Eighteen
Character

The Agents of the Action

We’ll get back to structure and delve much more deeply into it soon. But first, we need to switch gears.

As we’ve discussed, and then discussed some more for good measure, the most important element of any drama is the STORY.

And while the story may be predicated on a hero’s objective, essential to every good one is that the pursuit of that objective changes them in some fundamental way.

Whether a moisture farmer becomes a Jedi or a powerful newspaper mag-nate gets reduced to a helpless child, pining for his lost sled, they are either different at the end or they have discovered, along with the audience, that they were different all along.

So as we’ve said, another way to look at the unity and wholeness of a story is that it starts with a hero being one way and ends with them being another, and everything that happens in between, connected by the laws of necessity and probability, contributes to that Change of Fortune.

Hence, who a character is at the beginning, what they want, what they do to get it, and how they end up as a result, are all intrinsically tied to that story.

Therefore, while we have already determined a premise and started to look at the big events that shape our story and give it a solid structure, we can’t proceed any farther without discussing CHARACTER.

And just what does Aristotle have to say about this crucial element?

First, he observes that while drama is a representation of an action, it requires CHARACTERS to dramatize that representation since, unlike other mediums of writing, there is no narrator. We aren’t told the story; we are shown it. Therefore, the primary role of characters in a drama is just that, to dramatize the story.

Look at the term Aristotle uses for characters: AGENTS OF THE ACTION. For him, story isn’t there to serve the characters. On the contrary, story reigns supreme and the personages within it exist solely to advance the action.

And that lopsided relationship brings us to his first principal of character, Aristotle’s Guiding Precept #12:

That shouldn’t be a controversial notion, but for some reason it tends to be. In every class, I’ll have a student who has created what they think is an absolutely amazing character. Their one concern is that they simply haven’t yet found the right story to plug them into.

Guess what, no matter how fresh or interesting or funny or tragic that character might be, it is not an amazing character. It is not even a mediocre character since it isn’t fulfilling its principal function, its reason for being, to be the right character for that particular story.

So as we’ve been saying from the outset, you must start with that story and only then craft a character by making choices that best serve it.

But what kind of choices are we talking about?

Well, we’ve already discussed several crucial elements of character. We revealed how our hero must have a dramatizable objective (AGP #6), how he must undergo a change in pursuit of it (AGP #9), and how he must ultimately overcome his fatal flaw or be overcome by it (AGP #10).

If you’d been wondering why we didn’t put off discussing these elements of character until this chapter so cleverly entitled CHARACTER, hopefully by now you’ve understood the reason.

We simply couldn’t avoid discussing these three guiding precepts earlier because they are also so fundamental to our understanding of PLOT. As we’ve seen, the character’s objective propels that plot, which in turn affects the character, and ultimately leads to their Change of Fortune, for good or for ill.

So while STORY remains paramount, it simply can’t exist without those Agents of the Action dramatizing and shaping it. Therefore, to get this far, we’ve already had to make significant choices about our characters, decisions that have already helped craft our story.

But we’ve only just begun.

For Aristotle, a story is all about the action, specifically the behavior of those Agents that moves the narrative forward. And as the quote that begins this chapter indicates, those actions are determined by the two core qualities that every one of those Agents possesses: CHARACTER and THOUGHT.

While we’ve touched on these attributes briefly before, let’s take a closer look at them, and determine exactly what they mean and how we can utilize them to our benefit as screenwriters.

You’ll recall I mentioned that the term character here is not the same as we think of the word today. Aristotle is actually talking about MORAL CHARACTER, of both the Agents of the Action and of the story as a whole.

At UCLA, we often use the term MORAL DISPOSITION in place of Aristotle’s term character. And I’ll do the same here. That way I can continue to use the word character as we commonly know it, and dispense with the cumbersome Agents of the Action. Whew.

Moral disposition, just as it sounds, refers to where a person falls on the good/bad spectrum. For Aristotle, every real person falls somewhere between the extremes of pure EVIL and pure GOOD, and that unique moral center is key to describing who we are.

So characters in a drama, being representations of real people, must likewise fall somewhere on that scale. The closer they are to one of those two extremes determines their moral disposition, and thus for Aristotle, represents a critical element in defining them.

Thought, on the other hand, refers to how characters think, or more precisely, how they judge a given situation or circumstance. What is interesting about this term is that it implies Aristotle considers characters to be thinking entities. How is that possible when they’re just constructs, products of a writer’s imagination? Characters can’t think. People think. Real people.

Ah, but once again, characters in a good story, being representations of reality, must give the impression of thinking, of having reason. For it is the imitation of that crucial aspect of our own humanity, that our actions are motivated by thought, that makes them credible facsimiles.

So for Aristotle, characters can’t simply act for the purposes of advancing the narrative. Rather, their actions must be motivated from within, by their hopes, dreams, and fears, by their INNER LIFE. After all, if they appeared merely functional, it would destroy the illusion of the representation and reveal the artifice beneath our Golden Buddha.

Therefore, in stressing these two core elements, moral disposition and Thought, Aristotle emphasizes an inextricable corollary to his precept that the characters serve the story, Aristotle’s Guiding Precept #13:

Giving a character these two attributes that all real human beings possess, a clear moral disposition and the ability to reason (or more accurately, creating the impression of having that ability by ensuring all their words and deeds are motivated by thought), allows them to fulfill this dual mandate, maintaining mimesis while moving the story forward.

And they move the story forward because these two qualities, together, determine how a given character will behave in a given circumstance.

For instance, if a financially strapped character is cruel (moral disposition) and sees the surveillance camera is out of order (thought/reasoning), they may decide to mug the stranger in the elevator.

A different character, with a different moral disposition and different reasoning would have behaved very differently in that same circumstance. So it is vital to know these qualities in order to understand how a character will act or react in any given situation.

As the quote that begins this chapter reveals, that behavior then moves the story forward, resulting ultimately in a final resolution, success or failure, that reveals the moral character of the story as a whole (as we’ll discuss later in our chapter on THEME).

But for now, you must be wondering, how do we apply any of this in practical terms?

How do these observations help us to actually craft our characters, to bring them to life so that they look, sound, and act credibly while serving the needs of the story? What must we do to imbue them with the traits, attributes, and experiences necessary to help the story fulfill its function of providing the joy of learning through the experience of feeling?

Well unsurprisingly, Aristotle provides some invaluable insight into the kinds of choices we need to make in order to accomplish just that.

So let’s get to it.