Have you ever noticed who actors thank when they win an Oscar? They profusely thank the director for “getting the performance out of them.” They thank his agent, their husbands, wives, distant relatives and distant ancestors, the crew, the studio, the associate producer and, of course, their eighth grade drama teacher. In short, everyone except the writer.
On those rare occasions when they do thank the writer, it’s always for the words the writer gave them to speak. What they should be thanking the writer for, in an endless cycle, is the wonderful part they played in a great story. That’s why Orson Welles said that for the Oscars to be fair, every actor would have to play the same role. When an actor wins, 80% of his success is due to who he became. It’s all about the paper.
My new book, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, is packed with techniques, over 300 by my count, including how to create great characters. As the word “Anatomy” implies, the book uses an organic approach to writing, rather than a mechanical one, and that makes all the difference.
For the last 30 years, screenwriting has been dominated by a mechanical approach to creating a story. For example, the so-called “three-act structure” is actually a mechanical imprint from the outside that is placed over the top of a story. Act breaks are completely arbitrary. They don’t really exist in history. The result, for the vast majority of writers, is a generic, hopelessly derivative story that has no chance of selling in a market with 100,000 sellers and 300 buyers.
Writing a script using the organic approach is the opposite of all that. It’s about starting with what’s unique and original about you, what no one else can create, and then using techniques that allow you to expand and execute your idea into a professional script.
Organic storytelling has two main characteristics. First, a story is a living body in which a hero grows (almost always). When we talk about story structure, we’re talking about structure in time, the stages a character goes through from some sort of life-destroying weakness at the beginning of the story to a life-changing revelation of himself. in the end.
The question is: how do you show this character change through the plot? This is the six billion dollar question (the entire entertainment business is based on it). That evokes the second hallmark of organic storytelling: a living story is made up of a series of individual parts that are interdependent with all the other parts. These main parts of the story are: premise, the seven main steps of the story structure, the character, the moral argument, the plot, the world of the story, the symbol, the fabric of the scene, the scene and the dialogue (which happen to be the chapters of The Anatomy of History).
Screenwriters tend to look for a magic wand, the one trick only great professional writers know and use to write and sell their million-dollar scripts. this doesn’t exist. Instead, writers must master all of the major story skills simultaneously, because each of these story parts connects to each other in literally hundreds of ways. Failure to master even one part causes the entire body to collapse and die.
The biggest mistake writers make when creating characters is that they think of the hero and all other characters as separate individuals. Your hero is alone, in a void, disconnected from others. The result is not just a weak hero, but also cardboard opponents and supporting characters that are even weaker.
This big mistake is exacerbated in screenwriting by the enormous emphasis placed on the “high concept” premise. In these stories, the hero seems to be the only person that matters. But ironically, this intense focus on the hero, instead of defining him more clearly, only makes him seem like a one-note marketing tool. To create great characters, think of all your characters as part of a network, each helping to define the others. To put it another way, a character is often defined by what they are not.
Key point: The most important step in creating your hero, as well as all the other characters, is to connect and compare them with others. Every time you compare a character to your hero, you force yourself to distinguish the hero in new ways. You also start to see the supporting characters as whole human beings, just as complex and valuable as your hero.
Simply put, you have a hero (and sometimes heroes), opponents, and then characters that are some kind of friend or foe. In fact, one of the marks of a professional writer is the ability to deceive the audience about whether a character is a friend or an enemy of the hero. We see this in a master storyteller like JK Rowling, author of the most successful fiction of all time, the Harry Potter stories. An excellent example is the character Snape, who appears to be Harry’s enemy and then his friend. But wait, he really is an enemy. No, he is a friend. These kinds of reveals and twists are among the greatest joys people get from storytelling.
The character web is set up differently in each genre, which is one of the reasons why mastering the genre is so crucial to your success. In romantic comedies, for example, the male and female leads are presented as opposites in some way. Then each one has a friend who gives them advice, usually wrong, that has to do with the stereotyped defects of the other sex.
The romantic comedy Pregnant begins with this classic opposition between man and woman. In fact, the two leads are such an odd couple that writer Judd Apatow has to refine the fact that Alison would never sleep with Neanderthal Ben, even if she was dead drunk. But this opposition, the mature woman and the man child, provides the basic line on which the story depends. It also gives Apatow the essential comic opposition from which he can create many of the jokes.
But the really brilliant move in character opposition, indeed what makes the movie, is how Apatow establishes allies in the character web. Ben’s ally is not a lonely bachelor but a group of teenage boys in the bodies of men. Alison’s ally is not a single woman embittered by love and men, but a couple whose marriage is worn to the breaking point.
This character opposition between the allies takes the story beyond the problems men and women have dating, to a much broader and deeper set of questions about how men and women live out the rest of their lives. At one extreme is the permanently adolescent male who has complete freedom but no love or children. At the other extreme is permanent life as a couple, with love and children, but without freedom, without a sense of self and with the constant realization that one is getting old. By placing the pregnancy within this much larger web of character oppositions, the emotional and comedic resonances bounce back and come to a breaking point within each person in the audience.
I mentioned that the character web also has a big effect on all the other main parts of the story, like the plot. In action stories, the biggest mistake most writers make is that they don’t know how to create action without killing the plot. There are a lot of reasons for this. But surely one of the key reasons has to do with how you set up the opposition in the character network. Most of the action opponents are almighty and evil. That makes them boring. But more importantly, everything about them is just on the surface. Result: no surprise and no plot.
In Bourne’s blockbuster movies, the opposition is very powerful. But most of it is hidden below the surface. There are layers upon layers that Bourne must uncover. In The Bourne Ultimatum, the hero continues to dig into the rogue CIA that made him the killing machine he is. And he has both ongoing opponents, like David Strathairn’s character, and a succession of new assassins trying to kill him.
This same character web approach is used in a comic travel story like Little Miss Sunshine. In standard travel stories, each opponent is new and therefore a stranger to the hero and the audience. But in Little Miss Sunshine, writer Michael Arndt sends an entire family of six, each with their own unique need for him, on the trail. That means that the main opposition is among the people the audience knows, and it is continuous opposition. Instead of a succession of unconnected events, the story has a constantly building conflict. That makes the jokes funnier and allows the writer to develop the funniest joke of all when the family arrives at the beauty pageant at the end of the trip.
In your script, start with a great web of characters and you’ll be amazed at how every other part of your story seems to magically get better.
For more screenwriting techniques, visit http://www.truby.com.