Black List writers on the craft: Characters (Part 1)

“If I’m creating a character from scratch, I’ll usually start by thinking about people I know, or I’ll use some version of myself, mining my own fears and neuroses and building outwards from there.”

Over the years, I have interviewed 50+ Black List screenwriters. Over the next four weeks, I am running a series featuring one topic per week related to the craft of writing.

This week: How do you develop your characters?

Reading through all of the responses was a fascinating exercise. Once again, this group of writers demonstrates there is no one way to approach the craft. Their respective approaches to developing their story’s characters vary from highly intuitive, even instinctual to the conscious use of specific techniques and writing exercises. In all cases, the goal is the same: To make the characters come alive in the writer’s imagination and onto the printed page.

Today let’s start where many of the writers begin their character work: Real people.

Chris McCoy: “If I’m creating a character from scratch, I’ll usually start by thinking about people I know, or I’ll use some version of myself, mining my own fears and neuroses and building outwards from there. I’ve never really been somebody who writes with an actor in mind, because my feeling is it’s better to create someone on the page who an actor can inhabit. “

Declan O’Dwyer: “They’re nearly always somebody I know or knew or something somebody has said to me. I find old people fascinating. I’m a people watcher. A voyeur. Mannerisms, tics, tells — anything.”

Eric Heisserer: “If I just go out to a coffee shop for a day I tend to come home with a handful of observed behaviors that I’ll decide I want to use for characters later. Sometimes it’s just grabbing a behavior based on a friend or family member, like I have a friend who believes that he sees celebrities just about every time he and I go out somewhere. He always says, ‘Hey, was that…? That looked like Tom Selleck, didn’t it?’ or ‘I think that’s Anne Hathaway.’ They never are. [laughs] He’s always wrong, but he has this way of thinking that he’s always close to a celebrity. There’s something about that behavior that I think, ‘That’s going to end up in a character at some point.’ Those get me a good deal of the way.”

Geoff LaTulippe: “Mostly, think you just have to be a student of people. If you know people, you will NEVER lack for characters, no matter what genre of script you’re writing. It helps to know unique people, and it helps even more to engage them and peel back their layers. I firmly believe that the more you have this outlook, the better your characters will be and the more the audience will cling to them. Moviegoers want to have a visceral experience — they want to feel like they know these characters onscreen. So what better way to accomplish that than work from people we all know?”

But there’s a whole other way to use the concept of ‘real people’ when working with your characters… and that’s to embrace them as real people.

Stephanie Shannon: “When you have it in your mind that your character is a separate entity that’s not just something abstract in your head, that’s a good place to start. The supporting characters, I think it’s really important to know if they do something, why are they doing it. You have to think about what would be going on in their head and why they would make a decision as opposed to any other decision they could make and how that relates to their personality. Just thinking of them as real, living, breathing people that exist somewhere outside of your imagination is really helpful for me.”

Nikole Beckwith: “I feel like when I’m writing a character it’s not all that different from meeting an actual person, you learn them as you go… I think that for me writing is definitely I get to live in a different world. As much as I might be the creator of that world, I definitely often feel like a guest in it, so I like to step in there and see what I see.”

Elijah Bynum: “I have a very distinct idea of who this person is, but the first third of the script is always the toughest to write character‑wise, because I’m still getting to know this person. Then as the story unfolds, their dialogue and their actions becomes much more natural, because this person has become, in my mind, fully realized.”

Brad Ingelsby: “I always want to know something about them before I meet them and I want to know exactly where they’re going to be a couple years after I leave them. I think that’s really important. I’ve found that audiences appreciate films where they leave the theater and say, ‘I really got to know those people.’ If there’s a history that an audience is privy to, they feel comfortable.”

Lisa Joy: “Creating a character is almost like getting to know a person. You start with the generic pleasantries, the how-are-yous and observations about the weather. But then you spend a bit more time; you dig a bit deeper; and you get to really know that person — their history, their dreams, their secrets, their fears, their tiny tics and idiosyncrasies… that’s when a character comes alive.”

Takeaway:

• If you’re looking for a starting point to develop a character, you may need to look no further than the people around you. If our goal is to create characters who come alive in the mind of a reader, absorbing the unique behaviors and personalities of the people around us can translate into our characters and help breathe life into them.
• At the end of the day, however, as writers we are compelled to a belief that our characters exist, their story universe exists. Therefore much of character development derives from spending time with them in their natural habitat.

But how? In the next few days, we will explore many different ways to do precisely that as practiced by these Black List writers.

How about you? Do you draw inspiration for your characters from real people? Are you able to think of your characters as ‘real people’ themselves?

Come back tomorrow for some brainstorming tips as well as the singular importance of getting curious about our characters, then how to use questions to pry into their inner lives.

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