Story first, then characters
I often find myself writing half of a screenplay, and then throwing it on the scrapheap because my characters have totally lost their direction. How do I build on my characters to help me, by taking the story in their own direction?
–Colin
In your case, I would urge you to really figure out the end of your story before you begin writing. Otherwise, it’s very easy to keep writing scene after scene and end up with interesting characters in a mess of a story.
One trap that many beginning writers encounter - especially those who’ve read some of the more notorious screenwriting books - is taking the truism "character-driven story" too literally. Yes, the most successful and engaging movies are those where the characters seem to be in control of their own destiny, where every turn of the plot seems to derive from an element of their personality.
But it’s naïve to think that all a writer has to do is come up with amazing characters and watch them go to work. The truth is, great characters are useless unless we see them doing interesting things - and coming up with those things is the screenwriter’s job. Don’t start writing until you know both who your characters are and what they’ll be doing.
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May 26th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
I’m so glad to see you write that. I’ve been guiltily writing “story-driven” scripts, feeling like I’ve been cheating because they were not “character-driven” in a purist sense. Damn you, Syd Feld!
May 26th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
I’ve always thought that if you develop well-rounded characters and put them in a story that at least has a clear direction, then the characters will react honestly and interestingly to the interesting story elements/obstacles you place them in and still be on track. Basically, the best of both worlds. Those are the borad strokes anyway, and it took me a long while to figure that out.
May 26th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
Although I’m a newbie to screenwriting, I’ve found that it’s much more interesting to allow the characters to flesh out the story for me. Of course, I have my “skeleton” — to use a John August analogy — in place and I know basically where the story is going when I sit down to write. But the characters often surprise me with the direction in which the story goes. Often to places I never even dreamed of! The destination is the same, but the journey there is one I couldn’t have “thought up” myself. It’s only through the characters and how they react to the circumstances, what they bring to the story from their own pasts and how they deal with events as they arise that I find myself writing something that is much, much better than I had intended.
I sure hope that all made sense.
Jonathan from NYC/LA