The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Are the non-three-dimensional characters impartially polarized into head, heart, and gut?

I’ve already had a lot to say about the pros and cons of polarization here, but let’s look at one final case study to see how you can use polarization without sacrificing realistic elements. 

The book (and later movie) Deliverance is based on a real canoe trip the author James Dickey took with three other businessmen from Atlanta, with one big difference: In real life, the mountain folks who found the lost canoeists just gave them a nice meal and a lift back to town. (No good deed goes unpunished!) I know the true story because one of the men involved was a family friend. His name was Lewis, and he was the basis for the character Lew, played in the movie by Burt Reynolds.

In the first scene of the movie, Lew finds out that Bobby (Ned Beatty) is an insurance agent and snaps, “I've never been insured in my life. I don't believe in insurance. There's no risk!” When the real Lewis passed away recently, it turned out this was actually true: He owned a lot of property, but he had no insurance on any of it, to the chagrin of his family, who had to scramble to insure it all.

Anyone who knew the real Lewis and watches the movie can see that Dickey copied his friend’s persona very faithfully. But the actor Ronnie Cox, who played the character Drew, had this to say about Dickey:

• We used to joke about it, because the four characters are all these four aspects of Jim Dickey. There’s a lot about him as that sort of “outdoors macho-man challenging everybody, and everything’s a competition” in Burt’s character. And there’s the thoughtful, almost timid advertising man, the everyman that was Jon Voight’s character at the beginning of the film. And then there’s the buffoonish, klutzy Bobby. But then Jim Dickey was also a poet and a guitar player who loved to play music, and all of his artistic aspects were in Drew. 

So which is it? Is Lew based on the real Lewis or on Dickey himself? There’s no contradiction: It’s both. It’s always a good idea to base a character on someone you know, but that character must also be based on yourself, because you can look much deeper into your own heart. Lewis had the sort of larger-than-life personality that writers love to appropriate, but Dickey could not have written him well without finding part of Lewis in himself.

Deliverance has a classic, four-part polarization: head (Ed, played in the movie by Jon Voight), heart (Drew), stomach (Bobby), and cockiness (Lew). When you add them up, you get a complete human being, as Cox observed, but each character is also a believable human being in his own right, partially because each is also based on a real person.

The final product works as both an interpersonal drama, creating a harrowing conflict between four believable characters, and an intrapersonal drama, dramatizing the internal debate a person goes through when faced with a traumatic situation. To do so, Dickey combined specific details from the lives of his friends (such as the real-life Lewis’s adversity to buying insurance) with the polarized aspects of his own personality.

The results are tremendously powerful: We utterly believe in the reality of this situation, and yet we also feel the work has invaded our psyche and exposed our innermost fears and insecurities.

Rulebook Casefile: Head-Heart-Gut in “The Good Place”

It’s been a while since we talked about head-heart-gut polarization. To review, in some stories every character is three-dimensional, and that can work well, but it’s not the only way to tell a great, sophisticated story. Just as often, if not more often, the three main characters are polarized so that one is all-head, one is all-heart, and one is all-gut. (Sometimes this only applies to the three sidekicks and the main character is three dimensional.) In other stories, with bigger casts, some of these body parts are split up further. Sometimes, if you have three gut characters, they can be dived into spleen, stomach and groin.

The “Good Place” pilot has only three main characters and it’s a great example of classic head-heart-gut polarization. Eleanor is all gut: Hungry, horny, raunchy, selfish, insulting, etc. Chidi is all-head: An ethics professor, he overexplains and overthinks everything. Michael is (or seems to be at this point in the show) all-heart: a glowing, angelic, open-hearted lover of life and the world, bestowing care and affection wherever he goes.

This creates classic comedy and significant meaning as well. We see ourselves in all three, and different parts of our own 3-dimensional personalities identify humorously and painfully with each of the three in turn, thinking “Yes, I can go to that extreme sometimes and it’s so embarrassing when I do!”

Any polarized story is ultimately about how we need to integrate ourselves to evolve, and each of these three end up going on (or seeming to go on) a season-long quest to discover their missing elements. Eleanor tries to learn to be a smarter, more compassionate person. Chidi tries to learn to trust his gut and fall in love. (It’s telling that dealing with Eleanor gives Chidi a stomachache, as she reminds him of his missing organ.) Michael explores what it means to be human, especially in dealing with Eleanor, the first non-angelic human he’s had to deal with.

This show will soon expand to become a six-member ensemble, and it’s interesting to see where the new ones end up:

• Janet is clearly a second head: an actual repository of all knowledge, unable to understand human emotion. Why isn’t she too similar to Chidi? Because her serenity is so different from his neurosis.
• When Jason is revealed, he will clearly be a second gut. He will become stomach/groin, and Eleanor will become more spleen/groin. He’ll have some heart to him, too, though.
• But where does that leave Tahani? Her main character note is “snooty”, which usually lines up with head (Think Fraiser or Winchester), but she’s not a therapist, doctor, or intellectual. She’s sort of a fake-heart, as her background is revealed to be an effective but smugly-self-satisfied philanthropist. Ultimately, she doesn’t fit well into this dynamic. What do you think? Where would you put Tahani?

“The Good Place” is a deep and sophisticated show. Like “Star Trek”, it’s a journey into inner space (and inner conflict) as much as to other worlds. By embodying our three-part personalities in three extremes, each episode re-creates our inner debate as we deal with ethical dilemmas in our own lives.

Rulebook Casefile: Assembling Gut, Heart, and Head in The 40 Year Old Virgin

Like Dorothy Gale, Carrie, Dr. House and Hannah Horvath, Andy in The 40 Year Old Virgin is a three-dimensional character with one-dimensional advisors who roughly correspond to Gut, Heart, and Head. In this case:

• Jay (Romany Malco) is a classic Gut character, advising Andy to be animalistic, “All you doing is using your instinct. That's it. Tackle the gazelle.”
• David (Paul Rudd) is all-Heart, still hung up on an old relationship and constantly imploring Andy to pursue old-fashioned romance.
• Cal (Seth Rogen) as Head is the least obvious of these three, but, like many Head characters, he is both a would-be novelist (this is more clear in the extended version) and the Jewish member of the group. His advice is all about head-games, employing a strategic “ask questions” method.

This movie’s unique premise sends Andy on a coming-of-age journey at 40 years old, belatedly going from a proto-person to a fully-realized adult, so we get to see him build his adult persona from the ground up, first trying Jay’s method (picking up Leslie Mann), then David’s (Attempting and failing to call Trish), then Cal’s (hitting on the bookstore girl).

It’s only after he’s tried each version on its own and found each one wanting that he realizes that he has to integrate them into one method, and thereby integrate himself into a whole three-dimensional person, surpassing each of his former mentors.

In the commentary, Apatow cheerily points out that, though he and Carrel are the only credited writers, almost every scene in the finished movie was not in the original script, and instead came from jokes pitched by various actors in the movie, and even by some who aren’t in the movie. For instance, he keeps crediting gags to, of all people, Garry Shandling, One of Shandling’s suggestion was, “Once the virgin has sex, it has to be better than all the other guys’ sex”: This led to the wonderful finale in which Andy can only describe his deflowering by leading a jubilant performance of “Age of Aquarius”. 

  Shandling’s point, it seems to me, is that Andy has combined his friends’ incomplete parts into one whole, and achieved a level of fully-human experience that is denied to them.

Rulebook Casefile: Real Life Head-Heart-Gut Trios in “Humans of New York”

I found this gratifying: more than once on the site, Brandon discovers genuine polarized ensembles wandering the streets of New York!  Even when advocating such trios, I usually stress that they’re more common in fiction than they are in real life, but it turns out that they’re more common than I thought.

First we get a Heart / Gut / Head (in that he’s risk-averse)

And a Heart (in that his goal is more childlike) / Head / Gut (with an extra gut tagging along...)

It’s simple enough to differentiate characters by giving them different responses to a question, but an even better way to establish their personality is to have each one interpret that question in a fundamentally different way, showing us that their brains are hard-wired differently, and so they’re inevitably going to create conflict.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Cal: head (he’s a novelist), David: heart, Jay: Gut
Alien	YES. Ripley and Ash are both head (good head and bad head), Kane and Dallas are both (slightly) heart, Parker and Brett are gut.
An Education	All characters are 3-dimensional.
The Babadook	YES. Everyone is three-dimensional
Blazing Saddles	YES. The heroes: Bart is head, Waco is heart, Mongo is gut, Lili is groin.  The villains: Hedly is head, Taggart is gut, the governor is groin.
Blue Velvet	Hmm…I guess you could say Jeffrey is head (a Hamlet-like character, called home from college and still living in his head, acting without realizing that his actions affect the world) Sandy and Dorothy are two very different types of heart, and Frank is gut?  That seems like a stretch though.
The Bourne Identity	All characters are three-dimensional
Bridesmaids	YES. Annie and Helen are competing heads. Heart: Lillian and Becca. Gut: Megan. Crotch: Rita.
Casablanca	YES. Everybody’s three-dimensional.
Chinatown	YES. They’re all three-dimensional (or no-dimensional, we never get to know his assistants at all, for instance)
Donnie Brasco	YES.  Characters are all three dimensional.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Senor Love Daddy: head/heart. Sal: Heart. Pino, Raheem and Buggin’: spleen. Mookie: gut.
The Farewell	YES. They’re all three-dimensional.  To a certain extent, the mom is head, the father is gut and Billi is heart, but they’re ultimately more complex than that.
The Fighter	YES. Despite the fact that the personalities are extreme, everyone is 3-dimensional.  You could say that Dicky and Micky are 2-way polarized: silent vs. prattling, slow-burn vs. flame-out, etc.  Dicky’s constant advice to Micky: “Head-Body-Head-Body!”, speaks to the fact that a champion must be both a boxer (head) and a brawler (gut.)
Frozen	YES. Partial polarization: Olaf: Heart/Gut, Kristoff: Head/Gut, Anna: Heart
The Fugitive	YES. Partial polarization: Gerard has head and gut but lacks heart, Kimble has head and heart but lacks gut.  They each become more complete humans over the course of the movie.
Get Out	Hmm, I guess maybe the dad is heart, the mom is head, the brother is gut?
Groundhog Day	YES. Phil = gut, Rita = heart, Larry = head (He’s dumb, but he’s the one who says things like, “we need to get going”, which is a classic head line.)
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. When with the group, Hiccup is heart, Fishlegs is head (he cites statistics), and the other four kids are all gut.
In a Lonely Place	YES. Everybody’s 3-dimentionsal.
Iron Man	YES. Partial polarization: Tony is head and gut, no heart. Pepper is head and heart, no gut. Jarvis is all-head, obviously.
Lady Bird	YES. All characters are 3-dimensional, even the teachers.
Raising Arizona	NO. Even though they have elements of caricature, they’re all actually fairly well-rounded, with elements of head, heart and gut. (Exceptions: Evelle has no head, Smalls has no heart)
Rushmore	YES. Everybody is 3-dimensional.
Selma	YES. They’re all three-dimensional.
The Shining	NO.  The characters are three dimensional.
Sideways	YES. Jack and Miles are 2-way polarized: careful pessimism vs. reckless optimism.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. The characters are all 3D.
Star Wars	YES. Four way polarization: Luke: heart, Leia (and Threepio): head, Han: gut, Obi Wan: spirit.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. Joe and Betty have two-way polarization: bitter cynicism vs. fresh-faced idealism.  Norma, despite her extremity, is 3-dimensional.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Do characters (excluding professors) speak without dependent clauses, conditionals, or parallel construction?

There are three types of sentences writers love but should never use in dialogue (unless the character is a professor or writer): dependent clauses, conditionals, and parallel construction. Let’s tackle those one by one. 

Real people avoid using dependent clauses when they speak, for good reasons:

• Our minds aren’t quite fast enough to nest clauses on the fly. 
• We know we’re always about to be interrupted, so we lay out our thoughts one at a time, in case we don’t get to finish. We do this to others, and we know they’ll do it to us, so we speak with the assumption that we’ll be interrupted. We know if we’re interrupted in the middle of a dependent clause, our entire sentence will be meaningless. 
• Even when we know for certain we won’t be interrupted, such as when we’re giving a speech, it sounds awkward to use dependent clauses. Rather than extemporaneous talk, it sounds like a prepared text. 

Writers are used to seeing their words on a page, where dependent clauses can nest comfortably, which is why we’re often shocked to hear how mealymouthed and wishy-washy our dialogue sounds when spoken out loud.

In the 2004 presidential race, linguists criticized John Kerry for using too many dependent clauses and praised George W. Bush for speaking simply, even though his faux-folksy speech patterns greatly annoyed the American intelligentsia. Kerry also got in trouble for speaking with too many conditionals. When speaking aloud, these sound like prevarication, which is inherently unsympathetic. If you say “If A and B, then C,” that sounds weaselly. If, on the other hand you say, “C! Because A! Because B! C!” then you’ve basically said the same thing but sound more like a leader.

A third sentence structure that works well when written but not when spoken is parallel construction. On one episode of The Blacklist, James Spader is tracking down a killer using a dog hair from a crime scene, and he muses aloud to his henchman, “Dogs are not our whole life, but they do make some lives whole.” Ugh.

It’s a lot of fun to use that sort of parallel construction when you’re writing something down, and it’s fun to read. It creates a bit of additional meaning to take a turn of phrase and then turn it on its head, creating a “compare and contrast” moment and giving your language a little poetic lilt, but people just don’t say that sort of thing out loud.

Once again, we don’t set up elaborate constructions because of the fear that we won’t be able to finish them. In real life, that exchange between Spader and his henchman would have gone something like this:

• Spader: Dogs are not our whole life, but— 
• Henchman: —Yes they are. I love my dog. 
• Spader: I know you do, but— 
• Henchman: —There’s no 'but' about it. He’s my huggums-wuggums. 
• Spader: I know, I know. He’s a great dog. That was my whole point, asshole! If you hadn’t interrupted me, I would have said, "But they do make some lives whole. 
• Henchman: Oh, I see what you were trying to do: "whole life/life whole." That’s cute. You should write greeting cards. 
• Spader: Go to hell. [Now it can be revealed: When I first submitted my book to Writer’s Digest, it said “Eat a dick.”] 

It’s even worse when characters turn each other’s phrases. On an episode of Agents of SHIELD, the “hacker” character confronts one of her fellow ex-revolutionaries who has betrayed the cause, and they have this exchange:

• Hacker: You’ve changed. 
• Ex-revolutionary: Good. 
• Hacker: I mean, you’re not who you used to be. 
• Ex-revolutionary: You’re not who I thought you were. 

After that third line, I thought, Why would he rephrase what he just said? Then she said her line, and I just rolled my eyes: Oh, he did it to set up her line. One reason this sort of thing doesn’t work is that people have different syntax. We build our sentences differently. It may be cute to turn someone’s phrase, but it would come out all wrong if we actually tried it because we’re not used to phrasing things that way.

While we’re at it, let’s tackle a similar problem: Never let characters extend each other’s metaphors, either. In real life, when a husband and wife are extremely like-minded, we say they “finish each other’s sentences.” Why is this such a remarkable trait? Because it’s hard to do. But you wouldn’t know that from watching bad action movies, where people do it all the time.

I only saw the trailer of the action movie Faster, but it was all I needed to see. The trailer ends with a moment that’s clearly from the end of the movie, when the revenge-seeker, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, has caught up to the slimy villain, played by Billy Bob Thornton. Looking defeated, Thornton laments, “I created my own hell.” Johnson looms over him, growling back, “And I’m the demon that crawled up out of it.”

How many things are wrong with this exchange?

• We’ll overlook the first one—people don’t tend to converse while beating each other up—because that’s a well-established convention of the genre. 
• But I still can’t accept it when one character extends another character’s metaphor. Sure, I’ll buy that these characters may shout angry things at each other, but they’re not going to listen closely to the other’s figure of speech, accept that metaphor as a good way to sum up the situation, think of a way to twist that metaphor to address their own concerns, and then continue the other person’s sentence, using the same general language and tone. 

When you’re confronting someone about something and he sums up the situation metaphorically, you’re more likely to respond, “No, it’s not like that at all, asshole.” If he's speaking figuratively at a time like that, you’ll be all the more tempted to respond in a more literal fashion, or, perhaps, nonverbally. Alas, there’s only one language we all speak, and that’s chin music.

You only have one brain, so it’s natural to write each line as a continuation of the previous one, using the same language and continuing the same train of thought. But your characters all have different brains, and they have no interest in finishing each other’s sentences—and they couldn’t, even if they wanted to.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Apatow’s reliance on improv gives the dialogue an astonishing degree of verisimilitude.
Alien	YES, only Ash the robot uses dependent clauses.
An Education	YES. Mostly. As with all screenplays written by novelists, there are a few.
The Babadook	YES.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Only Hedly does, because he fancies himself a gentlemen.  Bart, being a real gentleman, doesn’t.
Blue Velvet	YES. The sentences are all simple.
The Bourne Identity	YES. (Even the character whose name is “The Professor”!)
Bridesmaids	YES.
Casablanca	YES.
Chinatown	YES.
Donnie Brasco	YES.
Do the Right Thing	YES. everyone.
The Farewell	YES.
The Fighter	YES.
Frozen	YES.
The Fugitive	YES. even the doctors.
Get Out	YES.
Groundhog Day	YES. Sure.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES.
In a Lonely Place	YES. Dix is a writer, so he can get away with it.  She refuses to mirror his flowery language.
Iron Man	YES. Even the over-educated ones.
Lady Bird	YES. even the intellectual speaks realistically.
Raising Arizona	YES.
Rushmore	YES.
Selma	YES. Well, you can add presidents and preacher (people used to being listened to without interruption) to the professor category here.  The other characters speak simply.
The Shining	YES.
Sideways	YES. Even the novelist / teacher avoids such language.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. …but two of the main characters, Crawford and Lecter, are professors, so they get away with it.
Star Wars	YES.
Sunset Boulevard	NO. Joe’s a writer and loves pithy turns of phrase: “an older woman who’s well to do, a younger man who’s not doing too well.”

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Are there minimal commas in the dialogue?

To be far more concise and have more personality at the same time, cut out everything before or after your commas. 

The fact is, almost all dialogue with commas sounds weaselly. Characters shouldn’t preface things; they should just say them. So when characters answer questions, cut out every “yes” and “no.” Compare these exchanges:

• “Are you going to the picnic?” 
• “No, I’m going to the bar.” 

• “Are you going to the picnic?” 
• “I’m going to the bar.” 

• “Do you love me?” 
• “No, but I need you.” 

• “Do you love me?” 
• “I need you.

• “Did you hear the news?” 
• “Yes, I’m so sorry.”

• “Did you hear the news?” 
• “I’m so sorry.” 

• “Are you visiting Iowa?” 
• “Yes, we need the rural vote.” 

• “Are you visiting Iowa?” 
• “We need the rural vote.” 

Just lop off anything before a comma. I’ve gotten pretty good at this, but I still overuse “Well, I …” and “Look, I …” These are “change gear” words that allow characters to deflect or transition the conversation in the direction they want it to go, but you don’t need them. Just let the character shift on the fly, even if it results in a little grinding of the gears.

For each of these, you may be thinking, But then things might not be clear! Good! Life isn’t clear. Your goal should be to write dialogue with maximum personality and the minimum amount of clarity that you can get away with. The audience doesn’t want you to hold their hand. They’d rather catch up. They want you to play hard to get so they can have the thrill of the chase.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.
Alien	YES.
An Education	Somewhat. It’s a very formal time, and the conversations are somewhat formal.
The Babadook	YES.
Blazing Saddles	YES.
Blue Velvet	NO. Not really.  The language is oddly formal.
The Bourne Identity	YES.
Bridesmaids	YES.
Casablanca	YES.
Chinatown	YES.
Donnie Brasco	YES.
Do the Right Thing	YES.
The Farewell	YES.
The Fighter	YES.
Frozen	YES.
The Fugitive	YES.
Get Out	YES.
Groundhog Day	YES. Sure.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES.
In a Lonely Place	NO. There are a fair number of commas.  It’s a fairly writer-ly screenplay, which makes sense.
Iron Man	YES.
Lady Bird	YES.
Raising Arizona	YES.
Rushmore	NO. Max talks like a professor, but it’s supposed to be odd, so that’s okay.
Selma	NO. There’s lots of “Well, Mr. President,” in the political meeting.  There’s less in the movement meetings but they have to do it to a certain extent so we know who the historical figures are. (“John, James, the way our organization works…)
The Shining	YES.
Sideways	YES.
The Silence of the Lambs	Somewhat. Our main pair speaks rather formally. There’s lots of “Clarice” and “Dr. Lecter.”
Star Wars	YES.
Sunset Boulevard	Mostly.  It’s a little writerly, despite being so slangy.