Sympathetic Characters & the Perils of Backstory

Back when I worked as a reader, when I didn't "get" a character I'd often drop a backstory note about fleshing out the guy or gal in question. The producer I worked for would sigh, like he was disappointed and mutter that I was just like the studio honchos in suits, always yearning to see "how I came to be" scenes shoehorned at the midpoint of a story. He hated backstory with a passion I didn't understand when it seemed to me, fresh out of school, that learning about a character's past was a quick way to "get" him, nay, even like him.

Flashforward a couple years, on a recent draft of the much mutating crazy Bollywood musical, and I understand where that curmudgeonly independent producer was coming from, and how much backstory can be overcredited for making a sympathetic character sympathetic. Very rarely, is a clearly laid out backstory the reason you like or root for a character. Matter of fact, backstory can cripple your otherwise pretty darn compelling main guy.

So how do you create a likable protagonist? Here are a couple ideas from Mary Lynn Mercer's "The True Nature of Sympathetic Characters" which I found on a late night Google. It's intended for fiction writers so you have to chuck the last part about internalization but the rest of it is pretty on target.

• Get rid of self-pity. Readers hate it and furthermore (my opinion now) it's not active and your protagonist needs to be active.

• Scenes of goodness, "saving the cat" scenes that are unconnected to the story

• Melodramatic backstories

• Character's that don't quit. This is connected to that active protagonist. If the character cares deeply enough to continue on the quest when all around is dark, we're going to care about that character.

• Inner weakness. Conflicted characters. They have the drive to see them through the story quest but it must not come easy. Every step is hard but they can't turn back.

• Know your genre boundaries. What's fine and "humanizing" for your hero to do in a Western might be downright death for him to do in a romantic comedy.

Crazy how much the creation of a sympathetic character can have so little to do with laying out explicitly the "ghosts"/backstory of the character's life, right?

Now excuse me while I go cut the part where my protagonist talks about the car crash her mother died in, life in the orphanage and the puppy she couldn't save when the orphanage caught afire. (I kid...kinda.)

Happy writing.

photo by Crail
Originally uploaded by AndyRob

Two-Minute Screenwriting School

Analyst and story coach Dan Calvisi of Act Four Screenplays has a new Youtube channel that features snappy two minute episodes on the craft of screenwriting. While the first couple installments are pretty basic in terms of content, I love Dan's execution and their brevity. (Even Third World Girl has an attention span of two minutes!)

If you haven't seen them yet check them out here and find out what he's about to do to that cat...depending on the state of your script.

Predictable Dialogue: Examining the Dialogue Reversal

I've been getting several sets of notes on the Crazy Bollywood script before I send it off to the co-producer whose readers will also run it through the mill before we go out to talent. For the most part, the feedback lines up and the coverage is pretty good...but the other day I got a note about dialogue. The reader didn't think it was bad but thought I could work it harder in terms of dialogue reversals.

My first instinct was to bristle... even if I hadn't a clue what the heck a dialogue reversal was.

I know about reversal "reversals". They're the bread and butter of any scene, the action that turns a story in an unforeseen opposite direction, but I never thought about how the same's true for dialogue...never considered how a lot of laughs we earn as writers are really about surprises in how dialogue's constructed. I went back through the script and the reader had a point. I confess to being so focused on working structure and tone that I'd missed the opportunity to punch up the dialogue.

At any rate, now I've become obsessed with studying quotes for the dialogue reversal and trying to apply it to my own writing. Here are a few of my favorites. Study exactly where the reversal happens in each line and then go write some memorable, A-list attracting dialogue for your characters.

"Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen."
Homer Simpson

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take."
Wayne Gretzky

"Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or fourteenth."
George Burns

"I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?"
Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Happy reversing!

Photo by Zevotron

Put Down The Gloves. Don't Fight the Story.

Here's what I've learned doing the rewrite on crazy Bollywood project...
Don't decorate a plot that has no story logic. I know I'm sometimes guilty of leaving in a well-written scene that is visually exciting, lovingly crafted... but totally tacked on. You know the one. It stops the story or worse, makes the reader question the credibility of characters.

Better the imperfect, "not as visual" scene than the beautiful scene that defies logic.

Photo by mrkalhoon

The Fairy Tale Business

I had a professor at film school who used to tell us we're in the dream business, which was a nice antithesis to all the curmudgeonly folks telling us that we stood a better chance of winning the lottery than selling a spec.

He would then go on to say that every movie begins with "once upon a time" and that our craft stretches back to the cave dwellers who told stories around campfires to explain the world around them and the values they held.

Sometimes I find it helpful to frame everything I'm writing in this way. I'm able to see the big story beats from the minutiae of the details, to separate the forest from the trees. It can also help underscore the archetypal characters in your story and press you to kick your conflict up several notches. Thinking of your obstacles as dragons, your antagonist as the evil villain, I'm reminded that a story runs on conflict, on BIG problems.

(Also, doing this exercise helps later on when you come to the pitch stage so you don't get bogged down explaining cool asides that aren't essential to the story.)

I like to do this with current movies too to see how they mirror these ancient stories. Take Slumdog Millionaire for example.

It might go a little something like this.

Once upon a time, there was a lowly young pauper who fell in love with a beautiful girl but the two were separated by a rich evil prince who built a fortress for the girl and put her in it. But the pauper refused to give up faith in his first love and decided to enter a dangerous joust in the hopes that fame would lead him back to his lost love. But when the pauper improbably progresses to the final stages of the contest, the king's dragons descend on him, convinced he is a trickster who must be punished. Can he stay the course despite ever decreasing odds that he'll win the joust and be reunited with his love?

Ta-da. There's the heart of the story without getting sidetracked into our hero's relationship with his boyhood friend or mean gangsters, the funky soundtrack, or the dance scene at the end in the train station. Viewed this way, it's clear that the "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" stuff is merely an easy tool to ratchet up tension, not nearly the heart of the story.

What I find interesting about "Slumdog" is how the first decision screenwriter Simon Beaufoy took to depart from the novel completely changed the film. Recently the novelist Vikas Swarup has been complaining about not being given more deference this awards season because he wrote "Q&A" the source material behind "Slumdog Millionaire"... But the Swarup novel was all about a pauper's rise to the top on India's version of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire." End of story. It was a successful and sought after literary property, a fairy tale in its own right, but for Beaufoy it lacked heart. And so he introduced a love story and put a princess in a castle. Fable upon fable makes it truly resonate.

So, is there a fairy tale in your script...aside from the part where you sell it for a million dollars?


Illustration by artista blog

How Do I Hate Outlining? Enough to Send Myself Crazy Trying to Make It Fun!

I hate outlining so much it's a miracle I ever get anything written. To get through the outlining phase I have to perform all sorts of extravagant mind tricks to keep the tedium of plotting a story out beat by beat at bay. My process is chaotic. I jump around from strategy to strategy in order to keep myself going. If there's a method of outlining, I've tried it.

I started out with the "just write the story down on one page" method. I come from a short story background so thinking of the screenplay in prose form wasn't hard but I had to scrap the one page approach because once I started writing the screenplay, I'd write myself into corners. I needed a more detailed road map: a scene by scene that would help me get pacing right.

I tried the index card approach. Forty-five scenes tacked up to the wall, easily shuffled...but I got bored. Being a software sap who never met a new interface that didn't at least inspire some brief burst of productivity, I tried Power Structure. I'd got this when I worked at The Magazine as a freebie. I think it's important to mention this because I hated it and at the time it was kind of hokey. (There's been many updates since I had it.) I remember it being more complex than I needed. It had a couple views that I didn't even know what they did. (What's a Gestalt view?) It had graphs and color coding and I glazed over when I read about it in the way I often do when people talk about Dramatica. Third World Girl is too simple to get all this stuff.

So I went back to the index cards but, in time, I found a template that you download so you can type onto the index cards. It means the outline looks neater on the cork board and you waste some more time fiddling around which is pretty important to my "process." I also used Post-It index cards to do away with the thumbtacks. However, no sooner did I lay out Act One to the midpoint but an index card came loose and went missing and made me think, it is ridiculous to be agonizing about a lost scene because I can't figure out how to save the story in a single document format.

So I gave in to the temptation of working in Final Draft and a simple scene by scene outline. I did this with slug lines because it fooled my brain into thinking that I was writing the script and not outlining which is, did I mention, the part I really hate?

But going into Final Draft meant I got much more detailed than I needed to be. I got taken in by the moments in the individual scene and dialog ideas and in no time at all I was writing the damn scene and losing sight of the forest from the trees.

So I tried Movie Outline which is software I bought back on a job where I was outlining a docudrama. I rationalized it as a business expense and used it sporadically since. ( I'm using it on the current screenplay.) It's got its weaknesses and sometimes it feels no different than typing your scenes into a box and hitting enter, but I like that it's intuitive and that I can make a mess someplace else before I bring everything into Final Draft.

Because that's how I view the outline stage: making a mess. The idea that I'm in love with on Monday is hurled out the window by Wednesday as I search for the best elements to tell the story. I used to think of outlining as a necessary evil, something to be endured like a bad hair day. Once I found a way to get the story from the beginning to the end, that'd be my cue to type FADE IN. But the more scripts you write, the more you realize how crucial it is to go in with the best possible outline...because it's far easier to edit an outline than an entire script. And an entire script disguises things. Once you've written the dialog of your very funny mid-point scene and people really like it, it's harder to see that it doesn't convey the story point you're trying to make.

So this time, with this screenplay, while I can't say I don't still hate outlining, I'm surrendering to the process of it. I've done my time at the reading desk of a couple production companies and I'd say that ninety percent of scripts by new writers fall down in the area of storytelling. Sometimes you'll be lucky enough to find an executive who sparks to a character or story world but more often than not if the story doesn't work, the whole screenplay becomes moot because the script doesn't satisfy that primal human need we have for "once upon a time"...y'know someone goes on a journey, faces tough, increasingly dangerous dragons and returns to his world a better person with the magical elixir in hand.

Stories are our religion, guiding us how to live and outlining, figuring out how the order goes, is at the root of the task. It's not just the pre-writing duties that have to be dispensed with before the real writing begins. A few days ago in my Writers Group, I handed out my beat sheet and experienced a surreal moment, cause I never thought of myself as the kind of girl who'd be workshopping an outline but that's just the kind of girl I'm turning out to be.

Great Screenwriting Advice: "A is Better Than A+B"

I've never seen this expression written down in any book but it's one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten from a screenwriter with regard to character motivation.

"A is Better Than A+B" means that one motivation for a given action is better than two motivations. It's a counterintuitive maxim because in real life where we make pro and con lists all the time, the more reasons we have for doing something the better.

But economy is the name of the game in screenwriting so the idea is that you'll go for one strong, consistent motivation rather than muddling the character by giving him/her more than one reason for taking action.

For example, you've got a cop and you figure he wants to avenge the death of his partner but in your heart of hearts you think, that's not strong enough...he barely knew the guy. I know, I'll make it that he wants to avenge the death of his partner and that he also wants to make detective and further his stalled career. Now you've got motivation A+B. That's a whole lot better right? Uh...no. One motivation. If it's weak, raise the stakes and obstacles. Take it from an emotional Richter scale of a 2.0 to an 8. Resist the temptation to add other motivations, no matter how "connected" they might be.

I tend to fall into this trap from time to time. For example, at a recent writers group meeting I found myself explaining the action of my protagonist in terms of his backstory and realized that I was saddling the character with the dreaded "extra" motivation. So I lost the line of dialogue, problem solved.

In short: less is more, even when it comes to motive.

The Word on the Street (Overheard Dialogue at Duane Reade)

In line at Duane Reade. Two women hold magazines waiting to be rung up.

Woman A: How old are you?

Woman B: I'm an old fart. I'm turning 29.

Woman A: That's okay. Don't have a breakdown about it. Neil is 29.

Woman B: I know... Y'know, they say you shouldn't date someone who's 29.

Woman A: I've heard that too! And it totally makes sense. (inaudible) But I think it's okay if you start dating them before they turn 29.

Woman B: I started dating Neil like three months before he turned 29.

Woman A: That's okay then. That's enough time to make an impression.

Woman B: Dave was 31. You shouldn't date guys who're 31.

Woman A: 31 is the new 29.

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.
.
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And to think I had no idea of this seminal rule of dating. No guys who're 29.

Seriously though, you can't beat eavesdropping as a way to sharpen your dialogue skills. So feel better about being plain, damn nosy.

"From a Powerful Antagonist, Boundless Energy Flows"

That's the quote this writing professor used to lay on us about the importance of creating a strong antagonist to keep a script from flatlining.

Yet I just outlined the first half of the new rom com and it feels flat as a pancake with...(you guessed it) no real antagonist. In thinking about this script, I read an old draft of a wedding romcom I haven't seen "Made of Honor" where they made the "Bellamy" (the name given to the Mr./Miss Wrong in a romantic comedy) a real jerk but, for me, that approach didn't work. It just made the whole question of whether the hero would win the girl so much more inevitable. ( I guess in production they went entirely the other way cause one of the Rotten Tomato reviewers complained that the Bellamy was too likable and he couldn't see why the romantic lead would choose Patrick Dempsey.)

Another obvious antagonist in wedding romcoms is the mother-in-law but that feels too easy, though perhaps I shouldn't fight it. It's universal and credible. Also Craig Mazin at "Artful Writer" has this great post about how whenever you write to avoid something rather than write towards something you're asking for trouble. So in reworking the outline, I'll probably be looking for a new twist on the mother-in-law from hell, looking to raise the stakes, and putting my two leads in more direct competition. Because a romantic comedy is primarily the battle between two people who could be perfect for each other but are unwilling to admit it.

Back to the drawing board.

Backwards is Better

So my new favorite trick is the backwards write.

I've done this before with other scripts, usually to make sure scenes worked in isolation and to read them with a fresh eye. (You'll be amazed what jumps out at you when you start from the back of the script where your eye usually tires.) I'd also done this to check for excess flab and to make sure every scene had a story purpose, moving the action forward.

But it's only within the last couple of weeks that I used the backwards write to solve an ending that was just not working.

The backwards write is a method that story consultant Jeffrey Kitchen advocates. I like it because it focuses so exclusively on cause and effect.

It all starts with the ending of the movie. What is the image that dramatizes the object of the story? This question makes you zero in on the "moral" of the tale. Then working from the dramatization of that final object, you go back through the chain of cause and effect for each action until you arrive at your beginning.

What I find is that this really focuses the story. The question becomes less what preceded an event in the story, but more specifically, what happens in your script that causes the subsequent event to happen. For me, the backwards-write method took actions that arose to facilitate the plot and put them in the hands of the protagonist or the antagonist. I can't tell you how much more satisfying these new drafts feel.

Check out Kitchen's method here...