Character Sketches: My Philosophy (I Think Very Deeply) posted by kza

Note: The following has absolutely nothing to do with Burley’s excellent character bios, as seen below. It’s just that, when I started my bios, I felt like I needed to definitively state what it was I was trying to accomplish, so I created a list of guidelines and “talking points”, if you will, to guide me. While I certainly hope that I can engage Burley into a conversation about this topic, he’s not honor-bound to share my philosophy or use my ideas. (I doubt I could force him even if I wanted to, at least not without the use of a whip and cheese-covered apple pie.) I share them with you now because… well, when it comes to grand theorizing about writing, I’m a Chatty Cathy.

The following are my notes, and expanded thoughts, on creating a character sketch for a screenplay.

Name. Obvious, sure, but god, I’m awful at names. I really, really hate coming up with them, and I don’t have the cojones to name deities after candies. But I force myself anyway, but because I force myself, I usually end up with very bland, WASPy names. Sometimes I wish I could create names like Vonnegut or Bester, but I bet they’d just look silly to me. I usually look at movies or other media that inspired the original story in some way and steal that (i.e., Atmosphere = “Curtis Ian”, the Dario Argento-inspired Yellow = “Fiore”, Argento’s daughter’s name.)

Support Network: Too often when I think of a story and just start writing, it’s like I have a main character, a handful of necessary supporting characters, and that’s it. The problem is that, at least in a screenplay, it starts to feel like the world is severely underpopulated, like an old cartoon. What I keep failing to take into account is that nearly everyone has some kind of support network in their life. Who are the character’s friends? What would they do for him or her? Who takes care of this character when she’s sick? Who does the character go to when he’s in love and needs to talk to someone? Sometimes this is family, but sometimes it isn’t. And if it isn’t, why not?

The purpose of the Support Network is two-fold: one, to provide a realistic backdrop for the story (assuming it needs one) and two, to be a Well.

The Well: The Well is for people like me who sometimes need a kick in the butt to get a story going, particularly while deep in the hell of the second act. The Well is like a goodie bag that you can reach into and draw some kind of prize that can (hopefully) inspire you when you’re stuck. It could be filled with just about anything: you could literally create a bag and fill it with pictures or Oblique Strategy-styled bits of prose to help inspire, or just keep it all in your head. What I do (because this is an area I’m weak in) is to use the Support Network as my well. If I’m stuck and I don’t know where to take my protagonist, I can reach into the Well and remember that he has a sister he loves but had a falling out with. What if he has to go to the sister to proceed towards his goal? Now the protagonist has a goal and an obstacle (the sister), and the collision of the two is going to reveal background information in an organic way, and deepen the material. (Well, we hope.)

3 Significant Events. This is here mostly to structure the sketch material in some way, and add stuff to the Well. I do add one requirement, however: that each event has some kind of common theme. For example, in my sketch for The Atheist, issues of belief and faith run through the bio, and in Atmosphere, the sketch is held together by the character’s autism — a kind of stasis or wall — and the character’s attempt to transform himself.

Status Quo: This (along with the Well) is actually the whole purpose of the sketch exercise. If a story is pretty much defined as the upending of a character’s status quo and his/her attempt to right it again, then that Status Quo needs to be defined. Obviously, this is built from the Support Network, but is defined by the long-standing but unresolved conflicts in the character’s life. In terms of the sequence method, I think it’s okay to include Status Quo material in the first act, if necessary, but it should the sketch should never include the Predicament. Everything up until that point, sure, but not the actual event that upsets the Status Quo. While I suspect that a lot of us think of the Status Quo as a kind of large, heavy boulder — tough to move — I prefer to think of it as more like a station wagon that’s balanced precariously on the edge of a precipice — one ounce of pressure from safety or certain doom. (I’m not always successful in this, I’ll admit.)

However: Despite all this (potentially) interesting stuff, I feel that the sketch should not be so interesting that it could be the screenplay itself. While there should be dramatic events in the life of the character, they’re only there to be drawn upon for the actual screenplay — the character’s life up until the Status Quo-altering Predicament should, ideally, be as chaotic and unstructured and maybe a little boring as a real person’s life.

(I’ll admit, again, that I probably failed here re: Atmosphere. The problem there was, to understand the character’s background, details of this future world had to be explained, and expository material like that works best when couched in terms of a flowing story. In fact, after our two sketches, I’m thinking Atmosphere might work best with the prison sequence as the third act, with the character’s life up until that point filling the first two acts. In a sense, that’s a failure, but you have to eventually go with what works.)

I also feel that, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, the character sketch is no place for talking about a character’s personality. You won’t see me write something like “He’s a happy-go-lucky guy” or “She’s moody and depressive”. I’m kind of a “existence precedes essence” guy when it comes to this stuff. I just want the fact’s, ma’am, about a character’s life, and when I go to write the script, I’ll use that as a basis as to determining the character’s personality. (Which isn’t to say that the personality, as it develops, won’t change the story somewhat — I think it’s imperative that the story remain elastic enough to incorporate on-the-fly change — just that starting with personality seems backwards to me.)

Ultimately, the character sketch should ask more questions than it answers. If there are answers, they will be provided by the screenplay. If not, then they’re there for thematic purposes or jumping off points for the plot.

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