Nevertheless, as I was working on the rewrite I just finished, I kept realizing that, through I had answered all my core questions about each character, I still didn’t know them well enough. Then I realized: most of my questions are about knowing my heroes externally. The questions are focused on what I think of my characters, not on what my characters think of themselves.
Then I tried
asking a question I’d never asked before and it did wonders for my rewrite:
What are the rules they live by?
Every character has these, though most don’t state them out loud, as
John Wayne does in The Shootist:
- “I won’t be wronged; I won’t be insulted and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them.”
One problem
I had with my script is that my characters, who all went to college together
and had the same job, just weren’t differentiated enough. This turned out to be a great way to
differentiate them. Here’s what I
came up with:
This helps me love my characters, and it also helps me polarize them in a non-judgmental way. As you can see, I tried to force myself to stick to what they people would actually say if asked. Nothing like “I can’t stand dirt”, or “I don’t like kids”, or “Never get off the couch” Those may be rules that actually define a character, but the purpose of this exercise is to get to know their self-image.
Once you’ve
got your rules, you can start playing with them. Which rules are they forced to break over the course of the
story? Which ones should they break but are too proud to
do so? Which rules are they just
deluding themselves about, since they’ve never really followed them?
The
advantage of listing these rules is that they force you to listen to your characters and allow them to define themselves. It’s easy for a character to become
just a bundle of flaws: a false goal, a false statement of philosophy, a limited
perspective and a long host of ironic failings. But they don’t know
that. They’re just living
their life, doing their own thing in their own time, so you need to know what
that thing is, as they see it.
4 comments:
Wow, J.S. got it. I thought it was ungoogleable. Surely you didn't just know it? It occurs to me that the rights holders may not want it known that it's getting made yet, so I decided to delete it. (And if you know the story, or read a plot synopsis, then you might be able to figure out which Underrated Movie this is the thriller version of)
Allow me to clarify: I had originally included the character names and dared anybody to guess what story I was adapting, since it didn't seem to come up on any google searches, but after j.s. got it, I realized that you could specifically search within "Google Books", so I went back and took out the character names.
Once again, I'm late to the party. Story of my life.
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