Creating Compelling Characters

1. Introduction to Creating Compelling Characters: Hi. My name is Joshua Corte. I'm a professional screenwriter. I also am a film director, producer, sometimes, actor, and editor, and I also have over 16 years of experience teaching college courses in screenwriting, directing for film and media, producing film and media, film history, international cinema, and so on. In this course, we're going to talk about something that's important for any storyteller, and that is creating compelling characters. Stories begin and end with those characters. They are the audience's window into the narrative. So whether you're writing a novel or a short story or a play or an epic poem or a screenplay, which is my specialty, knowing how to create those indelible characters that will really connect with your audience is an absolutely essential part of the process. Throughout this course, we'll talk about how to build character designs, how to think about goals and motivations for characters, how to make characters interesting and unique, how to make your cast of characters work together. And ultimately, by the end of the course, you'll be able to put together a character profile that includes backstory, motivation, personality traits, as well as a short monologue to get a sense of the character's voice. That should give you a nice template for building out the rest of your cast and creating more and more characters. So I'm excited to get started on this journey with you to talk about creating compelling characters for your narrative fiction. I'm Joshua Corte. Let's get started. 2. Course Project: Character Profile: The project that you'll be doing for this course is a character profile. Essentially, what you're going to do is write a short biography of your character, detailing elements of their backstory. So getting into things like family of origin, education, socioeconomic status, what career path that they take in? What are the relationships like with family members or friends? Are they married, single, divorced? All that kind of stuff. As well as digging into the things that drive the character. Is there a particular wound in their past that has created some sort of a fear, some sort of motor that drives them forward. In addition to writing the short biography, which only needs to be about a half a page. You're also going to write a short monologue in the character's voice. Every human being speaks uniquely. There are certain dialects or phrases that are cultural or regional. But each individual still has their own manner of speaking? The choices of what words that they use, what phrases they use? Do they drop their Gs? Do they speak formally or informally? Do they use complete sentences? Do they use fragments? Do they start something and then in the middle of a sentence, just kind of stop and cut themselves off. What kind of personality comes across in their speech? Are they funny? Are they flirtatious? Are they very serious? Are they very intellectual? Are they kind of snobby and condescending? Are they fun and pleasant? So your character profile, is going to be a biography of your character and a short monologue. Now, the length of the monologue can vary depending on what medium you're working in. If you're writing a screenplay, for instance, the formatting for speech in a screenplay tends to bring the margins in quite a bit. So a half a page is probably plenty for something like that. If you're writing in more of a prose format, like what you might see in a short story or a novel where the margins go all the way to the usual edges of the page, then you're probably writing a speech that's, you know, a paragraph, maybe four or five lines on the page, that kind of thing. Doesn't need to mean anything massive. Just enough to really get a sense of who your character is and how they communicate. I've attached a questionnaire onto this course that you can look at that has a bunch of prompts and questions about your characters. Now, these prompts and questions will make more sense as we go through the various lessons in the course. So I would suggest holding off on filling in everything until we've covered each topic. So for instance, when we cover the topic of goals and conflict, then I would go back in and maybe fill in the goal for your character. Or you can wait and do it all at the end after you've gone through all the lessons. But the goal here is to think about all these different aspects of your character ahead of time before you write the profile, get your thoughts organized and then compose the actual character profile with the monologue and the biography. So that is the project for this course. It's a fairly simple straightforward project, but it does require quite a bit of thought to process all of these different ideas and to really think through your character and their choices and how all of the different pieces fit together. It seems very simple on the surface, but it's a little bit more complicated once you get into it. So take your time with it, don't rush it and have fun. 3. Stories Are About Characters: Think about your favorite stories, your favorite books, movies, TV shows, plays, et cetera. My guess is, if you were to make a list of your top ten or 20 favorite stories, a number of those titles would have references to the primary character, Hamlet, Henna gobbler, Frankenstein, The Godfather, Barvie Seinfeld, Iron Man. Why is this? Well, because character is fundamentally what story is about. Now, we can get into structure and all of those things as well. But all of that really derives from understanding a sense of character. The audience connects with the story through the characters. If the audience can relate to the characters, you're going to have a much easier time eliciting some sort of an emotional response from your audience. Now, why are we telling stories? There are tons of reasons why people tell stories and why people consume stories. Part of it is to create a shared cultural experience. If we look back at the ancient Greeks, the iliate and the Odyssey weren't just stories to them. They were their history. It was their culture. It was their religion. They shared those common elements of culture, religion, history, and so on, through the sharing of stories. Stories let us know that we're not alone, that the things that we feel and experience are common to others as well. Stories, of course, can be entertaining. We enjoy a story simply because we want a fun way to pass the time or an engaging way to pass the time. So if we want our audience to connect with our stories, first we have to get them emotionally. In order to do that, we need compelling characters, because, as I said, the characters are the audience's window into the story. If the audience is on board with the characters, they start to identify with the characters. They start to feel what the characters are feeling. And now, as we put our characters through the journey of the story, The audience is now feeling those things as well. Now, how do we create compelling, unique, interesting characters? Well, there are a number of ways to do that, and we're going to go through them throughout this course. I'll be referencing, you know, many different characters and stories from different medium. I'll probably tend to lean a little heavier into movies because screenwriting is my specialty, but I'll be referencing plays and books and stories and all of that stuff as well. Let's start with the first couple of things that you can do to create characters that audiences will relate to or resonate with or want to follow. Michael Hg, who's one of the great screenwriting guru. He basically breaks down into five elements. One of which is liability. Do we like the character? Looking at just about any Tom Hanks role for that or any John Candy character. You know, nowadays, Ryan Gosling plays a lot of very likable characters. There are people that we genuinely enjoy watching or reading about, or whatever. It's not necessary to make your character liable. Now, you'll hear all kinds of people, especially people who are publishers or producers or whatever. Talk about, you have to have likable characters. I've been through that situation as a screenwriter, where I've had screenplays that have been in front of producers or executives at studios where they've said, Well, the character is not liable enough. That usually misses the point. It really doesn't matter whether the characters are liable or not. What matters is, does the audience find them compelling and interesting? Do we latch onto them in some way. Think about the movie taxi driver. Travis Bickle is not a likable character. He's a horrible person. But the way Paul Schrader writes the character is such that he's interesting and compelling, and we understand the motivations that drive him. So even though the actions that he takes are pretty reprehensible throughout the film, especially by the end of the film. We understand that in a lot of cases, he's coming from a place of genuinely wanting to do something good, right? He's going to rescue this teenage prostitute from her life. But we also see that Travis takes the worst possible approach to this and does terrible, devastating monstrous things in order to save her. He's not a likable character, but he's a fascinating character. And that's the most important part. Likability is just one of the five ways that you can make your character interesting and make the audience connect to them. Making your character somehow sympathetic, meaning that they're in some kind of a situation where we feel bad for them. Think about Cinderella in any version of Cinderella that you want to think of, right? She's very put upon. She's in a bad situation being somewhat oppressed and repressed by her evil stepmother and the step sisters, and so on. And so we feel bad for her. We want her to be successful to get out of this life because we feel bad for her being in this position that she's in. Another level with higher stakes, is just to put them in jeopardy, right? Make it dangerous. If our character is in peril, now we feel a sense of, uh oh, I hope they're going to be okay. Think about the movie Titanic, right? Jack and Rose are doomed on the As soon as they go on the Titanic, we're like, Well, they're in trouble now. And now we are invested in them because we know that they're endangered. Is your character funny? That's another way to make your character resonate with the audience. You can have a horrible, miserable person, but if you make them funny, the audience is going to connect. Think about a clockwork orange. Alex is a terrible person, does awful things, rapes, murders, beats up old people. Awful stuff. But he's a funny guy. He's very witty. And so even though he's doing these just absolutely reproachul things, we're watching him or reading him and thinking, you know, he's still entertaining to us. We're still interested in what he's doing. The fifth thing that you can do to make your character compelling or interesting or resonate for the audience is to make them powerful or very skilled. They're really good at what they do. Think, you know, Liam Neeson in taken, right? I have a particular set of skills. He's really good at what he does, and that makes him interesting to us because we want to be powerful and skilled like our character is. Walter White in Breaking Bad is really good at what he does, even though, you know, as the series goes on, he becomes a worse and worse and worse person. Don Draper, in the show Madmen not a great person, right? He lies about who he is about his whole backstory. He cheats on his family, on his wife. He's sexist misogynist. But we're fascinated with Don Draper because he's really good at advertising. He's great at what he does. He's one of the best. So likability, sympathy, are they in jeopardy? Are they funny? Are they powerful or highly skilled? All right. So there's lesson number one. As you start thinking about your character, especially your protagonist, the main character in your story, think about how you can incorporate at least one or two of those elements into your character. 4. Characterization: It's an old question in psychology, whether human beings are shaped more by nature or nurture. A are personality traits inborn or are they shaped by our experiences in the world. Many of us would probably argue that it's a combination of the two, that's somewhere in the middle, that there are certain aspects of who we are that are probably genetic or probably passed on through our parents. But a lot of the things that shape us are our experiences. And in storytelling, that's especially true. The most common way to approach narrative storytelling is through a sense of cause and effect. Something happens in the story, and there's a consequence to that. And that is true of our characters as well. Characters will experience something they'll go through some kind of a situation good or bad, and it will shape who they are. It will shape aspects of their personality because they learn things and they respond to those things and they go, Alright, well, I'm not going to do that again because I'm going to get hurt. Oh, that turned out well for me, so I'm going to keep doing that. And the more that they get reinforced through those different experiences, the more it starts to shape who they are. Now, this is true of the story itself as we watch our narrative unfold, but it's also true of what we call backstory. Backstory is the idea that the character has already experienced things before the beginning of the story that you're telling. And that those things, those experiences in the past, have shaped who the character is now. Now, different types of stories and different types of characters require different degrees of backstory complexity. Some characters, the audience learns very little or nothing about their backstory. You can see this in almost any heal Pinter play. We don't know who these characters are, where they come from. It doesn't matter to the viewer or what matters is what they're doing in the story now. But from a writer's standpoint, it can be very helpful to have a sense of where the character is coming from. The man with no name trilogy, starring Clint Eastwood, the Sergio Leone films. In a fistful of dollars, we don't know anything about Eastwood's character when he rides into town. We don't know who he is or where he comes from. All we know is what he does, but something has shaped him to become the man that he is. Like any real person, our character is shaped by those experiences. So what you want to start thinking about for your character is where do they come from? What was their family of origin like? In other words, who were their parents? Did they have any siblings? Were their parents together or separated? Were they raised by their parents? Were they raised by stepparents? Were they raised by adopted parents? Were they raised by an aunt and uncle, by a complete stranger? Were they completely homeless as a child and had to raise themselves on the streets? What did that look like? For instance, did they have a good relationship with their mother or father or siblings or whoever? Are they close to them? Was there a lot of conflict? Was there, competition, like in the TV show Frazier? Frazier and Niles are very close brothers, but they're also in tremendous conflict because they're in competition with each other all the time. They're both psychiatrists. Well, I went to Harvard, Well, I went to Yale. Well, I have this many patients. Well, I have this many patients. Well, I believe this. I wrote this. I did this. I did that. And there's this constant sort of back and forth of who's the better sibling. So what is that family of origin like? In addition to that, think about it in terms of socioeconomic status. Did they grow up very poor? Did they grow up very rich? Did they grow up middle class? Did they grew up in a certain region of the country or a certain country for that matter. Did that shape who they are? Do they have good old Midwestern values? You know? Are they East Coast liberals? Are they farmers? Are they intellectuals? Are they teachers? What does the family believe in philosophically? How is the character raised? Did they have any religion in their upbringing? If so, what's their relationship with it now? Are they deeply religious? Have they rejected religion? Are they agnostic? What religion? Christianity, some form of Protestantism, Catholicism? Are they Hindu, are they Buddhist? Are they Muslim? Are they Jewish? Think about it in terms of education? What kind of education did your character have? Did they go to school? Did they go to school for long? Did they finish high school? Do they have a diploma? Do they have a GED? They have a bachelor's degree? Do they have a master's degree, a PhD? What kind of degree do they have, if any? Did they drop out of school? Were they a good student? Were they a bad student? Did they like school? Did they hate school? Did they like certain subjects and hate other subjects? Did they go to a really prestigious school? Did they go to an underfunded inner city school? Did they go to a state university or did they go to community college? Was it a private institution? Was it a religious institution? Now, maybe your character is a kid, and so these questions are still kind of influx. But if your character is an adult who has a job, what is that job? Is that the job they want? Is that the career that they're in because it's what they want to be doing, their passion, their vocation? Or is it just a day job to make money to pay the bills? Are they good at their job? Are they bad at their job? Do they like it? Do they hate it? Do they like the co workers? All of those things are worth considering. One of the other key things that I think you should think about with characters that doesn't get talked about enough, but I think it is important. What does your character do for fun? What are their interests? What are the hobbies and activities that they engage in? Do they like to read? Do they like boating? Do they like playing video games? Is there certain kind of music they like listening to? Do they like concerts, do they like sitting at home and listening to a record or a CD or the radio or what? Do they like watching television or movies? Is it like an every now and then thing? Are they really into it? What? What kind of books? What kind of plays are they into sports? What kind of sports do they like to go? Do they watch at home? Do they hang out with friends? What about their friends? Who are their friends? Have a big group of friends? They have one or two really close friends. A big part of that, of course, is that character's relationship with other characters, whether those characters are part of the story or part of the backstory. What's the relationship like with the co workers, their boss, their friends? What about romantic relationships? Is your character single? Is the character married? Are they divorced? Are they dating? Do they have kids? What are those relationships look like? So all of these things are going to help shape your character's backstory and help to inform your characters present? 5. Wants & Needs: If you're writing a narrative story, you probably are already aware that one of the fundamental elements of creating drama in your story is conflict. Now, where does conflict come from? Well, it comes from characters having goals that they're pursuing, and then they run into obstacles in that pursuit. So one of the most critical elements of defining your characters and developing your characters is figuring out what do they want Every character in a story should want something. For your major characters that want might be big to save the galaxy or to rescue the princess or to win the love of the love interest or to find their kidnapped child or to find the treasure or whatever. But even minor characters want things. Let's say your protagonist gets into a taxi cab. The cab driver wants to know where to. Where am I taking you? They want to do their job so they can get paid. Every character wants something. The bigger the character, and the more central to the plot the character is, the bigger that want needs to be, because that big want, that overall goal, what actors will call the super objective is what drives the entire narrative. Luke Skywalker wants to defeat the empire, right? He wants to rescue the princess and destroy the death star. That super objective is often complemented by a bunch of smaller objectives along the way. So again, looking at Luke Skywalker early in the film, he wants to go to the station to get power converters and hang out with his friends, right? And his uncle says, no. So then what does Luke want to do? Well, next, his goal is to get the droids operational so that they can be out working by the time that his uncle wants them out working. Well, then Archie Ditto runs away. So now Luke wants to go find Archie Detu that's the goal. And so on. And in each scene and each sequence of that story, we can follow what the characters goals are. Well, those smaller goals, those scene goals and sequence goals, build up to the larger goal. So, like a character like Rocky. In the first Rocky movie, his goal, ultimately, by the end of the film, the goal that drives the story is to go the distance with Apollo Crete. Not to win. His goal isn't to win the fight. His goal is to still be on his feet at the end of the fight, to not get knocked out or defeated. Hamlet's goal is to get revenge for the death of his father. He wants to expose Claudius as a murderer. And get revenge on him, ultimately, to kill Claudius for what he's done to Hamlet's father. So different characters are going to have different goals relative to the story that they're in, but those goals are essential in driving the story. Characters must want something. To clarify, characters wanting something is often different than a character need. Characters will often need things internally. The goals that they pursue are external goals, right? It's something that we can watch as a finish line. In Josh, Chief Brody has to kill the Shark. That's the goal. And at the end of the film, when he kills the Shark, we go, Oh, okay, he's achieved his goal. At the end of Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker blows up the death star, we go Alright, he's achieved his goal. So at the end of the story, we need to know. At the end of Hamlet, Hamlet has to either kill Claudius or die trying. We need to know definitively whether that goal has been reached or not. This is why internal goals are so difficult with dramatic writing, things like screenplays and stage plays. Novels, you can do that a little bit more easily because you can get inside the character's head in the narration in a book or a short story. With dramatic writing that's much harder to do. But there should still be some some tangible external goal that the character is pursuing. The internal goal often is a reflection of the character's needs. What is it that they need to do? They need to learn to be selfless. They need to learn how to love. So Casablanca, the character of Rick Blaine he has walled himself off from getting involved in anything that might hurt him. He had his heart broken in the backstory. And so now he's not going to risk himself for anybody. People get arrested in his bar, and he says, I stick my neck out from no one. He doesn't want to get involved in the fight against the Nazis. He doesn't want to get romantically involved with anybody for more than, like, a one night stand. Rick is isolated. He needs through the course of the story to learn how to love again, how to care, how to actually get involved with other people, and how to help fight against evil again, despite the idea that he might get hurt. So, while his goal in Casablanca might be the romantic story of winning back LSA, which in the end of the film, there's a really great ironic solution to that. It's wonderful ending. If you haven't seen Casablanca, please watch that film and study that script. It's a brilliantly written story. But in the end of the film, in order for Rick to achieve his external goal, He has to learn. He has to address his internal need, which is learning to actually care, learning to get into the fight again and fight for what he believes in. Now, sometimes the internal and external goals are in conflict, like, it's a wonderful life, right? George Bailey in that story wants to leave town. That's what he wants. He wants adventure. He wants to go out there and do things. That's his internal goal is, I want to live my life. I want to be the person I want to be. The problem with that is he has a conflicting external goal, which is to keep Old Man Potter, from basically taking over the whole town and turning it into these slums that are overpriced, where people are getting evicted and ending up homeless George's goal is to keep his father's business running. And that goal of keeping his father's business running in order to keep Potter from ruining everybody's lives in town conflicts with George's own goal of leaving town to go out and have an adventure. He can't do both, and he has to make a choice. So goals can be in conflict within a character, as well as in conflict with other character. So in the movie Black Panther, Chala wants to be king, But so does kill Monger. But they can't both be king. They both have the same goal and they can't both have it. In Rangers lost arc, Indiana Jones wants to get the arc of the covenant. And the villain Belch, also wants to get the arc of the covenant. They can't both have the arc of the covenant. So conflict comes in in that the characters are both pursuing the same goal and can't both have that goal. So, as you're developing your character, think about what is the goal that drives them throughout the entire story, and then what are some of the smaller goals that they're going to pursue along the way from scene to scene in order to achieve that super objective. 6. Character Design: If the pursuit of the super objective or the primary goal is what drives the protagonist of your story forward and drives the story itself forward, then what we have to think about is why this character is the character to pursue that goal. What makes your protagonist uniquely qualified to actually pursue the goal of the story? So think about it like this. In a Sherlock homes story, Sherlock Holmes is the protagonist of those stories, because there's really no one else who could solve those mysteries. Those particular mysteries are designed by the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a way where Holmes and his particular skills as a detective, his unique perspective on these mysteries. Holmes is the only character who could solve these mysteries because he's the only character in the story whose mind works that way. That's one of the great hallmarks of just about any detective story is the detectives intellect. The TV show Colombo, for instance, starring Peter Folk. Colombo has a really particular skill set that allows him to solve all of these murders. Right? His mind thinks in a very peculiar way. He observes details that others don't. But also the way he approaches interviewing his suspects is fascinating. This sort of nonchalant, almost slob kind of approach of seeming kind of scatter brained and bumbling, but using that as a mask of this brilliant mind that sees all these details that other people don't. In the movie Rocky, why is Rocky the character who's going to actually go the distance with Apollo Creed? Because Rocky's unique skill, the thing that makes him who he is and different from all the other fighters, all the other boxers, is that Rocky can take a beating and still keep standing and keep fighting. Rocky might not be the best fighter. But he's a fighter who doesn't go down. He stays on his feet. He keeps getting up. He's driven, and he can take a beating. In the movie, Superman, the 1978 Richard Donner film starring Christopher. Superman is uniquely qualified to solve the crisis at the end of the film when Lex Luther fires the nuclear missiles because there's no one else who has Superman's powers. Being able to fly, being able to move at super speed, super strength. That's how he catches up with the missle. There's no one else in the story that could do that. Think about Hamlet. Why is Hamlet uniquely qualified? Well, because Hamlet, first of all is the prince, so he has access to all of these behind the scenes going on in the castle. He also has the qualification of being somewhat mad. He kind of goes crazy over the course of the story, maybe or maybe not depends on how you interpret it. But he's also very, very clever, and he's going to outsmart Claudius and outfin him and get his revenge. Just like every character has a unique skill or unique strength, every character has a weakness or a fatal flaw, the Achilles heel, if you will. For some characters, that weakness might be pride, it might be anger. It might be a lack of self confidence. It might be that they're so eager, they're constantly, jumping the gun on things and screwing them up. It might be that they're just not very bright, and so they mess things up. They could be clumsy. With Superman, we can look at, you know, the idea of cryptnit, right? That's kind of the obvious one. But Superman has another weakness as well. It's more of a character weakness as opposed to, you know, this sort of external weakness. Superman's character weakness, which is also a strength is that he genuinely cares about people. That's a good thing, but it's something that his enemies exploit constantly. If he watched the film Superman two, when General Zod is fighting Superman in the third act of the film, at some point he realizes, Oh, Superman cares about these humans. Well, we can use that against him then. If we attack the humans, we can distract Superman and we can fight him while he's trying to save them. So, in that case, a strength is also a weakness. James Bond has a number of particular strengths as a character. But his biggest weakness is that he's a womanizer. That's the thing that often gets him in trouble. He's trying to seduce some female counter spy, and he ends up getting captured or in some death trap that now he's got to work his way out of with one of his gadgets or through his smarts. So, as you're developing a character, a good template for character design. Think about what is it that the character wants, right? What's the goal? The external goal? What is it that the character needs? What's the great weakness that they have? The thing that's going to keep them from getting what their goal is, that's going to prevent them from that often tied into their need. And then what is their great strength? The thing that makes them unique that ultimately is going to be the thing that allows them to resolve the conflict at the end of the story and achieve the goal. Think about those things for your character. What do they want? What do they need? What's their flaw or weakness, and what's their great strength? 7. True Character: Most narrative stories are about change. They're about characters, learning and growing, starting in one place and ending in another place. And we've talked before about how our backstory and our experiences, both as humans and in our characters can shape who we are and how we perceive the world, how we react to things in the world, how we make choices. The reality is that all the backstory and the personality traits and the things that we've used to define our characters are somewhat superficial. They're important. They're not unimportant. But the way that we really define true character in a deep way is through choice. Characters must make choices. And the choices that they make, especially when they're under pressure are how we define true character. So, if your character is presented with what we call an impossible choice, a choice between two equally good or equally bad options, the option that they pick tells us something about who they are. And it can't be between a good and a bad because that's not a choice, right? If you're picking between a good thing and a bad thing, well, I can either have ice cream or someone can break my arms. That's not a choice unless, you know, you're disturbed. It's got to be between two good things or two bad things. Can't be between a good and a bad, and there has to be pressure. Something needs to be at stake. They stand to lose or gain something based on their choice. You've probably heard of the trolley problem. You have a trolley that's out of control going out to track, and if it's not stopped, it's going to run over five people. You are standing at the lever that will change to a different track. And there's one person on that track and it'll run over that one person if you change it. Now, you can either do nothing. And five people get killed, or you can take action, and it saves those five people, but it kills one. What's the right choice? There's a classic film and novel originally called Sophie's Choice. And in Sophie's choice, part of the character, Sophie's backstory that comes out through flashbacks in the narrative is that when she was taken to a concentration camp, the Nazis made her choose which of her two children would live and which would die. It's a horrible thing to have to choose. And Sophie has to make a choice or they'll kill both children. So she has to pick one of her kids to live. Otherwise, they both die. So there's a consequence. There's pressure. She can't just dawdle. In Star Trek, too, the Wrath of Khan, the villain Khan is about to set off this weapon that's going to ultimately destroy not only his ship, but also the enterprise, where all of our heroes are. And the enterprise can't fly away because their warp drive has been damaged. So Mr. Spock, being a being of logic, makes the determination that he must sacrifice himself in order to save the ship. He is going to go into this chamber that has intense radiation in order to fix the warp drive so that the ship can get away so he can save everyone else even at the cost of his own life. There's a negative to that. Spock dies. But the positive is everyone else is saved. Now, when you're telling a story, Characters make choices that build on each other. And a vital part of creating growth through choice is by having characters taking risks. If a character is in a situation where they have to make a choice, at some point, they have to risk something. This is that idea, again, that there's something at stake. There's something to win or lose. But if the character is not risking anything. If there's nothing at stake, then they don't really learn anything and they don't row. So think about back to the future classic film. Marty has never played in front of an audience before. At the beginning of the movie, remember, he auditions for the school dance, and he gets rejected and then he's like, Oh, what if I never make it? I'm even going to send my demo to the records. What if I get rejected again? I can't take that. Well, now at the end of the second act, Marty's parents need to kiss at the dance. And if Marty doesn't get them to kiss, then he will cease to exist. His future will be erased. In order for them to kiss, they have to be able to dance, and there needs to be music playing, but the guitarist for the band had his hand injured in a previous scene. Marty now has the opportunity to play at the dance. He must take a risk by performing in front of an audience, something he's never done before, but he must take that risk in order to achieve his goal of getting his parents together so that he'll be born in the future. In that same film, shortly before that, the character of George McFly, Marty's father in the future, has to also take a risk. He and Marty have concocted this scheme by which George can see to be a hero by rescuing Lorraine from Marty who is putting the moves on her. Marty, of course, doesn't get that far in the plan because the bully, Biff shows up and legitimately tries to rape Lorraine. Horrible moment. Biff's a terrible guy. George McFly shows up ready to confront Marty in this act and finds instead that a real assault is happening. And Lorraine is looking at him. George, please help me. George McFly is a coward who walks away from fights. He never stands up to Biff or anybody else. In this moment, he has a choice to make. He can take a risk and stand up to Biff in order to save Lorraine, or he can walk away, not risk his own safety, but know that his choice has left Lorraine to be sexually assaulted by Biff. George, in that moment finds the strength to punch Biff out. And it changes the trajectory of George's future, as we see in the climax of the film when Marty finally returns to the present of 1985, and his life, his parents, they're all different, his family's different. So taking risk is a vital part of character growth and a series of choices that involve risk lead to character growth by the end of the film, because every time the character takes a risk, as you the writer, reward or punish them, they learn whether to continue that behavior or to change their approach to something different. The cumulative effect over the arc of the entire narrative is that the character grows and changes. And if the character refuses to grow and change, as is sometimes the case, then often that ends in a tragedy for the character, like in the classic story of ipus. Who doesn't heed the warnings of others. Consistently keeps making bad choices and ends up finding out some terrible things about himself and his history that ends tragically in his, you know, blinding of himself. Or Chinatown, the movie Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, written by the great Robert Town. At the end of the film, Jack Nicholson's character, Jake Gies, repeats the mistakes of his past by getting personally involved with someone he's trying to protect and ends tragically because he hasn't learned. So as you're developing your characters and your stories, think about the choices that your characters make and how that's going to drive the narrative. There's an age old argument, you know, what's more important? Plot or character? Well, the reality is, they're the same thing because the character's choices are what shape the plot. As the character makes a choice, something happens, and there's a consequence for that. So think about how are your character's choices going to shape the plot of your story? How will your character take risks that ensure growth over the arc of the narrative? That's how you build character growth, and that's how you plot your story. Okay. Okay. 8. Motivation: Okay. Narrative storytelling is about characters pursuing goals, tangible goals that have finish lines, and it's about the proactive pursuit. Characters shouldn't be passive. They need to be active. At least your protagonist needs to be active. At least at some point in the story. Maybe they begin more passive like the dude in the Big Bows. He's a somewhat passive character The first part of the movie. But as the story goes on, he becomes more and more proactive as he pursues his goal of solving this crazy, weird mystery that's unfolding around him. So if a character needs to pursue a goal. If that's what drives Native Ford, well, what is it that motivates the character to do that? They want something, they need something, but there needs to be something driving them. And this is, I think, a really important thing that I talk about with my students a lot, that often tends to get overlooked in writing classes, and that is that motor, the engine that drives the character forward, what motivates them. And it's often something fairly simple a simple concept that comes out of the character's backstory or their upbringing or simply some aspect of their personality. The character is driven by greed. The character is driven by love, by a need to be loved, a need to be better than someone else. So if we look at the TV show, Frazier, Frazier's motor, The thing that drives Frazier forward oftentimes is this sort of pompous need that Frazier has in order to be better than his brother or to be better than other people or to be elevated in the high society of Seattle. He's got to have the best seats at the opera. He's got to go to the new play on opening night. He's got to know, the best recording of any given symphony. He has to know the best wines. He wants to be the wine club president. He can't have his father's tacky Christmas decorations in the apartment because, Oh, my goodness, what would people say? Frazier is driven by his pomposity. Rick, in Casablanca, is driven by the need to not be hurt. Rick is closed off. He's an isolationist. Well, in his backstory, he had his heart broken. Ilsa ran off and left him with no real explanation. And so now Rick is afraid to get involved. He closes himself off because he doesn't want to get hurt again. As the story goes on, he has to heal that wound. And the story forces him into a situation where he must confront his own flaw and that very motor that drives him to act. And by the end of the story, the motor of self preservation of isolationism shifts into the motor of caring about other people. Not just love in the romantic sense with LSA, but also, you know, joining the fight, fighting the Nazis in the movie Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig. The main Barbie, played by Margot Robbie is driven by this idea of, you know, I'm supposed to be perfect, right? But now she's facing this existential dread. What if I'm not perfect? My feet are flat. I cellulite. What's going on? Why am I plagued by thoughts of death? I'm not supposed to have those things? I'm Barbie. She's driven by this idea first of I want to be perfect. I don't want to have feelings of existential dread. And as the movie goes on, she accepts those feelings as part of what it is to be human. To have those fears, those insecurities, to not be perfect. That the messiness is part of what makes us human and part of what makes us beautiful as humans. In Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones states his own motor very, very clearly for the audience. Fortune and glory, kid. That's what he wants in that film. That's the motor that drives him. Fortune and glory in breaking bad, the motor that drives Walter White is his own ego. It's his need to be recognized as being brilliant, as being smarter than everyone else. We know that in his backstory, he started a chemical company with two of his friends, and then he feels that he was squeezed out of the company and all the credit went to them, incentive to him. And now, as Walter is getting into his meth empire throughout the show, we see that he's constantly sabotaging his own efforts to remain anonymous. When his brother in law Hank, at the DEA thinks that he's finally caught the infamous Eisenberg, and Walter is getting off Scott free. Walter can't help but bring up the idea that this guy doesn't seem smart enough to be Heisenberg. This guy couldn't be Heisenberg. And now Hank is going to continue investigating. Because Walter's ego, his need to go recognize as a brilliant genius gets in the way of what his tangible goal is building this drug empire. That's part of Walter's law, but it's also the motor that drives him. At first, his motor seems to be, I want to take care of my family. I have cancer, I'm dying. I'm on a teacher's salary, which is garbage, and I need to be able to take care of my family even after I'm gone. That's the motor that drives him at the beginning of the series. But as the series goes on, we see that the thing that really drives him isn't his family It's his ego. And by the end in the final episode, he finally admits that he did it all for himself. So, what's your character's motive? What's the engine that drives them forward that makes them act? What's the thing that motivates your character? Why? Do they want what they want? Why do they need what they need? What makes them act that way? And if you can keep it simple, you can create a more dynamic character. Wow, but I need a lot of different things. I need to make my character complex. Great. Hamlet is one of the most complex characters in all of literature. One moment, he's pious. The next moment, he's profane. He loves aphelion, but then he treats her like garbage. Loves his mother, but then he treats her like garbage, makes ingenious decisions, and then gets careless, is quick to action and quick to anger, but then when it comes to certain moments slows down and takes too much time to think about things. Hamlet is a very complex, very very dimensionalized character. He's so dynamic, many, many different aspects of his character. But at the core, the motive that continues to drive him forward is the need for revenge. Underneath all of that complexity, it's a simple, simple motive. I think a great thing to study for this is loony tunes. I think cartoons, especially the classic cartoons made by brilliant filmmakers like Chuck Jones, are wonderful to look at for storytelling. Chuck Jones and his usual writer, Michael Maltese were great at developing very simple motors to drive the characters. Wiley coyote, he just wants to eat. Peppa Pugh just wants to be loved. Bugs Buddy wants to fight back against bullies. Daffy Duck just wants glory. Very simple motivations that drive these characters. So think about that with your character. For all the complexity, everything that drives your character to make choices should boil down to whatever that motor is that drives them. Generally speaking, in a narrative story, we see that characters are usually driven by one motivating factor and that pushes them forward. And if you keep that simple, you can develop complexity in the way that they behave around that motivation. 9. Cast Design: Now, we've been talking about how to create a compelling character, and probably most of you have been thinking about these ideas in terms of your protagonist, the main character who drives the action of the story. Or maybe you've been thinking about it in terms of your protagonist and the antagonist, the primary opposition to your protagonist. Maybe it's a villain, maybe it's not a villain. But the reality is that if you want to tell a good story and if you want your character to be effective, then you need to not just have one or two good compelling characters, but a cast of compelling characters. When you're designing your cast, You want to think about how each of the characters is going to reflect each other. Think about how your various supporting characters can provide reflections of your protagonist, either in terms of different aspects of your protagonist personality or different paths your protagonist could take. Each character should bring out something different in each other character. Which is why sometimes it's fun to pair up characters that normally aren't together in a TV show or a book or whatever. You've spent half the story not seeing these two characters together. What happens when you put them together? Does something new happen? Something fun. I remember when I was in college, I had a playwriting professor who said that anytime that he felt like a scene was getting stale, he would bring another character into it because that would change the dynamic of the scene. So, what is it that each character brings out in each other character that's different and unique? But in addition to that, how do those characters represent paths for each other? So, Luke Scott Walker is our protagonist. He's the hero of the story. He's driving the story forward. Each character that he encounters on his path, or at least each major character represents some path that Luke could take. Princess Lea, for instance, represents the freedom fighter. She's, you know, a leader in the Rebel alliance. Luke wants to fight the Empire. Once he rescues her, and they go back to the Rebel base, Luke could join the Rebellion and be a freedom fighter like Princess Lea. Onsolo and Chubaka represent the mercenaries. Onsolo even invites Luke at one point. Why don't you come with us? You're good in a fight. Towards the end of the film, when Han is saying, I'm not going to go fight in the death star battle, Luke saying, Oh, come fight. These people need you. Han says, No, Han wants to go off and continue doing his thing. He wants to be a smuggler for hire, and he invites Luke to join him. Luke could go that path. He demonstrates skills that would be valuable in Han's profession. But Luke rejects that idea. In fact, ends up going the other way around where Han ends up coming back at the end and joining the rebellion with Luke. Oviananob, the mentor character, represents another path that Luke could take. Learn the ways of the force and be a Jedi like your father. Ultimately, at the end of the film, Luke uses some of Oban's teachings in order to achieve the goal of destroying the death star. He puts away his targeting computer and uses the force to guide his feelings as intuition. Luke combines those elements with the freedom fighter elements of Lea's path. The other character who represents a major path for Luke is Darth Bader. Luke and Vader don't actually share any screen time in the original Star Wars. There's a brief moment where they see each other across a room just before Oban's big climax. And then there's the bit at the end where Vader's tie fighter is right on Luke's tail over the death star. But the two of them don't really interact But Vader still represents a path that Luke could take because he also follow the path of the Jedi much like Oban Konob had. Vader, however, is a fallen Jedi. He represents what happens when you go to the dark side. And we know from the sequels later on that Luke is tempted by the dark side at times. Now, there's one other path that Luke could take that comes out through a character in his orbit, and that's his uncle and aunt. Luke could just mind his own business and be a moisture farmer here on the desert planet tattoo. So each of those major characters represents a different way go. In addition to representing the different paths the character could take, the cast of characters can also represent different thematic ideas. So for this, let's think about the movie Batman Begins, which was directed by Christopher Now. Batman Bruce Wayne is trying to figure out what's the right path for me to take if I want to fight crime in a city with a broken justice system. Gotham City, the police force is corrupt, the local government is corrupt. So Bruce Wayne wants to figure out how do I fight crime? His first real mentor character was his father. Thomas Wayne used philanthropy. He tried to use economics in order to save Gotham City and restore a sense of justice to reduce poverty would be to reduce crime. That was his approach to that thematic question. Rachel, the love interest in the story proposes, you know, let the justice system do its job. Let the courts do their job. Bruce's reaction, that is the courts don't work. The justice system is broken, it's corrupt. That's a sense of idealism that isn't realistic. Jim Gordon, who is, I think, a lieutenant at the time in that story? He's not Commissioner Gordon yet. His approach is, I'm going to fight crime and corruption inside the broken system and see if I can change the system from the inside. The mentor character that Liam Neeson plays, Ducard or Rasa gol depending on which part of the story we're looking at. His perspective is vigilantism, right? The idea that if someone commits a crime, they should be punished according to that crime. Somebody steals, it chop their hands off. Somebody kills someone, they get executed. And Bruce rejects that as saying, well, but then we're just we're no better than them, right? If we kill someone who has killed, then what makes us different from that killer. Now, we're killers. The other character that comes into it is the mob boss mine Falcone, played by Tom Wilkinson, who essentially says that justice is irrelevant. Real power doesn't come from justice. It comes from fear. And so if you want to control the system, then you control people's fear. You make them fear you and the person who's the most feared gets to decide what we call justice and what we call crime. Bruce takes in all these different perspectives and has to choose his own path. Based on all of those? So it's a reflection of the action he takes, but also the ideology and the theme of the story. So when you're developing your cast of characters, you're supporting characters. Think about it in those terms. How does each character reflect a potential path for your hero for your protagonist? And how does the protagonist reflect a path for the other characters as well? And then how do each of them contribute to the moral argument of the story? What's happening in terms of theme. Everybody brings their own perspective. If multiple characters are saying the exact same thing, then why do you need multiple characters to make it one character. And cut down your cast that way. So think about how those characters can make those reflections of the protagonists journey, as well as their ideology. 10. Character Function: So we've been talking about the cast of characters and how supporting characters can reflect different aspects of your protagonist. Well, there's another layer to developing your cast of characters that I think is really important, and that's the idea of character archetypes. Now, some of you may be familiar with the idea of character archetypes. It goes back to young in psychology, the idea of the collective unconscious, and all kinds of stuff. The idea that hroughout history, throughout various cultures, there are different representations of kinds of characters that show up either in dreams or in stories that are common, even in stories that are separated by generations and oceans. And so that's a lot of kind of esoteric stuff to say to ultimately get to the point that what we really want to think about here is function of character. Characters serve functions. What are they there to do in the story? Your protagonist in mythic terms is a hero. The protagonist is the character who drives the story forward. They're the ones who make the most important choices. Ultimately, they're the one that has to resolve the primary conflict and achieve the primary goal, the super objective that ends the story. Heroes sometimes are willing and gung ho. They want to jump right in. Ryder's lost arc? Indiana Jones is ready to go. He wants to find that arc In the first Wonder Woman movie, Diana wants to go and, you know, try to save humanity from the God of War. Most characters are what we call reluctant heroes, which is a common thing just in real life, right? When we're faced with a big life changing situation, our first reaction is often, no, I don't want to do that. I'm too busy for that. Oh, I'm not good enough for that. And so we see characters doing that. Luke Skywalker makes excuses. He's been talking the whole time about how he wants to leave toen and go off and have adventures. And as soon as the opportunity comes up to have an adventure. Oh, I got I got to go do work for my uncle. A human reaction. So the vast majority of characters tend to be reluctant heroes. They aren't going to just dive right into the story. They have to be coaxed or something happens to motivate them. Hamlet isn't trying to get revenge until the ghost of his father shows up and says, Yeah, my brother killed me. Go get them. There are also what are called catalyst heroes. These are heroes who don't really have much of an arc. They don't really grow and change much, but they inspire growth and change in others. Ferris Bueller is a pretty good example of that from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Or a really great example from the movie Beverly Hills coop, Axel Foley, played by Eddie Murphy. He doesn't really change. He's still the same kind of smart Alec at the end, who plays by his own rules, and he inspires the other kind of uptight characters to loosen up over the course of the story. Heroes will have mentors. There will be characters who are there to guide the hero, whether that's guiding them in wisdom in good things, like, you know, Obi Wan or Gandolf or they could also be dark mentors or fallen mentors like the emperor in Star Wars, Emperor Palpate who is a dark mentor for Luke Skywalker and the prequels for Ankin Sky Walker. There are fallen mentors like the Woody Harrison character in the hunger games, who was once a hero himself and has fallen from Grace and is now kind of, you know, a drunken loser, but he's taking up the role of being a mentor now to the next generation of heroes. So there are lots of different was to approach a mentor, but mentors are characters who give advice, who give guidance. Oftentimes, we'll give the hero gifts. Obion gives Luke the lightsaber in the James Bond movies C gives bond you know, various devices. One of the big archetypes, of course is the villain. The villain is an antagonist that is there to oppose the hero outright often for evil or sinister purposes. So Darth Vader, Simon, and Lord of the Rings. Any of the bad guys in, like, a cop movie or a spy movie, James Bond, that kind of thing, a superhero the joker is a villain. The love interest is another major archetype. This is the character that the hero is either in love with or is going to be in love with or is in love with the hero. Part of what makes a love interest character interesting is that they often know the hero better than the hero knows themselves. They'll be there to kind of push the hero to be better than who they are. In Casablanca, Ilsa knows Rick better than anybody. Even though Rick has put up these walls of being an isolationist, Ilsa is the one that's saying, This isn't really who you are. I know who you really are. And there's conflict because she's pushing him to be something that he on wasn't isn't anymore. She wants him to put aside that mask that he's wearing and reveal the truth of who his real essence is. Adrian serves that purpose in the Rocky movies. Adrian's the love interest for Rocky. She's the one that says Rocky, you're not a loser. You're a good man. You don't have to prove anything to anybody. Similar to the love interest is the buddy or ally character. These are characters who are there to support the hero. They often will challenge the hero. Ultimately, they're there to be on the same side. In Star Trek, Kirk is the hero, and then we have Spock and bones as the allies. But they represent very different paths that Kirk could take the logic and the emotion. In Star Wars, you know, Han Solo is a buddy character, an ally for Luke Skywalker. In Casablanca, Sam, the pianist is Rick's buddy. In Lord of the Rings, Sam is Rodo's buddy character. They are also what are called threshold guardians. Threshold guardians are characters whose function is to block the path of the hero. If you think of the movie labyrinth. Jennifer Connolly's character is the protagonist of that film, and there's all these different things along the way to block her from getting to her goal of getting through the labyrinth and rescuing her baby brother. So there's the door knockers, for instance, are threshold guardians. They're not necessarily good or bad. They're just there to get in the way. In Star Wars, the storm troopers are threshold guardians. In Jaws, the mayor is a threshold guardian. He's not a villain, but he does get in Chief Brody's way as Chief Brodie is on admission to defeat the Shark. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Black Knight is a threshold guardian. In Hamlet, Rose and Crant and Gildenstern are threshold guardians. They just are there to get in the way. Another major type of archetype is a shape shifter. This is a character who seems one way and then ends up being another way. Shape shifters are characters whose allegiances will shift. Their true motives might be hidden. In Batman, this would be somebody like Harvey Dent, who becomes two face. You know, is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? He shifts who he is. In the Harry Potter books, Snape is a shape shifter. Sometimes he seems like a villain. Other times he seems like an ally. Fun archetype is the trickster, someone who's there to provide mischief that creates conflict, r2d2 in Star Wars. Bugs Bunny is a trickster hero. You know, he causes mischief, but he's also the protagonist. Characters can serve multiple functions, of course. Jareth in Labyrinth, the Goblin king is a villain, but he's also a trickster. He's very mischievous. He uses magic tricks. Mary and Pippin and Lord of the Rings, are trickster characters in those books and movies. And finally, the Herald. A herald is a character who is there to provide information. So this might be a newscaster. Trinity in the matrix comes with information to tell Neo things at the beginning of the film. Do the right thing. The Spike Lee movie. Radio Rahim is a herald character. He's there to proclaim things and make announcements. S Trepo in Star Wars is a herald character. He's there to provide information. Those are just some of the major archetypes that you're probably going to run into in your stories. So what I want you to do is to think about how each of your characters can fulfill one or more archetypes in each scene. And that can change from scene to scene. A character might be a hero in this scene, and then the next scene, they're doing trickster things. And then the next scene, maybe we have a villain who turns out to be a shaphifter and shape shifts into an ally. We have a love interest character. Maybe she's a fan fetal like in old film noir. And she's a love interest, who's a shape shifter and becomes a villain. Trinity in the matrix is both a love interest and sometimes a herald and other times an ally. The point here is that your character should be fulfilling at least one archetype at any given moment in your story. And if they're not, then the question is, why are they in your story? If they're not serving a narrative function, what's the point? Your character serves a function in the story. They are there to do something in the narrative. And that's what you should be thinking about as you're developing your cast of characters. 11. Epilogue: Well, we've come to the end of this course on creating compelling characters. We've covered a lot of ground, talking about character goals and motivations, talking about the motor that drives the characters forward, talking about their strengths, their weaknesses, what they want, what they need, how to develop impossible choices to create growth for your character and to move the story forward. We've talked about creating casts of characters and archetypes to serve functions. Now, it's your turn to create some compelling characters to complete the character profile for at least one major character in the story that you're developing, writing a profile with the back story and a short monologue, and then repeat the process, create more characters, fill in your whole cast, and then write your story, write your book or your short story or your play or your screenplay or whatever. Write your first draft. And if it's terrible, that's okay. It's a first draft, but you've got to get it on the page. You can't do a revision until something's there. And your characters will continue to grow and evolve and get better and more interesting and more compelling, the longer you work on them, and the more you develop them. So, jump in, write some stories, and then just keep writing. The more you practice, the better you can. I hope you've enjoyed this course, and I hope you've learned something. I'm Joshua Corte. Thanks for watching.