The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the surface characterization ironically contrast with a hidden interior self?

All of us see ourselves as having hidden dimensions. Therefore, we identify with heroes who feel misunderstood. Why are superheroes compelling? Because of their secret identities. Batman is an avenger and a playboy. Spider-Man is a wisecracking vigilante and a nervous nerd. Superman, when written well, is a superconfident savior and a humble bumbler. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a cheerleader and a vampire hunter.

Wolverine doesn’t have a secret identity, but he’s still a contradiction in that he’s a rude, crude killing machine who is secretly sensitive and honorable. His teammate Cyclops, on the other hand, is exactly what he appears to be: He’s a sullen do-gooder on the outside and a sullen do-gooder on the inside, too. As a result, he’s never been very compelling in the comics or the movies.

Superheroes are the most extreme example, but in every genre, heroes and villains become far more compelling if they embody an inherent contradiction. Dracula is an erotic monster. Equally compelling, Frankenstein is an innocent monster. Jason from the Friday the 13th movies, on the other hand, is exactly what he seems.

Character contradictions are important no matter the genre, but in character studies and small stories, they become absolutely essential, because the hero’s contradiction is often your only story hook.

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden made one of the best movies of 2006, Half Nelson, starring Ryan Gosling as an idealistic schoolteacher who is secretly a crack addict. Fleck and Boden returned two years later with Sugar, an admirable but unmemorable movie about a Dominican baseball player in Middle America. Miguel, their main character, is in an unfortunate situation, stuck in farm teams in farm towns where he doesn’t fit in, but he offers no internal contradictions. His whole personality is “lonely Dominican ball player.” The movie just doesn’t work. You can’t write a character study about a character who has no compelling contradictions.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.  He’s a painfully shy virgin
Alien	NO. Not really.
An Education	YES.  She’s fed up with her life, ready to experiment.
The Babadook	YES. She has a potential for violence, repressed sexuality.
Blazing Saddles	Yes and no.  For the most part, what you see is what you get, and Bart is remarkably untroubled by his plight, but when we see the scene where he takes himself hostage, it’s hard not to think about W.E.B. DeBois’s description of “double-consciousness”
Blue Velvet	YES.  the creepy voyeur.
The Bourne Identity	YES. he’s conflicted and broken.
Bridesmaids	YES. A depressed, lonely person who no longer bakes.
Casablanca	YES. Heartbroken romantic
Chinatown	YES. A bitter ex-cop, totured by his failures.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  in the mob: undercover Fed, outside the mob: morally compromised lost soul
Do the Right Thing	YES. Simmering rage and irreconcilable contradictions.
The Farewell	YES. She’s hiding the fact that she didn’t get a Guggenheim fellowship and feels like a failure.
The Fighter	YES. He’s ready to break out.
Frozen	YES. She’s tortured by her relationship by her sister and her suppressed sexuality.
The Fugitive	YES. An innocent and good man.
Get Out	YES. He blames himself for his mother’s death and he fears everyone is out to get him.
Groundhog Day	YES. He’s bitterly depressed.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. He’s actually the only one who can take down a night fury.
In a Lonely Place	Somewhat, he’s a better person than he seems to be, since he stands up for the drunk and secretly sends flowers to dead girl.
Iron Man	Somewhat: people pretty much have his number, but he’s more down to earth than you would think. You could argue that he always had a conflicted guilty conscience underneath, but you could also make the case that he hasn’t had any qualms until this disaster.
Lady Bird	YES. She secretly loves Sacramento and her mom.
Raising Arizona	YES. The sweet do-gooder husband.
Rushmore	YES. The failing lost soul
Selma	YES. Weary, adulterous-but-committed family man.
The Shining	NO. Jack thinks so, but he’s wrong: they’ve got him pegged.  Danny has a dark power.
Sideways	YES. He actually knows that he’s not good enough to be a writer, and he’s hiding a lot of darkness and bitterness.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Has strengths and weakness that others can’t see.
Star Wars	YES. The would-be galactic adventurer
Sunset Boulevard	YES. he’s really hollow inside.

Marvel Reread Club Episode 15: May, 1963

Steve and Matt Bird · 015 Marvel Reread Club April 1963

Welcome back to Marvel Reread Club! Today we tackle a whopping seven issues: Amazing Spider-Man #2, Fantastic Four #14, Thor in Journey into Mystery #92, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #1, the Human Torch in Strange Tales #108, Iron Man in Tales of Suspense #41, and Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish #43. Alien radio repairmen! Hypno-fish! Making Viking movies for charity! Surprisingly ineffective machine guns! Unbreakable smoke rings! Car juggling! Momentarily non-luscious chicks!

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero have a well-defined public identity?

Compelling characters are never exactly who they seem to be. The public identity is what your character seems to be to the world, and it must contrast with his private identity. The gaps between the two are the character’s contradictions. The more contradictions, the more compelling the character.

Now just because you’re going to build a rich inner life for your character, one that contrasts nicely with his characterization, doesn’t mean the surface characterization can be generic. You can’t say, “Sure, this guy seems like a million characters you’ve seen before, but wait until you really get to know him!” Your hero’s surface characterization must also be unique and compelling in its own right.

This is an area where novelists have more leeway than scriptwriters. A novel can start by introducing the hero’s interior life, then move on to introduce the hero’s public identity. But scripted media, such as plays, television shows, and movies, almost always introduce the external first. Characters’ interactions are immediately apparent, but their inner life (without a voice-over) only becomes clear when we see how certain behaviors contradict others.

So how do you create a compelling surface characterization?

The most obvious way is to define heroes in the context of their public role (job, school, function within the family, etc.). You do this by showing unique behavior in this space that quickly defines the character. But it’s essential to derive this behavior from your personal experience or research. Your character can’t start out by simply doing the sort of thing similar characters do in other stories or your audience will instantly lose interest.

If you’re writing about a doctor, and all you’ve ever seen of doctors is what they do in other TV shows, then it will be impossible to come up with fresh and convincing behaviors to characterize your hero. Every behavior you come up with will either seem overly familiar (they do that on TV!) or false (you just made that up!).

Generic is bad. If you want to give your cop character a little personality, don’t give him a donut craving. It’s believable enough, but it’s a cliché. Instead, you should give him something specific. How about a crazy saxophone-playing cop who always has his sax around his neck? That is certainly specific, but it doesn’t ring true. The hard part is coming up with something that’s unique but also authentic. How do you do this? Research. Go on a ride-along with some cops. Very quickly you’ll notice behavior that makes you say, “A-ha! I didn’t know that cops did that, but it makes total sense that they would!”

Likewise, if you want to write about doctors, it would be great if you were a doctor yourself, but if you just spend an hour with an actual doctor, or just read one doctor’s memoir, you’ll note dozens of little behaviors that you can use. ER creator Michael Crichton was a doctor, which is how he knew that some doctors dose themselves with saline drips to get ready for work.

Aaron Sorkin, on the other hand, knew nothing about the world of computer programmers when he got the assignment to write The Social Network, but he had an amazing resource: Mark Zuckerberg had kept a stream of consciousness misogynistic rant while creating his proto-version of Facebook. That sort of primary document is just as good as being there.

If the audience finds your hero’s surface behavior compelling, then you’ve already got a big leg up. To get them to really care, however, you must soon contrast her characterization with her true character.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.  The boring creep who may be a serial killer.
Alien	YES, the chilly, no-nonsense navigator.
An Education	YES.  The good girl.
The Babadook	YES. The widowed young mom of a troubled kid.
Blazing Saddles	YES. He’s the leader of the rail gang, then he’s the sheriff.
Blue Velvet	YES. the good son.
The Bourne Identity	YES. the hyper-confident super-spy.
Bridesmaids	YES. A funny baker with a hot boyfriend.
Casablanca	YES. Cynical-but-witty power broker
Chinatown	YES. A top detective.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  in the mob: Donnie the jeweler, outside the mob: dedicated husband and agent.
Do the Right Thing	YES. The easy-going pizza delivery man, the bridge between the blacks and whites.
The Farewell	YES. Her family has great hopes for her.
The Fighter	YES. The stepping stone.
Frozen	YES. The people’s princess.
The Fugitive	YES. A famous fugitive wife-murderer.
Get Out	YES. An acclaimed photographer.  A self-confidant young black man in love with a white woman.
Groundhog Day	YES. The funny weatherman.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. He’s the village loser.
In a Lonely Place	YES. talented misanthrope.
Iron Man	YES. Maverick billionaire playboy
Lady Bird	YES. Jumping out of the car results in a bright pink cast with “Fuck You Mom” written on it, and she has pinkish hair, so that defines her strongly.  And she tells everybody her chosen name, showing she wants to fly away.
Raising Arizona	YES. The no-good convenience store robber.
Rushmore	YES. The precocious kid-playwright
Selma	YES. Inspirational leader.
The Shining	YES. Jack’s the recovering alcoholic bad dad, frustrated writer.  Danny seems innocent.
Sideways	YES. The lovable sad-sack novelist
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Ambitious, plucky rookie.
Star Wars	YES. The unhappy farmboy
Sunset Boulevard	YES. a nice guy and a good-but-not-good-enough writer.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is the hero defined by ongoing actions and attitudes, not by backstory?

Many writers assume a hero will be interesting because of an interesting backstory, but the audience doesn’t actually care much about a hero’s backstory. Heroes are interesting because of their actions and attitudes as the story progresses, not because of what happened in the past. 

Some recommend that you preplan every possible fact about your hero’s backstory, all the way back to where her grandfather went to college, but if you actually take the time to list five hundred facts about the past, then you might run into some danger:

• You’ll bore yourself to tears, getting sick of your heroes long before they have a chance to come alive on the page. 
• You’ll commit yourself to randomly selected story details and feel less willing to change your hero’s past on the fly as you write—to add special skills or tangled relationships from the past that can juice up the conflict or provide additional ironies. 
• You’ll feel compelled to reveal this epic backstory, even though the audience won’t care. 
• You’ll be tempted to use backstory as a substitute for front story, differentiating your characters based on where they’ve been in the past rather than how they act now. This is a huge mistake. You should be far more focused on your hero’s present and future. 

Every year, there are terrible TV pilots about quirky groups of cops. Each member of the team stops the story dead to reveal a long, complicated backstory, but their current plans and tactics are virtually identical.

Differentiate your characters based on their behavior, language, and attitudes. You want characters who will all react differently to the same situation. Don’t differentiate where they came from; differentiate where they’re going.

Don’t get me wrong: As long as you’re ready to know more than you show, it’s okay to write out a full bio of each character. Just because your heroes have baggage doesn’t mean they should take it out of the overhead bin during the flight.

Most of the time, the audience is content to simply guess the hero’s backstory. If your hero became a cop because he came from a long line of Irish cops, or became a preacher because he was always the most pious kid on his block, you don’t need to tell us that. We can guess.

The only good reason to reveal a backstory is if it’s an ironic backstory: Maybe your cop comes from a long line of college professors, or your preacher used to be a gang member. These are backstories worth mentioning.

In Margin Call, the big-time stockbroker Jeremy Irons quizzes his underling Zachary Quinto about where he came from. We find out that, rather than being a trained stock analyst, Quinto started out as a rocket scientist working at a jet propulsion laboratory, then jumped into finance because the money was so much better. Not only does this give Quinto an ironic backstory, but it reveals the theme of the movie: Our cleverest minds, which once helped us soar to new heights, are now put to use dreaming up crooked schemes that crash our economy and create nothing but wreckage.

Irons’s backstory, on the other hand, is never revealed, because we can guess where he came from, and that’s fine. Not every character needs to reveal backstory. Most of the time, the audience is happy to fill it in.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, almost entirely.
Alien	YES. Entirely
An Education	YES. No backstory, except “years of studying”
The Babadook	Yes and no.  Backstory looms large, but only because it is totally unprocessed and therefore totally present.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Very much so.  We get a flashback to his childhood later on, but it’s just a gag.
Blue Velvet	YES. We never learn any backstory.
The Bourne Identity	YES. For the most part.  All we or he know about him is what he can do, not who he was.
Bridesmaids	YES. Mostly, though her backstory with the bakery looms large.
Casablanca	YES. although, after we’ve come to love his current actions and attitudes, his ironic backstory proves to be equally interesting.
Chinatown	YES. The backstory is interesting, but it’s not what defines him.
Donnie Brasco	YES.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Entirely.  We never learn any backstory, other than what we can infer.
The Farewell	YES. we never learn much backstory
The Fighter	YES. Well, he, his whole family, and really his whole town is defined by his brother’s backstory (while Micky doesn’t really have one of his own), but the fact that Micky puts up with that actually does a good job of defining him.
Frozen	YES.
The Fugitive	YES. Very much so.  We get almost no backstory.  When they want to show that he’s a good guy, they don’t flashback to his heroic deeds as a doctor, they allow him to have new doctor deeds, even though he has no time for that.
Get Out	YES. Backstory becomes very important, but it doesn’t come into play until we’ve bonded to him (It does tie in to one reason we like him: He checks on the deer because nobody checked on his mom, but we only realize that on a secord or third viewing)
Groundhog Day	YES. Entirely. We get no backstory whatsoever.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES.
In a Lonely Place	YES. His problems are defined by almost getting in that fight, not by what we then find out about his stalled out career.
Iron Man	YES. We meet him in Afghanistan and love his behavior there before we get any history, which is then dealt with quickly. No flashbacks, no baggage. Compare to the sequel.
Lady Bird	YES. Jumping out of the car defines her
Raising Arizona	YES. Despite all that opening narration, we know very little backstory, just current actions.
Rushmore	YES.
Selma	YES. Very much so.  We never get much backstory at all.
The Shining	NO. Jack is defined more by his backstory than his present.  Danny is defined by his present actions.
Sideways	YES. He’s focused on his past, but we’re not. We see that it’s his action and attitudes that are the problem, not the past.
The Silence of the Lambs	Sort of. Backstory plays a big part.
Star Wars	YES.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. but much more by attitude than action.