FREE DRAMA!!

Powerful and believeable characters are essential to the life of every dramatic screenplay, and the screenwriter's relationship with the characters is the primary relationship without which the enterprise of finding the story becomes stale and predictable.

What binds the writer and the writer's interest to a character is a PROBLEM or disturbance that upsets or undermines the habits (actions) and habits of thought (beliefs) of the character in question. The problem must also carry a sense of urgency - unless the character acts NOW, the problem will get much worse.

As the writer's relationship with the characters in the script develops, the writer will find him/herself forming relationships with characters that are seemingly extraneous to the script. These are not characters in the strict sense of the word, but they are imaginary entities grounded in the writer's experience and essential to the birth of the drama that is unfolding. These metascript characters include the writer's AUDIENCE and the writer's TRIBE or TRIBES. If a screenwriter is to work mediumistically it is absolutely necessary that he/she cultivated working relationships with these characters as well as the characters within the screenplay. While the fundamental relationship between the writer and the characters remains, it is unlikely to attain a [rofound degree of intimacy and emotional connectedness unless the writer works as a MEDIUM, that is, unless the writer relinguishes control of the unfoding story and allows the characters to freely interact and influence the decisions and responses of one another unfettered by the fears and personal axe-grindings of the ego-centred writer.

As might be expected, character-based screenwriting is fraught with pitfalls and is, at times, supremely frustrating. One does not create compelling characters as one might bake a cake. One must woo them, entice them, get to know them, enter into a frank and open exchange with them, if they are to reveal anything at all of their hidden potentials, including the anxieties, wounds and secret prayers that lend them their emotional depth.

If one works as a medium, one cannot be in too big a hurry. The mediumistic revelation of dramatic characters often takes time. Wham, Bam, Thank-you-Ma'am won't work - does it ever??? And yet, there are so many writers that are driven to turn out any number of bad scripts rather than spend their time making one good one. There are far too many pre-mature ejaculators in this industry.

In my experience, the conventional route taken by most mediocre script writers is

CONCEPT --> PLOT --> CHARACTER

A writer has an idea - or what I refer to as a notion (usually intriguing but invariably undramatic). The writer hatches a rough plot-line, that illustrates the notion in some (all too frequently) predictable or illogical manner. Often, the writer already knows the ending and works assiduously arranging events so that the characters will eventually intersect with the pre-ordained target.

This is the TARGET-SHOOTING METHOD of screenwriting - a paint-by-numbers approach that hordes of neo-Artistoleans crow about, the leading exponents of which churn out books and workshops like proverbial snake-oil salesmen, advantaging themselves at the expense of hapless and gullible knowledge bags who may end up spending thousands of dollars discovering there is no recipe.

The Writer-as-Big-Game-Hunter in the shooting gallery of mediocrity takes a bead on every target the gurus have told him about, tracking down each beat, turning point, and climax with somnolent enthusiasm. Employing this method, every event in the plot becomes "a dot" and the behaviour of the characters functions merely as a way of connecting all the dots so as to arrive at the "picture". Because it is invariably formula-driven, one usually anticipates the picture before it actually appears, thus rendering the experience predictable.

Such an approach to drama is both chauvenistic and manipulative, chauvenistic in terms of the characters ("cut-outs" might be a more appropriate word for them) and manipulative in terms of the audence and the audience's response. Invariably, such stories boil down to propaganda, sentimentality or pornography.

Alternatively. the character-based approach to screenwriting starts with CHARACTER and with a PROBLEM that compels the character to act. Motivated by the PROMISE of justice, salvation, freedon or merely something better or safer, the character struggles to make the promise a reality - to achieve his or her objective or goal. Drama arises when the quest is frustrated by  forces that are antagonistic to the character's struggle or predicament, thus forcing the character to fight for what he/she desires. In some powerful, unpredictable and thoroughly credible way, the character must find a way of transforming or over-coming this opposition if he/she is to succeed.

In Character-based screen storytelling, one accompanies each character on their journey - protagonist and antagonist - finding in each one the inner strengths and weaknesses that are relevant to the strategies and actions employed.

Plot vs Story

Plot is NOT the same thing as Story. Plot is the selection and ordering of actions that dramatise the Story.

Plot is ACTION and ORDER in TIME.

Story is ACTION, ORDER, TIME, as well as WHY and WHAT.

Plot is a journey towards the revelation of the WHY and the WHAT.

A satisfying and emotionally powerful plot withholds information about the why and the what, wrapping them both in MYSTERY and SUSPENSE and keeping the mystery and suspense viable up to the final climax.

Drama is about emotion, getting a powerful emotional response from one's audience - a response that is powerful enough to provoke insight. Plot is one thing happening after another; Story is about why do the characters care; and more importantly, why do I - the audience - care?

Guns, car chases, and explosions can only take you so far. How many screenplays have I read that are about characters wanting money? Or wanting to keep or save their jobs? Who cares?

Unless there is something in the story that allows me to enter the emotional life of the characters and identify with them, in short, to have a relationship with them that I care about - then no amount of car chases or special effects will make any difference. While it may seem natural to want to impress a script reader or a producer with a BIG story, when it comes to intimacy and creating emotionally compelling drama it's always best to remember the old adage, "size doesn't matter". If you aren't able to get the most intense and exciting scripts from small stories you won't stand a chance of doing it with big ones.

The key to it all is open-ness - the kind of openness that relies on courage and vulnerability. It will be impossible to have meaningful (emotionally viable) relationships with your characters without the courage to become open and vulnerable.

The truth of your characters resides in their emotional life, a life that is not only buried deep within them, but deep within you as well. If you are to plumb their depths you must also plumb your own. What characters do must be TRUE to them emotionally, with all the complexity their emotional life contains, as well as all the disguises and repressions they employ and harbour.

The search for character cannot adequaely proceed without also making a search of oneself. A dramatic character is invariably an aspect of ourselves that we do not yet fully recognise. The process of writing a dramatic screenplay is - in part - a revelatory process of revealing some hidden aspect of ourselves to ourselves. The reason we write a screenplay, it seems to me, is to find out why we are writing it.

Characters, like the characters who write them (i.e.: writers) are driven by needs or motivating drives to attain something of value. Drama itself is an exploration of a motivating drive as it is manifested in the actions of a character and his quest (the story). The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, grouped these drives into a hierarchy of categories. Maslow's hierarchy holds that drives form a kind of Great Chain of Becoming, so that one must first fulfill the needs of one category before moving on to the next. From the most basic to the most complex these can be expressed as follows:

Physiological needs - oxygen, food, water, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.

Secuity needs - order, law, limits, stability, etc.

The need to Belong or be Loved - family, affection, marriage, etc.

Esteem needs - achievement leading to self-esteem, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.

Cognitive needs - knowledge, meaning, etc.

Aesthetic needs - appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, etc.

Self-Actualisation needs - self-fulfillment and peak experiences.

Transcendence needs - helping others to achieve self-actualisation.

A character that chooses danger or hunger must have a credible reason for doing so otherwise the audience won't understand the emotional logic of the choice. Most people avoid danger, and they avoid hunger unless motivated by a need higher and more compelling than the biological one. When a writer enters into a relationship with a character, he/she also enters into a relationship with that characters entire system of values and the tribal groups whose influence has encouraged the inculcation of those values.

Initiation

All dramatic storytelling is by defintiion TRIBAL storytelling. Each of us is a carrier of the wisdom of our tribe or tribes, and the dramatic stories mustl necessarily reflect or feature the tribal struggles we are heir to, whether they be of Capulets and Montagues or Jews and Nazis. You cannot, however, effectively write a story about a tribe that you do not belong to. To become the storyteller of a tribe you must have been touched at your core by that tribe. You must be so imbued with the emotional life of that tribe that you have no qualms of speaking on behalf of it, or allowing it to speak through you. For a character to florish with all of the emotional depth and complexity that a audience expects, a writer must write from his/her origins in a tribe. And the origins of the writer's tribe must intersect with the origins of the character's tribe if there is to be any chance at all of ORIGINality.

This is not to say that there are topics from which you are forever barred. Anyone can write about anything so long as they find a way of becoming initiated into the trobe that they wish to write about. This initiation process, once upon a time, was thought of as RESEARCH. But the term seems rather inadequate, suggesting as it does a secondhandedness that is not implied by the experience of initiation.

Director, Rolf de Heer, is not an Aborigine so far as I know, but he was nevertheless able to receive and transmit Ten Canoes, MEDIUMISTICALLY, by virtue of his obsessive interest and involvement with the people of Arnhem Land. His initiation, whilst probably not in any sense traditional, nevertheless opened him to the world, the values and emotions of the tribe with whom he worked, enabling a relationship that mitigated against the sort of interference and fear a non-initiated whitefella might have inflicted upon such a project. It is not so much a matter of writing from what you know, but writing from what you don't know, based an an abiding faith that you are in the right place at the right time with the right people because they accept you and you accept them. Most simplistically, character-based writing demands that you write from what you FEEL.

Questions

Finally, we come to the essential questions of character-based screenplay writing. As a dramatic screenwriter you have to think and feel and explore like an actor. Put yourself into a character's shoes and ask:

Who am I?

What am I?

Where am I coming from?

What do I want? Why do I want it?

Who or what is in the way of me getting it?

What do I have to do to get what I want?

You can't wait for the actor to provide the answers to these questions. They have to be in the script.