What are your characters doing?

It's been a while since I wrote a blog exclusively on writing, the craft of. And that's what this is.

I've been reading "The Tools of Screenwriting" and finding it a very useful book indeed. I'm not one for formulas (except Aristotle) but I'm always keen on tools for the screenwriting toolbox - they don't necessarily make things easier but help you to incorporate those things that make your writing better.

This isn't a review and I'm not going into depth (you can buy the book) but this afternoon, as I travelled home on the train, I've been working on something that came from just a single sentence in the book:

"Determine the actions that reveal character and move the story forward first."

I'd been working on character background for the web series Winter and applying various other tools (such as Bill Martell's "just come up with scenes, lots of scenes, more than you need") but when I came across this gem I put all those aside.

There are three main characters in Winter and I knew the overall arc of the story (I had roughly plotted the acts and there is an earlier draft), so I sat down with the Protagonist and went "What does she do first?" and wrote it down, then I went through the whole story listing her actions that drive the story forward and reveal character.

The thing I observed was that nailing it down to the specific actions could not help but reveal character - a character is what they do - and character is story. It was a revealing experience to go through and nailed the story so much better than I ever had before.

Then I did the same for the other two characters. After all they are the protagonists in their own stories.

All in all it was a very productive couple of hours - I highly recommend it.

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What's on the turntable? "Will you love me tomorrow?" by Carole King from "Tapestry"

One of those moments

I had that feedback from Blue Cat the other day and I was just thinking about it. There was a throwaway comment in it "In general, you have a nice writing style and a good ear for dialogue" which I already knew.

That's not arrogance (honest) I spent 17 years writing for a computer magazine targeted at the general public. This had two effects: I know how to express concepts, and do it concisely. Screenwriting requires extreme conciseness. (That last sentence, for example, started with three times the number of words.)

As for the dialogue ... well ... I hear my characters talking. It's not that I'm taking dictation, I'm the one telling them what to say, but I can hear them.

At which point, in my thought processes, I came to an abrupt halt (good thing I was wearing my seat belt). Monsters was 7th draft when I sent it out (but it was my second script ever), Air was 2nd draft, Running was 2nd draft ... they've all done well. But Tec, Une Nuit a Paris and Unit X were all a bit rubbish (Tec less so, but still...).

It dawned on me: I couldn't hear the characters in those last three or, at best, they were a bit generic.

It makes sense, of course: If a character isn't "real" that's going to come across on the page and ultimately Character is Plot, so if there characters aren't real, the plot won't be either.

This is a good positive step because it tells me what I need to do to fix those three scripts.

I'm currently reworking Running for Blue Cat, there was one particular suggestion which was very good - giving a much tighter plot - but I don't have time to implement it because it requires a complete restructuring of the script. However I'm doing a general brush-up bearing in mind the other suggestions.

That's when I'm not working on my web project.

(Got up early this morning to do all the procrastination tasks - writing this blog wasn't on my Procrastination List.)

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What's on the turntable? "Emerald" by Thin Lizzy from "Live and Dangerous"

Emails away

Finally, a job interview for a longer contract coming up this Friday in Preston, which if I get it means I'll be able to live at home. And this Bristol contract has been extended by two days. It all helps. My record of getting contracts from interviews is 100% so far. I'm hopeful.

As mentioned two blogs ago the Unit X script is a bit bogged down because of my unfamiliarity with the US Army in 1945. Not a huge surprise.

I am pleased to say that the person I contacted off Yahoo!Answers has replied in the affirmative so I have just sent off an e-mail giving some background to the story and the kind of information I need.

It's a tricky thing, Unit X has, as one of its themes, prejudice. If you look at the US Army in 1945 the African-Americans had their own segregated divisions and most of them weren't even allowed to fight. (Not very bright "Only the white boys can die for their country".) But there were a couple of divisions, one being the 92nd that did, in Italy. They even had non-white officers. (It was a couple of years after WWII that Truman de-segregated the armed forces.)

Now a modern TV series has to have a spread of ethnic cast but that does present issues when you're dealing with history, and real history at that.

And then there are women. How do I get a woman into this script? Interestingly, in 1943 women were finally allowed to be Army doctors, because they were running out of male ones. All nurses have to be women. Up until 1905 (I think) nurses were male, then, at a stroke, the powers-that-were in the US Army declared that only women could be nurses. It's all the fault of that Nightingale woman.

It makes for interesting characters and character dynamics. And that's just the normal stuff.

But sitting down and explaining this to someone I don't know is a bit delicate, trying to phrase things so as not to offend his potential sensibilities. We'll see. In a day or two I should get a response and then I'll see what I have to change - or whether I have to find someone else to advise me.

Postscript: He replied almost instantaneously, in the affirmative and in such a way that I can stop pussyfooting around the prejudice. Hurray.

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What's on the turntable? "Joga" by Bjork from "Homogenic"

Reflections

The older members of the family have spent the evening in quiet contemplation, just reading books. The daughter is on "White Gold Wielder", she'd read the previous five Thomas Covenant books written by Stephen Donaldson but somehow we'd mislaid the sixth, so she's been stuck for over a year. I managed to get a copy. Then she can read the seventh.

The wife was on "Court of the Air" by Stephen Hunt, a new writer, I haven't read him.

And I was on "Watchmen" by Alan Moore.

If you want a lesson in character creation, read Watchmen. It really is an incredibly powerful piece of work with real characters in a nightmare world. No spoilers here, it's a must-read. It's in Time's 100 best books for a very good reason, it's very very good.

It's the kind of book that leaves you wondering where right and wrong really are.

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What's on the turntable? "Samba Pa Ti" by Santana from "Greatest Hits"

Ideas

There's a thing I say, which I might have got from someone else but I don't recall: "Ideas are the cheapest things in the universe". People have ideas all the time, 6 billion people having ideas every moment of the day (dreams are just ideas too).

Ideas also weigh nothing: Get a memory stick, weigh it, put every work of fiction, every work science, every work of art on to that memory stick and weigh it again: It's the same weight. Yet ideas change our world all the time, sometimes quite radically. They are simultaneously the most powerful things in the universe. (I could get very philosophical at this point and suggest that if that's the case then there must be something more to life than just "physics" - but that's not the point of this blog.)

So. Yesterday evening I had an idea about a TV series. It's new but also leverages existing productions and audience (that's management-speak for "spin-off"). It's also based in America. I'm not a student of US history (which would be required), but I know someone who is.

Then I started thinking about the argument that writers often have which is "which comes first plot or character?" (closely allied to the "which is more important plot or character?" which I gave my opinion on here, but can be summed up as: "Who cares? As long as you have a great story.").

For me it seems to be neither, it's always setting that comes first. I think of settings that can have interesting characters and lots of plot. So where do my settings ideas come from? Anywhere, random thoughts, whatever. Last night I mis-heard what a couple of friends were talking about and a whole string of thoughts went through my head like an express train. And I ended up with an idea. Then this morning, as I was getting up, I refined it, added the "spin-off" factor and realised I suddenly had a very saleable product.

I have absolutely no idea how to proceed with it, but that's what connections are for. E-mails to follow.

As for the week's resolutions: I finished the wine pages yesterday, have almost finished the coding I needed to do on my pet project, but haven't touched "Air" yet.

Off to Birmingham later today for a weekend with friends. Not sure whether I'll get time for any writing but my office will be going with me, though it'll probably be back to "Rubbish Internet" (tm).

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What's on the turntable? "Monday Morning" by Pulp from "Different Class"

Plot vs Character (again)

This is the perennial question ... what should comes first? Plot? Character? Both? Neither?

I was thinking about "Monsters" on the walk back from work, did I think of the characters first? Or the plot? Or the setting?

It was after Buffy had finished that I decided I wanted to write something to replace it. We'd had Alias which I sort of lost contact with somewhere into the second series. Dark Angel which eventually got quite good before it was canned. There was the faint promise of Ripper, something British by Joss Whedon, Dr Who hadn't returned and neither Supernatural or Heroes had been thought of yet (well, they might have been thought of, but anything public was far in the future).

So I thought, something similar but different. Not supernatural, not superheroic in the "this defies basic physics" sense (I love superhero stuff, I'm no slave to physics, it was just my thinking process). Definitely with a kick-ass lead teenage female.

So I decide on mutation and wrote a TV series bible for it, with lots of world creation. The lead character came first, the setting came second and that dictated the plot.

For "One Night in Paris" it was different. The setting was dictated by a song. Some of the supporting cast were suggested by the same and other songs by the same band. I had a rough plot and then I needed lead characters to fill it. I had to answer the question: "Who would spend one night in Paris and meet a prostitute?" The character was dictated by the setting and rough plot.

For "Running" again it was setting, and the dictates of the production company, that lead to character and plot simultaneously.

So which comes first?

It doesn't matter. It's totally 100% irrelevant. I might even suggest that if someone thinks it matters then they haven't yet attained a professional writing attitude -- or they're trying to sell something.

What matters is characters the audience can care about in a situation that demands their attention. Something that generates an emotional response, because that is what audiences really want. They want to laugh, cry, get angry, feel loved and loving, and all that emotional stuff. That's what really counts.

And the road you take to get to a script that delivers those things is irrelevant, as long as you do get there.

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What's on the turntable? "From Now On" by Supertramp, on their Greatest Hits compilation. Supertramp tell stories with their lyrics, well worth listening to.

Plot vs Character? Bill talks Aristotle

And I meant to mention that Bill Martell's script tip today discusses the perennial argument as to whether script or plot comes first - and he quotes Aristotle and discusses The Bank Job as his case in point.

Bill Martell is definitely worth reading, he knows his stuff.

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What's on the turntable? "Oxygene (Part IV)" by Jean-Michel Jarre from "Oxygene"