Creating Unforgettable Characters (5 page)

Writer after writer emphasizes this aspect of writing: "Whatever I know, I know from my own experience," says James Dearden. "In the end, the writer has to draw on himself. I have Alex inside me, and Dan inside me. And if you haven't got the experience, then you have to go out and get it. All the characters I write come from me. I draw from within. I always think, How would I react in that situation?"

Carl Sautter agrees. "I think you have to find the element in characters that is you. And it isn't that every character is auto-

biographical but often you ask, 'Who is the character you wish you were? What do you wish you could get away with?' When you start writing stories that only you can write, you raise yourself as a writer to a whole new level. So, whatever it is, even when it's a supporting character, I try to find a part of it that I can really identify with personally."

Barry Morrow, who wrote the original screenplay of
Rain Man,
says, "Movies have to be about the things you're interested in or it's no fun to write them. In
Rain Man,
Raymond likes the things I like. He likes baseball and pancakes. And Charlie likes what I like—money and cars and women."

Ron Bass, who did the rewrites for
Rain Man,
adds, "I carry Charlie and Raymond inside of me. I have all their faults and their good points in my personality. Certainly there's a part of me that is frightened of human contact and overcompensates for that, and certainly I have all those defenses that Charlie has. And there's a part of me that's very soft and wants to be loved. Writing is a very intimate process, and I know when I've got the guy, and I know when I don't have the guy."

In television, often there's one writer on the show who represents the character. This person becomes a kind of plumb line or measure of whether the character works.

Coleman Luck, co-executive producer of "The Equalizer" and writer of a number of shows in the series, identifies with McCall. He was with the show for four years—almost from the beginning—and became a guiding force for a number of character decisions.

"Some writer on the show has to become that character," he says. "There has to be an empathy between the writer and the character. I don't think there's any other way to do this. There's something inside of me that's like McCall. I'm not McCall, I've not been a CIA agent, but I've lived a few years. I was an army officer in Vietnam and I was in combat when I was twenty-two, and I've been through a lot. I can understand his concerns, his sense of guilt, his need for forgiveness, his need for absolution. So if you don't have the experience of self-examination, and knowing yourself to some degree, you're never going to know your character. Flat out you are not."

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

Readers will form a visual impression of a character they meet in novels. Most novels give vivid character descriptions to give the reader an immediate sense of who this person is.

Occasionally a novel, such as
Ordinary People,
avoids physical descriptions, focusing instead on details about the character's inner life. But readers still make an imaginative leap, forming their own pictures from these psychological details.

Screenplays almost always give one or two lines of strong character details, in order to hook both the reader and potential actors.

What does a physical description do? First of all, it's evocative—it implies other aspects of the character. The reader begins to associate other qualities and imagine additional details from the few lines of description you've given.

Let your imagination play with the following description, from a script called
Fire-Eyes
by one of my clients, Roy Rosenblatt: "A sweet-faced guy who's probably done his job too long. "

What other qualities come to mind? You may start thinking about his weariness. Do you wonder if he's also cynical? You probably find him likable, because of his face, but do you wonder if he has some conflict with his job or his coworkers because he's been at it too long? Maybe he suffers from burnout; perhaps you feel sorry for him, or even empathize. Can you begin to think of the way he'd walk or talk?

In novels, the character descriptions have sometimes created details that make the character instantly recognizable. Consider the descriptions of four famous detectives: Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple.

Sherlock Holmes is described by Arthur Conan Doyle as tall and spare with a hawklike face, wearing a deerstalker hat and a long gray traveling cloak. He is cold and precise, with extraordinary powers of observation.
¹

Father Brown, created by G. K. Chesterton, is a short, chubby Catholic priest, always carrying brown paper parcels and a large umbrella. He has a vast store of humor, wisdom, and insight into human nature.
²

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot is a little Belgian detective with an egg-shaped head and a passion for order
³
; and Miss Marple is an elderly lady, "so charming, so innocent, such a fluffy and pink and white old lady, with an old-fashioned tweed coat and skirt, a couple of scarves and a small felt hat with a bird's wing. "
⁴

In scripts particularly, the physical description can be strengthened if it is also actable. That means that something is implied that an actor can use—some sense of the character's movement, or of a certain look, such as the hunch of the shoulders, the tilt of the head, a particular walk. Such descriptions give clues the actor can use to build the role. "Pretty" is difficult to act; "strong" and "handsome" are not very helpful.

In
Fatal Attraction,
Alex Forrest is defined in terms of a look, the kind of clothes she chooses, and a sense of attitude to her age:

At that moment, an extremely attractive blond girl passes by. . . . She turns and gives him a look to make hell freeze over. . . . She really is sensational-looking. She must be in her thirties, but she dresses younger, trendily, and gets away with it.

Here is a description of the main character from a film called
Dance of the Damned,
written, directed, and produced by two of my clients, Katt Shea and Andy Rubin (and available on videotape). Notice how many details there are that could be helpful to the actor—details of movement, feeling, and intention. The description conveys a sense of yearning that will play throughout the film:

The man turns away from his reflection—his acutely handsome face: ethereal, sad, with a childlike naivete. And yet there is something in the way he moves, the tilt of his head—an alien-otherness, a catlike tentativeness, a predatory grace.

Another of my clients, Sandi Steinberg, has written one of my favorite descriptions, which gives a sense of the comic dimensions that are to come in her script,
Curses:

Maria-Theresa, 50's, awakens with a start, a big woman with small illusions—180 Guatemalan pounds squeezed into a pink lace teddy. She grabs a cluster of garlic to her bosom and begins to chant.

In writing actable descriptions, it's important to be both general enough that a number of actors can play the role and specific enough that there's a definite character being created. A description that evokes other qualities and associations can engage an actor's imagination, convincing him or her that this is a character worth doing.

THE CORE OF THE CHARACTER

Characters need to be consistent. This does not mean that they are predictable or stereotypical. It means that characters, like people, have a kind of core personality that defines who they are and gives us expectations about how they will act. If characters deviate from this core, they may come across as incredible, as not making sense or adding up.

As Barry Morrow explains, "Part of the appeal of characters in a film is their predictability. You understand who they are and you have a sense of their history and their code of honor and their ethics and their world view. The character is going to have to choose and make certain choices which the audience can anticipate and enjoy watching."

Advertising executive Michael Gill concurs, and adds: "I think with characters—just like with your friends—you want a certain consistency. You don't want your friends to change every time you talk to them. You don't want them to be one place at one time and a totally different place emotionally and psychologically the next.

"What you look for is people that have known characteristics. So once you've created a successful character, then the art is to try to keep it fresh and current and at the same time maintain those consistent specific feelings and details that are very reassuring to people."

Character qualities don't exist alone. A consistent character has certain qualities that in turn imply other qualities.

For instance, let's say you're writing the next Indiana Jones story. One of your characters is a professor of religion—a man who's an expert on early Christian history who's going to hold the key to finding an important artifact. What might we expect to be true about this character?

If this religion professor has a Ph.D., we would expect that he has done a great deal of research and can easily ferret out all types of obscure information in libraries or bookstores. It would be consistent for him to be interested in related areas, such as philosophy, church history, sociology, anthropology.

Many religion professors, particularly if they've received their degrees from American universities or seminaries, have had liberal-arts backgrounds. They've taken courses in the arts, literature, probably one or two science classes. It wouldn't be inconsistent for a professor to love literature or music or art or architecture—or to be knowledgeable about these areas.

This interest in archaeology and early church history could lead to a love of travel. Perhaps he might have done some archaeological research in Turkey, or Israel, or Egypt. It wouldn't be unusual for him to know several languages, perhaps Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

Notice how one set of characteristics implies other character qualities. A person who is sophisticated enough to know the music of Mendelssohn may also know the painting of Vermeer and Rembrandt. A person who grew up on a farm probably knows something about repairing tractors and cars, and about how to read weather patterns. A person who is a successful stockbroker probably knows something about economic patterns in Japan.

Although this all seems very obvious, many characters who are defined in one way seem to have none of the qualities one would expect from that kind of a person. There are characters who are mothers who have no awareness of a child crying across the street. There are characters who grew up in Brazil, but don't react when they hear someone speaking Portuguese at a nearby table in an Amsterdam restaurant. In television shows, I've seen characters who are supposed to have photographic memories, yet can't remember well-known dates or the composer of instantly recognizable popular music.

There's a lack of consistency in the characters in these situations. If, for some reason, the writer has deliberately set up the characters in this way, then that needs to be made clear. Otherwise it will seem as if the writer is unaware of the inconsistency.

EXERCISE: Think about what qualities you would expect to see in an art dealer, a murderer, a gas station attendant. The first qualities you think about might be the obvious ones. Brainstorm long enough to come up with qualities that would be consistent but not as obvious to the casual observer.

If you have only one or two consistent characteristics, you'll be in danger of creating a stereotype. But a consistent character need not be a limited character. By brainstorming consistencies, you can find many associations that are not stereotypical. You'll still need to select which aspects of your character you'll reveal in your story. But to the reader or audience, it will be clear that you know and understand the core makeup of this type of person.

ADDING THE PARADOX

Human nature being what it is, a character is always more than just a set of consistencies. People are illogical and unpredictable. They do things that surprise us, startle us, change all our preconceived ideas about them. Many of these characteristics we only learn about after knowing someone for a long time. These are the details that are not readily apparent, but that we find particularly compelling, that draw us toward certain people. In the same way, these paradoxes often form the basis for creating a fascinating and unique character.

Paradoxes do not negate the consistencies; they simply add to them. For instance, I once had a religion professor who specialized in the New Testament. He was a rather reserved, shy, unassuming man, with a great knowledge of his material. He had written many books, and although he was modest in class, he had a strong sense of his own scholarship. He knew what he believed, and was not averse to letting his students know where he stood on any religious issue. He could be the model for the consistent character mentioned previously.

But this professor had once been a cowboy and was an expert with the lasso. About once every three or four years, someone would talk him into showing us some of his rope tricks, which always included lassoing the leg of a willing victim. Also, besides having been a cowboy, he was known to do speed racing on the salt flats of Utah. All these characteristics made the professor a fascinating character.