Character Development Technique

[Tony R]

I stumbled onto a writing exercise which I'm sure is not new or original, but I've found it very helpful in developing my own screenplays.

The exercise: write a synopses of your story from each major character's point of view, including his/her thoughts (and emotional reactions) on various plot points, events and occurances in the story, other characters' actions, his/her own actions, etc. I've found that this helps me with continuity in my story, consistency with my characters' actions, with grounding my characters' motivations in the present rather than explaining their choices by events from the distant past (which generally contributes to a certain degree of ambiguity). I've also found that using this technique helps to add depth to the characters, especially supporting characters and villains. I've done this both as a precursor to writing my screenplays, and as a rewriting technique, and have found that if I do this before writing page one (as an annex to my Character Backstory sketches) it has helped to focus me, and can take an unbelievable amount of time off of writing my first draft.

I'm wondering if anyone else has used this exercise, or a variation of it, and what other merits you may have found in its use. Also, what other "character development" exercises have you stumbled onto, or heard of?

Tony

[ksk2]

Actually, folks have been doing thsat since before Rashomon (which, in a way, the story structure was based upon).

[Steve]

Sounds like a great exercise. One book I read the author suggested writing a "glowing review" of your movie before you start where you talk about the look, genre, story, plot, etc, and then you put it away and don't look at it again till you're done writing your first draft. I haven't tried it yet but it sounds kinda interesting.

John Truby suggests that for each character you define 3 weaknesses, psychological need, moral need (ideally in opposition to psychological need) desire, values and power status and abilities. Once you've done this you can create a "conflict map" where you can examine your character's conflicting needs and powers. It's especially helpful if you're working in the action or thriller genre where the plot so often ends up being driven by a physical or psychological battle.

[wcmartell]

Tony,

This is a great technique - I use a variation: I do a read/rewrite from each character's POV to make sure their actions, reactions, and emotions fit THEIR story thread.

No matter how you do it, each character needs to makes sense .

- Bill

[callit]

Excellent suggestion, Tony.

I've been having a problem with a rewrite, where the love interest reacts to the hero's action at the decisive moment of conflict. Her reaction has seemed false, pretentious.

I'll try it tonight, let you know. Thanks.

[Tony R]

Good luck with that tonight, Callit. It's always yielded nothing but positive results when I've done it.

I like the idea of writing the "glowing review", Steve, though I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to keep my eyes off of it for the prescribed duration of the first draft :) . I've done something similar to the "conflict map" that you describe, including the idea of contrasting the psychological need with the moral need. I also like to come up with a character trait or two that seems to conflict with the basic nature of my character. For example, a hydrophobe who collects model ships. All of these things add the much desired depth to our characters.

Bill, is your exercise something like physically isolating all of the dialogue and actions for each particular character (from your completed draft) from the rest of the script and checking the continuity, character arcs, consistency of action and speech patterns, consistency of characterization, etc.? This seems like a great technique.

Tony