Essence Of Character - VII Stairs To Creating Characters That Compose Themselves
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- February 24th, 2009 |
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Creating characters that are believable takes time and discipline. Creating dynamically real individuals and not imposing your own thoughts and impressions upon them is not easy to do, and is often the difference between a novel or screenplay that sits in a closet and one that finds its artifact around townsfolk and into the hands of audiences. Disbursal your time building your characters before they enter the class of your account makes the process of writing an easier and more enjoyable ride, and creates a finished product that agents, publishers, producers and readers can truly be excited by.
You must first agree to operate from the apprehension that the third-dimensionality of your characters is not created magically. Endowment equals discipline multiplied by time and you must practice (daily) the art of developing your characters. As a development executive with LA Film Lab Entertainment (a literary development and production company), I have developed a framework to assist you in creating rich and complex characters. The complexity that you desire comes finished 1) labeling their desire essences, 2) labeling their fear essences, 3) getting circumstantial about their past, 4) labeling their behavior, 5) raising their bet, 6) not meddling in their lives, and 7) letting them play. Asking provoking questions in line with these stairs, answering them good, and so repeating the process, provides constant individual growth in your characters that mirrors life. Now let’s accept each deputise activity:
1. Label the Desire Essences of each of your main characters: The first key to deepening your activity is finding the major motivators in the lives of your characters that drive their actions. We all have deep aspirations that drive our choices, our thoughts, our actions and reactions. These needs are what differentiate us from one another and we will refer to them as “Desire Essences.” Any examples of DESIRE ESSENCES are: the desire to be intellectually brilliant; the desire to be socially famous; the desire to hide from the class; the desire to belong to a group; the desire to be loved; the desire to party; the desire to die.
2. Label the Fear Essences of each of your main characters: What is at the root of each of your characters’ darker sides? For every desire they have they should also exhibit the antithetical fear of failing at that desire. These fears will battle their aspirations for control over their behavior. Labeling and apprehension the darker sides of your characters is imperative to creating the dimensional and imperfect characters you are after. Any examples of FEAR ESSENCES are: the fear of being anserine; the fear of being ordinary; the fear of being socially exposed; the fear of being rejected by a group; the fear of being loathed; the fear of being boring; the fear of having to face life.
3. Get circumstantial with your Backstory: Human behavior is made up of a add of moments and reactions to those moments. A character’s current behavior is a battle between fear and desire and their immediate choices are made based on real circumstantial (yet cold) experiences from their past &ndash experiences that leave imprints much like DNA. Tho’ your characters should be cold of these past experiences that are influencing them, you the writer must create these in your preparation of their backstory be fully aware of them. Here is an example of what won’t benefit you vs. what will when getting circumstantial with backstory:
Bad example of getting circumstantial: Rachel is a pretty girl who thinks she is homely. She prefers to live in her books as opposed to being with friends or family. Her father has abused her sexually end-to-end her cohort. She hates attention.
Better example of getting circumstantial: On her graduation day, at a party her Mother is throwing for her, Rachel’s sexually abusive father shows up drunk and congratulates her, hugging her also closely, grabbing her rear end with both hands, and calling her pretty in front of a room full of her friends and family. She runs away humiliated and hides in her room, escaping into one of her fantasy books. That night she moves out to act with a friend and doesn’t tell her friends where she is going. Fortnight later she finds out finished another friend that her father died in a car accident. He had been drunk.
In the better example of getting circumstantial, the reader can have a intuitive reaction to the words. This is caused by the detail. The generality of the bad reaction is logical, but lifeless. In the better example it is easy to determine what the essences of our leading lady might be: desire to hide, maybe even desire to die, desire to live in her books, desire to be valued for her intellect instead of her body, fear of loneliness, fear of her appearance, fear of the opposite activity, fear of losing a loved one, fear of being abandoned.
4. Describe their Current Behavior: Accept the essences and the circumstantial examples you have now created and determine what kind of behavior your characters might exhibit as a result. Don’t limit yourself with these, but rather excite yourself with the possibilities.
Simple examples from our leading lady - a Black who: hides her body; avoids friends from her past; mistrusts anyone who comments favorably on her appearance; desires to control her education and her intellect; avoids alcohol.
5. Raise the bet: Emotions are extreme. Play in the realm of this extreme when dealing with the fears and ambitions of your characters. These essences are all encompassing; meaning that we drop our lifetimes with them. Don’t cheat your characters by being afraid to raise the bet as high as you can. Needing to find a precious endocarp to sell to an art dealer by midnight to raise the financing to economise your character’s mother’s house before the bank takes it away from her tomorrow is exciting! Look back at your own life and remember how seriously you accept your essences &ndash when your essences are threatened will you fight to extremes to defend them, just as when they are fulfilled, do you enjoy any of your greatest moments in life? Play in the realm of the extreme. Raise the bet. Your essences are life and death to you &ndash let them be that artifact to your characters.
6. Don’t meddle: Of course you might be expression to yourself, “How do I not meddle &ndash I’m the writer!” But a honest account is going to grow from your willingness to let your characters make their own decisions based on how you have defined them (which after these exercises will be in great depth). As their parent, you have to let your children go; this is the point at which your account truly begins. DO NOT MEDDLE IN THEIR LIVES. Continually remind yourself &ndash it’s not about you. You just assist the account. Let your characters make their own decisions. If you ever find yourself not knowing what decision they might make &ndash question your homework and rework their essences, behaviors and bet until their choice becomes obvious.
7. Let your characters play: Once you have developed various characters by labeling their essences, getting circumstantial, defining their behavior, and raising the bet, you are ready to begin to let them interact. It’s like the first day at a new school; ripe with possibility. When properly developed, thither is no artifact to predict how your characters will behave in any given situation, but they are so full of life and their own agendas that they are ready to interact with other characters who have been developed to the same level. If you have done the activity to get to this place &ndash this is where your characters will begin to compose themselves.
Follow these stairs to create the richer characters you deprivation to be writing.
Find the Essences:
To find the essences of your characters, you have to look to their history and their genetics. Just like real people, your characters’ current behavior is defined by their DNA combined with experiences you create in their past. We all have the basic fears and ambitions of survival, decrease, and food, so when employed on these essences focus on the ones that really drive each character. Consider ethnicity, religious beliefs, and major life events. Address activity, drugs, music, parents, siblings, education, appearance and intelligence for careful.
Start by writing out bill DESIRE ESSENCES that feel right for each main character. So determine one polar opposite of each DESIRE to create your bill FEAR ESSENCES. Go back and flip the ones that you now feel less attached to. Repeat and refine the process until you have at least ten of each for each character that really excite you.
Get circumstantial about Backstory:
Get circumstantial about how your character’s essences have come to be. Create definitive moments in your characters’ lives that detail when these fears and desires were initiated. Come up with five activity examples of moments in their lives when each of these essences was proved and eventually absolved in the name of the fear or in the name of the desire. Failure vindicates the fear and achiever vindicates the desire. Compose at least one half page of matter activity each -Yes that will give you a come of 25 pages of essence activity. Do the activity.
10 Essences (a desire and a fear for each) x 5 samples for each = 50 descriptions (each a half page)
Label the Current Behavior:
Exploitation their essences and their circumstantial past, come up with ten distribution behaviors for each character. Simple example: a character who has a desire to hide and a fear of being publicly humiliated, has a circumstantial past incident of continually having their pants pulled down in public by a relative. The current behavior - they might always act a belt, or might always look behind themselves in a real circumstantial attempt to never be humiliated again.
Raise the bet:
After looking over your newly created examples, it should be easy to determine any issues that might be going on in their lives that would increase or decrease their accent. A decrease in accent generally excites people to accept greater chances, piece an increase in accent tends to bowdlerise people’s fuses.
List five possible increases or decreases in your characters accent level.
Don’t meddle and let them play:
Now put cardinal of your fully developed characters into the same room. Implement cardinal or III increases in accent to one character and cardinal or III decreases in accent to the other character and let them bounce off of one another. Go into this exercise with no preconceived notions of what might happen. If you have done your homework, they should affect one another.*
*If you need a jumpstart &ndash add an element that one needs from the other and give the other a alcoholic reason for not deficient to provide what that character needs. Could be concrete or emotional.