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It's
All About A New E-book by Barry Pearson |
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Chapter Six
How to Create a Constellation of Characters That's
Right For Your Story
Musing upon constellations
If you have an affinity for the night sky, you've likely had the experience of struggling to make out the shape of a constellation you're looking for.
Oh, yeah, we can pick up the most familiar ones (The Big Dipper, Orion) quickly, but others yield their shapes only after some neck-cricking staring into the cosmos.
The fun of it, for many of us, is the satisfaction of seeing the pattern emerge from the millions of points of light up there.
It's an intriguing metaphor for story-making. In fact the two activities are connected.
They both reach back into the dim recesses of the history of the human race. And most of the constellations have their own mythology, their own tales told by successive generations of skyward-looking humans.
Seeing the patterns
Think about building your story by "seeing" the emergence of the characters in a pattern. A pattern of their own, distinct from all the other patterns of human beings that exist. Unique, yet composed of types that are common to many other stories.
If you study movies long enough, you'll see certain typical patterns of characters cropping up repeatedly.
As a storytelling form, the feature-length movie tends to be more structured than other forms. Specific patterns are followed more frequently than in other looser forms such as the novel, the short story, the biography, etc.
Movies as we know them have been in existence for less than a hundred years. In that time, though, they've evolved into a methodical storytelling form.
Several generations of professional screenwriters have come to learn what pleases and what displeases their audience, and they have come to structure their stories accordingly.
So the structured form of storytelling we see at the movies is the result of writers responding to the desires of the audience.
In a way, writing a movie is like writing a sonnet — there exists an evolved convention within a writer is expected to work. SENENSE
Of course the movie convention is much more complex and complicated than the simple Octet and Sextet of the sonnet with its abba-abba-etc. rhymes, but the relationship of the writer to the form has similarities, the most significant of which is that the form is both a blessing and a curse.
A blessing because the writer doesn't have to invent the wheel, and a curse because the creative process is never unfettered.
The good news is that, as in most other endeavors, knowledge and understanding is power.
In this chapter, I intend to impart what I know of the convention of the movie form in such a way that you will be able to use it to build a successful story from your screenplay ideas.
So let's do some stargazing into the galaxy of screenplay characters to find the patterns of the screenplay convention.
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Not all Hollywood movies parade their constellation of characters as blatantly as American Graffiti did, but most advertising displays the two main characters, and sometimes a third character as well.
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One final comparison and I'll spare you any further extension of this metaphor.
Think of the Hero as the Pole Star — He or she is the character around whom all the other characters revolve.
Bear in mind that, as I carry on this discussion about screenplay characters, I'm not prescribing a recipe. Rather I'm describing the nature of 90% of successful movies.
You're the writer. You can choose to work within the patterns I'm describing or not. But to make that choice intelligently, you need to know what the patterns are.
Trust me that the room for creativity and invention within the boundaries of the patterns is almost infinite, so set aside the fear that knowing and using the convention and its patterns will somehow stunt your creativity or board up your muse.
The Hero — then what?
When you've decided on your Hero, where do you go next?
You have multiple options, but it might be useful to have some type of guide.
How many of you remember reading a story by Ray Bradbury named A Sound of Thunder?
It’s the classic sci-fi story about a time-traveler who visits a site in the ancient past, steps on a butterfly, and returns to find his own world utterly, irretrievably changed.
I can still remember the frisson that story gave me—the excitement of the idea that the fate of all things in the world rested somehow on the nature of their connection to each other.
Fast-forward a few years.
I’m now a working writer. But I’m struggling to create satisfactory connections between my Heroes and the other characters in my stories.
Why was I struggling? Because I was thinking about story and characters in a literary way, a "straight line" way—the way print goes across a page, one element after another. HERO— INCITING INCIDENT— GOAL— RISING ACTION— etc., etc.
Even worse, I just assumed that drama consisted mainly of "conflict" between two entities: Protagonist and Antagonist (Hero and Villain).
That’s okay for Literature and stage.
Not for movies.
Sometimes my scripts seemed to have rich characters, compelling themes, and surprising plot twists, but they didn’t always work, and so I struggled.
One day, after enough years of this writer’s angst, and after studying enough movies, the light dawned.
I discovered that the essential appeal of the screen story, unlike many literary forms, was not to be found in the conflict the villain created.
Surprise!
Of course the villain is important, but in my analysis of movies, I learned that the villain often got less screen time than another secondary character who had a lot of scenes with the Hero.
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Certainly, this idea of the "second character" intrigued me, because I'd been giving the second largest chunk of screen time to the Antagonist.
Then I rationalized that, well, this other secondary character existed because the Hero had a romantic interest, or else a Buddy.
But that didn't prove out either, because I found many movies where the character who got second most screen time was neither a lover or a buddy.
When I was preparing to lead seminars on screenplay writing, I did a deeper analysis of the character layout of successful movies.
I started by studying the role of Heroes and Antagonists in hundreds of movies, and even though I was reluctant to accept the fact at first, I discovered that the typical movie story is dominated by a personal relationship between two other characters—the Hero and what I called at the time the "second most important character."
That’s all. Just those two characters. When I first explored this principle, there wasn’t any information about screenplay writing that dealt satisfactorily with this "second most important character."
I named this character the BONDING CHARACTER. And then by studying movies further, I deduced four things about the audience’s response to the Bonding Character that truly surprised me:
Defining the Bonding Character
1. The more unlike the Hero and Bonding Character are, the better the audience likes them and gets involved in their relationship.
These examples show two popular unlike pairings:
