Characters
October 3rd 2006 13:23
Now that we have story under control (well, sort of), with your idea and the template of the Hero’s Journey, we have to find the people who will inhabit our brave new world. Keep in mind that we can come up with a story, and a world, and fill it with characters that will implement the story in the best way, or find characters and then decide what world they live in and what stories they have to tell. Which works for you? That’s the subject of the next post.
To a greater or lesser degree, the characters have to fill niches in the audience’s mind, but you’ve still got to come up with twists that will surprise them, make them think about the human condition in a different light. That was the driving point of characters like Spock and Data in ‘Star Trek’: they stood outside and passed comment on what it means to be human.
We have to be able to hit our marks in terms of stereotype and the Hero’s Journey. And when I say stereotype, I DON’T mean make Dad a real dope, or the Mum very loving, or the boy a precocious brat, or the girl a little know it all. That’s a copout, it’s been done and done and done! Make the Dad the know it all, the Mum the brat, the boy the loving one and the girl the dope. Whatever. Shake the tree. It’s that same dichotomy: the characters have to be believable, and therefore we expect them to behave in certain ways, but we want to be challenged to, that they will do thing that will surprise us. As I said, balancing act.
The characters have to be true to whatever context you place them in. You can’t tell the true story of a pioneer family crossing the plains of the American Midwest, and, say, have the son rapping about Indians, unless you’re aiming for a very specific kind of production where the historical lines are deliberately and obviously blurred from the beginning. By the same context, our Elizabethan drama can’t be an authentic recreation of the language, as the audience will be pondering over the meaning of unfamiliar words as the plot presses on, leaving them further behind. Be true to your characters and your world, and they will reward you more than you can imagine.
(As an exercise in the unfamiliar, look up ‘Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog’, in which our hero blogs to a mix of modern topics and events of the days of Henry II in England, in a language earlier than Shakespeare’s. Interesting to gain the sense of the old words, and pretty funny too).
With the advent of the likes of Bryan Singer and especially Joss Whedon, smart dialogue is all the rage. It’s good if it isn’t overused, allowing you to give the characters a slight off-centeredness, and helping to delineate the character more clearly. But be careful: a character spouting one-liners regularly can become trite and turn into a smartarse.
I’ll revisit Characters in a later post, once we’ve gone into writing a bit more. But for now… read! Write! Think! We’ll talk later.
To a greater or lesser degree, the characters have to fill niches in the audience’s mind, but you’ve still got to come up with twists that will surprise them, make them think about the human condition in a different light. That was the driving point of characters like Spock and Data in ‘Star Trek’: they stood outside and passed comment on what it means to be human.
We have to be able to hit our marks in terms of stereotype and the Hero’s Journey. And when I say stereotype, I DON’T mean make Dad a real dope, or the Mum very loving, or the boy a precocious brat, or the girl a little know it all. That’s a copout, it’s been done and done and done! Make the Dad the know it all, the Mum the brat, the boy the loving one and the girl the dope. Whatever. Shake the tree. It’s that same dichotomy: the characters have to be believable, and therefore we expect them to behave in certain ways, but we want to be challenged to, that they will do thing that will surprise us. As I said, balancing act.
The characters have to be true to whatever context you place them in. You can’t tell the true story of a pioneer family crossing the plains of the American Midwest, and, say, have the son rapping about Indians, unless you’re aiming for a very specific kind of production where the historical lines are deliberately and obviously blurred from the beginning. By the same context, our Elizabethan drama can’t be an authentic recreation of the language, as the audience will be pondering over the meaning of unfamiliar words as the plot presses on, leaving them further behind. Be true to your characters and your world, and they will reward you more than you can imagine.
(As an exercise in the unfamiliar, look up ‘Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog’, in which our hero blogs to a mix of modern topics and events of the days of Henry II in England, in a language earlier than Shakespeare’s. Interesting to gain the sense of the old words, and pretty funny too).
With the advent of the likes of Bryan Singer and especially Joss Whedon, smart dialogue is all the rage. It’s good if it isn’t overused, allowing you to give the characters a slight off-centeredness, and helping to delineate the character more clearly. But be careful: a character spouting one-liners regularly can become trite and turn into a smartarse.
I’ll revisit Characters in a later post, once we’ve gone into writing a bit more. But for now… read! Write! Think! We’ll talk later.
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