagining the aspect of your characters remember that no detail is too small, no gesture is insignificant. As you choose physique and costume and habit and condition you are making decisions that may have enormous impact as you compose the screenplay. You are creating a palette of colors from which you will draw throughout the writing. What may seem only a bit of character color, an interesting quirk, may be useful as the story develops. Nothing is random in a fictional character. It is designed. And the elements of that design will prove useful. They become tools in the telling of the story.
In addition to providing your reader a way into your character and so into the story, I contend that by thinking clearly about various char-acter gestures and quirks, habits, and mannerisms, you will also learn more about your character. You will deepen your hold on the story.
You will discover unexpected actions and interactions, perhaps lead-ing you to new events, and perhaps even alterlead-ing your plot.
Fully imagining your characters, giving them compelling flaws and believable desires, inevitably impacts story. Screenwriting does not happen just from the plot down to the details, but also from the details up. There must be an ongoing colloquy between your characters and your plot. Character is central to both the how and the what of your storytelling.
Backstory
Backstory is that part of your understanding of a character’s past that actually shows up in the present tense of the screenplay.
Having written a narrative of your character’s past means nothing if it doesn’t manifest in the relationships and motives in the present tense.
It’s possible that you have written (or just imagined) an extensive character history. If so, likely it’s more than could ever fit into a fea-ture film. So, think of backstory as that subset—perhaps only one or two things—of your character history that has a specifiable impact on the action of the story.
In Aliens, Ripley has had a bad experience with androids and so enters the story with a deep distrust of Kane.
In Lethal Weapon, Martin Riggs’ wife was killed, he thinks, because he was busy being a cop. Now he’s indifferent to the job’s dangers.
Casually suicidal.
Here’s a subtle example of how a character’s history impinges on the present tense of the story, carried by a very minor gesture. In Three Days of the Condor, after all of his colleagues at a CIA research facil-ity have been assassinated, the main character reaches into a drawer and takes out an automatic pistol. But he grips it wrong. He grabs it upside down, holds it awkwardly, as if it were a stinky sock. He clearly is not comfortable with the weapon. He knows he should take it, but he’s not holding it in a useful or threatening way. He’s thinking the gun is a good idea, but he’s not ready to use it. That small gesture speaks volumes. It is consistent with his history: he’s an intellectual, not a field agent. The gesture is completely consistent with who this character is, and who he will become in the course of the film.
There has been a tendency in Hollywood story departments to con-fuse backstory with character history. What I sometimes refer to as The Backstory Police will often ask “What in the backstory makes the hero who they are?” The only answer is “everything.” What they are really asking for when asking for more backstory is a better handle on their understanding of the character in the present tense. Write the active character better and perhaps the Backstory Police will leave you in peace.
Be careful not to overburden your present tense story with baggage from the past. Be delicate and specific in the use of backstory. Taken to the logical extreme, your character’s history is as messy and cha-otic and infinite as any real life—you can’t possibly use it all (or even understand it all).