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CREATING COMPLEX AND COMPELLING CHARACTERS

Without a doubt, the most important component of any story is the characters. Characters are the force that drives the story forward. They are what hooks an audience in. Without interesting, well-defined characters, your story won’t work because the audience won’t care. Therefore, it is imperative that you create multi-dimensional characters. Multi-dimensional characters are characters with many layers. Like most human beings, they are not perfect. They have flaws and weaknesses that occasionally lead them astray and get them into trouble, yet these same flaws and weaknesses make them relatable.

CHARACTER BROKEN INTO THREES

To create complex characters that are multi-dimensional, you must dig deep into your characters’ heart and soul. Ask yourself, “What is this person’s agenda? What is his point of view?” There are three important layers that need to be defined in order to create a compelling character:

WHAT IS BACKSTORY?

Every one of us has a backstory. Consider yours to be everything that has ever happened to you from the moment you were born (and, depending on your life philosophy, you could go back even further) until right now, this second…this moment in time. Everyone has a different backstory. Backstory is what shapes us and makes us who we are as individuals.

Characters have backstories too. Theirs consists of everything that has happened to them up until the moment we meet them on screen. It is important that as a writer you understand the intricacies and complexities of your characters’ backstories, because everything that has happened in their past directly contributes to who they are in the present. It’s what gives them their all-important point of view. For example, a person who grew up in the inner-city projects, hungry most of the time, probably views the world quite differently than someone who grew up in Beverly Hills. Similarly, a person whose roots are in the Bible Belt probably thinks more conservatively than someone who grew up in San Francisco. Backstory shapes a character’s point of view.

Backstory is hugely complex. There are the day-to-day realities that affect a character’s viewpoint. These are the relatively small things. Then, there are the life-altering events. These are the big moments in a character’s life that change and affect everything. For example, a character who is adopted may have abandonment issues, a character whose parents are murdered may have problems with rage, a character who is fat as a child and constantly picked on in grade school carries feelings of inferiority into adult life.

To illustrate the point further, let’s go back to Thelma & Louise. Clearly, Louise’s backstory plays a huge part in why the women find themselves on the run. Had Louise not been raped in Texas, she likely would not have shot Harlan. Again, keep in mind, that once Louise put the gun to Harlan’s head, he stopped what he was doing to Thelma. It was only when he shot off his mouth that Louise blew him away. It is easy to conclude that what Harlan said brought Louise back to her own horrible moment of helplessness. This time, she had all the power and used it by killing him.

In creating characters, it is important to know the small day-to-day things about your character’s past. But it is the larger life-altering events that really define a character. Sometimes, as in real life, characters are unaware of how what happened in their past directly affects their point of view and how they react to certain situations.

CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL PEOPLE

If you can base your characters off of people you know, I say do it. When you’re writing someone you’re actually acquainted with, it’s easier to capture the character and the voice of the character. You’ll know instinctively how the character would react in any given situation. Plus, an added benefit is that if the person is interesting enough (and I assume he/she is or you wouldn’t be creating this character) you will likely have a treasure chest of stories at your disposal based on things that person has done or things that have happened to him/her.

Larry David, who is perhaps one of my favorite showrunners, recently visited Emerson College and gave an informal talk about his success in the television industry. I was amazed at how many characters in Seinfeld he said were based on actual people he knew. Even the infamous Soup Nazi exists for real. In talking about assorted episodes of both Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, David invariably came back to the fact that so many of the stories on these shows were rooted in real life people and situations.

If you opt to base characters on folks you know, don’t be afraid to use your imagination and add your own twist. You can use the real person as a jumping off point and then build the character from there.

SOME OF THE FINEST CHARACTERS ARE NOT HUMAN

Not every character you write has to be human. In fact, some of the standout characters in film and television have been nonhuman. The key to creating good nonhuman characters is to give them human qualities and traits, so that people can identify with them. Perhaps the best example of a nonhuman character is E.T. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison set us up to love this ugly little alien from the get-go. Who wasn’t tugging their heartstrings the moment the spaceship blasted off, leaving poor E.T. to fend for himself on a planet he knew nothing about? Who didn’t share his heartache brought on by homesickness, which we were continually reminded of by his constant desire to “phone home”? And who wasn’t secretly amused as E.T. slowly discovered some of Earth’s finer things like beer and Reese’s Pieces? Despite the fact that E.T. comes from a galaxy far, far away, we had a lot in common with him. This is why his character worked.

Perhaps my favorite nonhuman character in television history is Herman Munster. Herman works because mentally he is the complete opposite of what we expect, based on his physicality. Despite his enormous size and frightful face, Herman is a pussycat. He is friendly and kind, and laughs heartily at his own bad jokes. There is a child-like innocence about him, and in fact he has been known to have a tantrum or two. Herman is also incredibly naïve, having no concept of people’s reaction to him. He is always perplexed when strangers walk through walls or jump out windows in fast motion just to get away from him. All of these things make him endearing. While Herman’s character may look simple on the surface, it is actually multi-faceted and quite complex. I believe him to be one of the best-drawn nonhumans in television to date.

Other memorable nonhumans include Mr. Ed, Harry (from Harry and the Hendersons), Alf, Eddie the dog (from Frasier), and the robot from Lost in Space.

Children’s television is also over-populated with characters that aren’t human. Go no further than Sesame Street where you will find Oscar the Grouch, Elmo, the Cookie Monster, and, of course, Big Bird.

When creating nonhuman characters, you should approach them like you do human characters. Provide them with an agenda and clear-cut goals and desires. These kinds of characters can be extremely endearing if you give them a definitive point of view and human traits the audience can relate to.

With the exception of those characters in children’s television, there are not many other creatures currently on the air. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be in the future. Again, television goes in cycles. All it takes is one nonhuman character to take off in prime time, and these kinds of characters will become the flavor of the month.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR THE AUDIENCE TO LIKE AT LEAST SOME OF YOUR CHARACTERS

I often read scripts that are loaded down with despicable characters. It’s one unlikable Joe after another, with virtually no redeeming values. And I wonder to myself, what is the point?

It is important when writing a script to give the audience someone they can root for, or at the very least bond with. If an audience doesn’t like anyone in your script, they will be resistant to the story. And if they don’t like your story, it’s over. This isn’t to say that you can’t have dark characters. You can, but you need to even them out by giving them some traits that an audience can relate to.

In recent years, there has been a run of extremely successful shows where the main character is, well, for lack of a better way to put it…a bad boy. Take Tony Soprano (The Sopranos). He’s a crime boss who does despicable things. We shouldn’t like him, but we do. Why? Because he’s got a sensitive side. He might be a big thug in his professional life, but in his personal life, he’s a family man. He’s seeing a shrink, trying to get his life together. That makes him vulnerable…which is a good thing in a character. Then there’s serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter). But, Dexter’s not your typical serial killer. He only preys on those individuals who have committed the most atrocious crimes imaginable. Dexter knows if he doesn’t take care of these people himself, no one else will. So he makes it his mission to rid the world of these monsters. There’s a twisted sense of justice that we, as an audience, admire. Deep down, in places we don’t like to admit, we’re glad Dexter is giving these creeps their due. And how about Walter White (Breaking Bad)? He’s a high school chemistry teacher turned meth manufacturer. We should despise him, but we love him. Perhaps it’s because he turned to making meth after he was diagnosed with cancer. He’s got a wife, an infant daughter, and a teenage son with cerebral palsy. Walter wants to make sure they are financially taken care of when he’s gone. That almost sounds heroic, doesn’t it? Do we not silently put ourselves in Walter’s shoes, wondering, might we not do likewise if life dealt us a similar hand of cards? If you want to write an anti-hero protagonist, it is imperative you give that character a good reason to behave the way he/she behaves. Remember, if Tony Soprano were just a mobster, Dexter Morgan just a serial killer, and Walter White just a meth manufacturer, we would probably not like them very much at all.

CREATING CHARACTERS WITH OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS

In writing scripts, it is imperative that you create characters that have opposing points of view. This will create conflict, which is what drives both comedy and drama.

I believe the best-written show ever in the history of television is All In the Family. The characters are all perfectly fleshed out. Even though deep down they love and care about each other, they possess strikingly dissimilar viewpoints, which they aren’t afraid to express.

Some of the funniest scenes are between Archie and Meathead. The reason for this is that Archie and Meathead are polar opposites. Let’s take a side-by-side look at some character traits for both Archie and Meathead.

The list goes on. It is all but guaranteed that any conversation these two enter into will result in conflict. They can’t talk about work, they can’t talk about religion, they can’t talk about politics. They can’t talk about anything without getting into heated disagreements, which eventually become personal.

Imagine if we took the list of traits that we assigned to Archie and gave the exact same ones to Meathead as well. Think about how different their dialogue would be. Archie would talk about what a great president Richard Nixon is. Meathead would agree. In this scenario, where is the conflict? Where is the humor? It becomes nonexistent because these two guys now share the exact same viewpoint. Therefore, nothing they discuss is going to be too interesting. Their conversation, I’m sure you’ll agree, is much livelier when Archie and Meathead fight about Dick Nixon. The argument escalates and finally becomes personal, at which point Archie loses patience and tells Meathead to go jump in Lake Pollock (or a similar, bigoted remark).

Let’s look at Curb Your Enthusiasm, another of my all-time favorite shows. Larry (played by Larry David) and his wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines) are a May–December couple. Though obviously in love, their personalities are like night and day. Larry is a Jewish, socially inept, confrontational, sarcastic, eccentric, self-absorbed multi-millionaire. Cheryl, on the other hand is much younger than Larry. She is Christian, an extrovert/ social butterfly who cares deeply about the world around her. Put them in seemingly simple situations together and the result is some of the funniest comedy on television. This is because they come to the table with drastically different approaches and viewpoints.

When you are writing characters, be sure they approach most things from different points of view so that you can maximize the conflict, which will in turn escalate the drama and/or comedy. If you need to, make a graph of their personality traits so you can clearly see not just who they are individually, but how they will play out against your other characters.

MINOR CHARACTERS MATTER

While fleshing out major characters, it is important to spend a good chunk of time on minor characters as well. Secondary characters who are well-drawn can really take a script or series to the next level. Though it happens rarely, minor characters can break out and become synonymous with a show. For example, Frasier Crane didn’t start as a regular on Cheers, but rather he was introduced a few seasons in as a psychiatrist friend of Diane’s. The rest is TV history.

Another great example of a minor character breaking out and defining a series is that of Happy Days ’ Arthur Fonzarelli. What started as a comparatively smaller role, “The Fonz” — a leather jacket-clad, motorcycle-riding rebel — quickly became a 1970s icon at the hands of the mega-talented Henry Winkler. Yet Winkler himself would probably tell you he had some help. Show creator Garry Marshall resisted the temptation to make Fonzie the stereotypical 1950s hoodlum that we have seen time and time again. Instead, Marshall dug deep to create a perfect dichotomy of guy who is super-human, but at the same time super-accessible. A high school dropout, Fonzie was loaded with street smarts. He could get hoards of pretty women with the snap of a finger; and he could start a jukebox with the flip of an elbow. He may have been the coolest guy in Milwaukee, yet he was painfully alone at Christmas. The Fonz could go from being extremely threatening to being completely vulnerable in the blink of an eye. On the surface, many of these traits seem contradictory. But somehow, when thrown together in one character, it worked. Viewers fell in love with him. Had Marshall and the other writers not taken the time to peel away layer after layer and instead gone with the obvious, it is likely The Fonz would not be the household name that it was in the 1970s and still is even today. It is also likely that Happy Days would not have been as big a hit.

You may think that going the extra mile for minor characters even in a spec script is more trouble than it’s worth. I beg to differ. You need to make your script as fresh and as entertaining as possible all the way around, if you want it to be received in a way that will get you work. Characters are a big part of what’s going to get you where you want to go. Every one of them matters, no matter how small the role. In addition to the regular cast, also be sure to serve your guest cast. It will make the episode all the more interesting.

HOW TO WRITE QUIRKY CHARACTERS (AND WHY AUDIENCES LOVE THEM)

Over the last decade, the term “quirky” has become commonplace when referring to characters. Audiences love quirky characters because they march to the beat of a different drum. Quirky characters work because they are unpredictable. They see the world in ways that the rest of us don’t. The result is a character who feels fresh and original. Executives and producers love quirky characters because they usually stand out. Think Amy Farrah Fowler (The Big Bang Theory) or Abby Sciuto (NCIS)or Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm). The list goes on.

So, how do you go about creating people who have certain, shall we say, eccentricities? Start by observing the people around you, and I don’t mean just family and friends, though certainly that is a good starting place. What I really mean is start to consciously observe people everywhere you go: restaurants, airports, libraries. Everywhere. Listen in to conversations. You will get a wealth of information. Start a notebook, and every time something stands out to you, write it down for future reference. (Don’t count on remembering — you won’t.) When it comes time to create a character, refer back to your notes. Look through everything. Try mixing different traits from different people in order to create a whole new person. As you are creating characters, just for the heck of it, try going against type, as in a park ranger who has melissophobia (a fear of bears).

CHARACTER BIOS

Before you write, you need to take some time to flesh out your characters. I can’t stress enough how you must know these people intimately. They must come alive in your head and in your heart. They must talk to you throughout the course of your day, and in the middle of the night. And you must listen to what they have to say.

Many writers will sit down at their computers and knock out what are known as character bios. It is here that writers make decisions about who a character is and why. They define a character’s backstory, including all the important details from the moment a character was born to where he is right before the audience meets him. Most of the fine details of a character’s backstory don’t get mentioned on screen. It’s more for the writer to develop an understanding of what makes the character tick.

Character bios are a good way to get a handle on who a character is, what drives him and why. However, I think there is a danger in knowing too much about your character. I have seen writers who have notebook after notebook filled to the brim with the smallest of character traits and details. Literally, they work months fleshing out each character. Most professional writers don’t do this. They get the character basics down, and they come to terms with the life-altering moments that define the character. I have seen many a new writer get so hung up on knowing every little detail about a character that it prevents him or her from actually writing the script. I also believe that writing is about discovery. As you write, you will uncover things about your characters that will be a natural fit. If you have them too etched in stone, you won’t be open to possibilities that pop up along the journey.

TWENTY QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF ABOUT EACH CHARACTER

Below, I have listed 20 questions to help get you started in creating your own multi-dimensional characters.

Try filling in the blanks for each one of your characters. As you go, add some questions of your own as they come to you. If you do this thoroughly, you should be on your way to creating some interesting and compelling characters that will eventually take on lives that are all their own.