Lecture 1
When we start to think about a story we naturally think about three questions:
- Who is it about?
- Who matters to me?
- Who do I want to tell the story about?
The heart of character is, who matters to you. Not who you think will be interesting to other people, but what you care about.
Usually the way we start with character is with ourselves and with our family, because these are the people we know the best. And then you might move into another ring, which is your immediate community. And then into a larger ring, which includes your culture.
But the heart of an interesting character is not a series of qualities, and it’s not a cliche, and it’s not a stereotype. The heart of an interesting character is somebody that you’ve developed in your imagination, and then we work on the language to put that on the page.
When you start developing a character, think first about the physical being. Imagine its physical characteristics. Imagine it starting from the top to the toe. Start with the head/face.
How tall are they? What color are they? What kind of face do they have? Round, friendly, lantern jawed, square, movie star handsome, but when you think move star handsome that’s a cliche and it’s not enough. You have to say to yourself, what specifics does this person have? What color eye? What shape eye? What kind of brow? What kind of nose? What kind of ears? Big and floppy, small and cute. What kind of chin? What kind of neck? What kind of body? Broad shouldered, narrow shouldered. Small and wispy, big as a barn.
Once you’ve seen it in your mind, articulate it on the page. Put into words.
After you can see them, then you need to use all the other senses. You need to think about their smell, how they sound.
Lesson 2 – Brando Skyhorse
To write a believable character, that character must want something. It must have its own desires.
Write dialogues to discover the character.
A good dialogue should do two things:
- it should deepen our understanding of a character, or
- advance the plot.
Dialogues are what characters do to one another, with an active condition.
“Dialog is not backstory, dialog isn’t recitation of, this is everything that’s happened in the story up to now. Dialog isn’t a place where you sort of feed all of the mechanics of what a writer wants to tell in the story. Dialogue is something that’s organic. Dialogue is something hat should be happening in the moment between two characters. It should be an exchange, really. Basically, it should be like a barter, like one character’s trying to gt something from someone else. And so the dialogue is their tool to get, whether it’s an object, or kind of concession in some way. Dialogue is something that’s active.”
“Dialogue is a really excellent place toconvey a rising action to the reader. So by rising action I mean, you are escalating the situation in a way that makes it interesting for the reader and forces your character to figure a way out.”
Reiterate this point: dialogue is not an information delivery system. Dialogue is an action.
What makes a great character?
- flaws are important, because nobody likes a perfect character.
- desire is key: the character must want something. Only with from a desire the character will move and develop action.
- The two are connected because from a flaw there might generate a desire.
Lesson 3 – with Maria Venegas
How do you enter into a character’s point of view which is completely different from your own? A useful exercise is to write the same story from different points of view. Do it in first person, third, from someone else’s perspective.
In dialogue is very important to reveal something about the character.
In doing so, think about the good, the bad and the ugly. All aspects of the character. And create empathy.
Lesson 4
“As Michael Cunningham, the great American novelist once said, we not only add when we develop character, it’s important to subtract, to think of fiction writing as a process of subtraction. This probably dates back to a time when someone told me as a child that what Michelangelo did was take a block of marble and cut away everything that wasn’t the David. It was of course a joke, but I took it literally, and to some extent I still do. What a writer does, in a certain way, is to look at the world, leave out everything that isn’t part of the story at hand, and then examine very, very carefully that which remains. ”
You need to know so much more about your character than what you are actually going to write on paper.
You need to be focus on what’s important for the story. Cut the crap. There is a lot that could be said, but if you stay focused, eliminate the mental junk and useless stuff, then the story will simply tell itself.
Reiterate: central to character development is choose what to tell.
Two key points are essential to do this:
- Observation: how we get to know how people look like, sound like, smell like, how they move in the world, how they feel, interact,
- Empathy: we enter into the character and feel, look at the world as they do. No villain thinks “I am the bad guy”, but only “I am misunderstood.”
- Selecting: there are elements of the character that are not part of the story, the do not help us moving along, the might confuse or risk losing the focus.
So you hear, you see, you select. And your tools are observation and empathy.
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