Writing Tip: How to Discover a Character’s Humanity

A writing exercise which helps you tap into a character’s inner life.

In Part III of my book The Protagonist’s Journey, I provide six writing exercises as part of an immersive character development process. One of those exercises is the Interview.

This is a form of direct engagement with your characters. How? You ‘sit down’ with each of your characters and ‘interview’ them. I like to do this while I’m at my computer, but if you feel like you can get more comfortable with a pad of paper and pen, by all means use that approach.

It might help if you imagine a scenario:

• You are someone who is interviewing them for a job.
• You’re out on a date and getting to know them.
• You’re a police detective and you have them in a holding cell interrogating them.

My favorite: I’m a psychiatrist. They are my patient. What’s more, they have been court ordered to answer my questions.

One of the writers taking my class posted this comment:

My problem more often than not is that I can’t get my characters to stop talking! But I let them go on because I’m hoping down the line that I can synthesize and pare down to something more essential. Which brings up a question: how do you synthesize/simplify without losing the humanity?

Here is my response.

If you, like I do, subscribe to the theory that your story’s characters exist — in some sort of strange, magical way … a parallel universe — then the hope is to discover their unique humanity. And of course, that includes the way they speak. So the idea is the deeper you go into a character’s personality, psyche, and background, the more they come to life … and the more they come to life, the more human they become.

If you don’t have a problem getting your characters to talk, in fact you have the opposite issue, then the concern is not what some call the receptive writing process, where we immerse ourselves in the lives of their characters and “receive” stuff from them (e.g., dialogue, memories, associations, personality, behaviors, beliefs, and so forth). The issue may be with the other part of crafting a story: the reflective writing process. That’s where we step outside of the story universe and assess what we’ve got. This pertains to everything including writing dialogue. After all, dialogue is not just conversation. Dialogue is conversation with a purpose. Rarely, if ever, do we take whole confessions or observations we “hear” our characters say when we’re receiving that stuff via interviews or monologue or stream of consciousness sit-downs, and literally transpose that in a script. Rather, we shape that dialogue in actual character sides, so that each side advances the story. Again: Dialogue is conversation with purpose.

It may be that in that process — reflective writing — we lean too heavily into our editorial mind or intellectual mind, and because of that distance from the character’s own experience, what ends up on the page feels inauthentic to who the character is. In other words, as you said, we run the risk of “losing their humanity.”

We need both: receptive and reflective writing. But it is absolutely critical that we begin with the former. We have to hear the characters. We have to feel what the characters are feeling. I tell my students all the time: “Your first draft is a journey of discovery.” A huge part of that discovery process is taking what they’ve learned about their characters through brainstorming and character development exercises, then seeing how that evolves onto the page. And the best way to do that is by writing scenes from a feeling place. You can always rewrite. You can always massage the dialogue. But you can only bring a character’s humanity to the page by knowing them intimately to the point where they come alive and share who they are with you.

So, that’s a long-winded way of saying a couple of things:

— Start with receptive writing. Immerse yourself in the lives of your characters. Put down everything you learn about your characters into some sort of document (I call it a Master Brainstorming List). Don’t prejudge anything. Put it all down on the list.

— After you’ve spent time with all of the primary characters in this type of discovery process, you can shift into reflective thinking. Step back and ask yourself: Who is this character? What is their narrative function? What is their character archetype? What subplots exist (my principle: Subplot = Relationship)?

— Write a first draft from a feeling place. Before you write each scene, get in touch with each character’s emotional state of being. What feelings are they bringing into the scene. Feel your way through the writing of the first draft of each scene.

— Then you bounce back and forth from receptive to reflective writing … reflective to receptive writing.

Your goal: Aim to hit that balance point where a character’s actions and dialogue comes from their authentic human experience, yet also serves the narrative.

Whether conscious of it or not, when we craft a story, there are times where we are inside the story universe … and other times when we’re outside it. But ALWAYS start the process this way…

Go into the story.

My book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling is an Amazon #1 Best Seller in Film and Television. Endorsed by over thirty professional screenwriters, novelists, and academics, you may purchase it here. If you want an autographed copy, go here.

For information on courses I teach at Screenwriting Master Class, go here.