Know Your Characters Like You Know Your Friends

By David Terruso

Picture this: your closest girl friend is at a bar. She’s hammered. Men are goading her into dancing on the bar. She ends up taking off her top and bra, and showing the entire bar her bosom. She goes home with three men and leaves all three fully satisfied.

Could you, in fact, picture it? If your closest girl friend is like mine, you couldn’t. Or if you did, it was cartoonish and made you laugh. Why is that? Because you know her well enough to know, with a high degree of certainty, what she’d do in a given situation.

That’s how well you want to know your characters. Even the minor characters.

There are three important tools that I use to understand my characters: intuition, questions, and the explainable eccentricity.

First off, intuition. It’s surely not something you can teach. But it can be helped along. You hear a lot of writers talking about how their characters speak to them; what they’re actually describing is their own intuition presented to them as a voice in their head.

There’s really only one way to develop your intuition about your characters: spend a lot of time with each one-- that’s how you get to know your friends. Picture them in your mind. What are they wearing? How do they talk? Are they confident? Do they talk more than listen? What would it take to get a rise out of them? There’s no set way to spend time with them, you just have to focus on them until they are familiar. When they start to feel like a friend, when you look forward to thinking about them and seeing what new details have arisen, you’re where you need to be.

Once you’ve done this with your main characters, imagine how two of them would interact with each other. Then throw in a third. Who dominates the conversation? Do they get along? Is anyone attracted to anyone else? Why or why not?

This process is not brief. It usually takes me about three months to do, so I tend to start befriending new characters while finishing my current script.

Once you're familiar with your characters, it’s time to ask them questions. A lot of writing classes will give you a list of questions to ask, or tell you to make up a list on your own. This list is always exhaustive. It’s also useless. It asks a ton of generic questions and you’re able to fill in the blanks. What you end up with is the false sense of confidence in knowing your character, when what you really know is the “type” of person they are.

If you’ve ever gotten one of those forwarded e-mails where one of your friends answers 173 questions about themselves and then asks you to do the same, you’ve learned that dozens of small details about a person tell you next to nothing about them. Granted, I never knew that my one friend preferred spicy mustard to yellow mustard, but that information hasn’t deepened my understanding of her. I’m proud to tell you that at the end of most of those forwards, there is a question that reads, “Who is least likely to respond to this e-mail?” and I am invariably the answer.

So throw out that character questionnaire. Ask questions that specifically relate to your story or to the characters as you’ve already started to develop them. If you’re writing a love story, focus on romantic issues. Don’t worry about their childhood unless it relates to the subject at hand (for instance, if your male lead was abandoned by his mother as a child, that will surely effect his views of women and acceptance). Ask the big questions. Leave the minutiae for the first draft (this will keep that first draft energetic, with small improvisations you create along the way). And ask the characters themselves the questions. Don’t say, “What would Sandra do if her boss caught her stealing?” Ask Sandra, and let her answer you in her own words. That’ll do double the work for you.

There are five questions I ask each character in my stories: 1) What do you want out of life? 2) What do you want during the course of this story? 3) What’s your biggest regret? 4) What’s your biggest fear? 5) If you had to choose one event in your life that most shaped who you are now, what would it be? I ask plenty of other questions, but those five are a must.

I find that most people in real life can be boiled down to a few main goals. For your characters, limit it to one. Make everything that character says and does somehow relate to that one goal. For example: your character’s goal is to be a real man (whatever that may mean to him). Great. Now you know that when he is talking to other men, he wants to come off as competent and maybe macho. With women, he wants to seem chivalrous and responsible. That will color every single word that comes out of his mouth.

The problem with filling out giant surveys for each character is that you generate so much information, so much back-story, that you either want to cram in as much of it as you can or you don’t have a singular trait to focus on. Even the most well-rounded characters are usually dominated by a singular trait. Hamlet, one of the greatest characters in all of Western literature, is dominated by one simple trait: inaction. He’s fueled by revenge and a sense of obligation, and doubts his sanity, but it’s his inability to act that consumes him-- and the audience.

If you’re lucky, your characters will stray from the things you think they would do in a given situation (as long as it’s with good reason; remember, real people can often be a sea of inconsistencies, but your characters have to be vastly more consistent or people won’t buy them). And if your audience feels they know who your character is, then and only then can you truly surprise them with your character’s uncharacteristic decision. (Maybe your closest girl friend actually does the crazy things at the bar I mentioned in my opener. It could happen.)

The last and most important tool for knowing your characters is something I call the explainable eccentricity. This is a great shortcut to understanding the core of any character. We all have strange things that we do, weird idiosyncrasies, pet peeves that make us unreasonably angry. But, to us, they make total sense. And they don’t make sense to anyone else unless they really know us.

In the screenplay that I’m writing now, one of my main characters, Morris, always wears some variation of the same outfit, carries a wax apple in his pants pocket, and walks with an umbrella cane. Weird and random? Only if you don’t know Morris. And I know him well, so it makes perfect sense to me. (Unfortunately, I can’t give away the reason because it would spoil the ending to my screenplay.)  More importantly, when the reader knows Morris, it’ll make perfect sense to them as well. The overall effect is that the reader now feels connected to Morris. The reader “gets” him. If you want people to enjoy your writing, they are going to have to “get” your main characters (at least).

Here’s an example from a great film, The Royal Tenenbaums: Ben Stiller plays Chas Tenenbaum. Chas is constantly subjecting his two young sons to emergency fire drills and other safety routines, often in the middle of the night. At first, this seems bizarre and a bit tyrannical. But, when we learn that Chas and his boys were in a plane crash that his wife didn’t survive, his compulsion for the safety of his children makes perfect sense. And then we really care about Chas, because we understand him. That’s the ultimate goal here: understanding your characters so that you’ll love them and hoping your audience will do the same.

The same goes for “villains.” I put villains in quotes because I don’t write villains. I write antagonists, and I write characters who do bad things, but I don’t write villains. I make sure I understand each of my characters, and that makes me love them, and then there are no villains. There are only people. Friends. 

Here’s an example: in another great film, Sideways, the character Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, has an affair during his weeklong bachelor party. What’s more, this is his sole purpose during that week. It’s clearly a despicable thing, and yet Jack is not made into a villain. He’s just a man. He is, in fact, the best friend of the main character, Miles (Paul Giamatti), and we see him as Miles sees him: deeply flawed, but a good man in his own way.

When watching the film, I wanted to hate Jack. But the film didn’t let me, and in the end, I was happy to see Jack’s humanity. I thought of a close friend of my family who cheated on his wife. I’d wanted to hate him as well. But I couldn’t hate him because I knew him too well. I despised what he did, but I still cared about him as a person.

There are two ways that you can look at someone who does something terrible: from the outside (in our example, this would be looking at the cheater from the point of view of the woman he cheated on, or one of her friends), or from the inside (as the cheater himself, or someone who cares for him). Always choose the inside.

Separating the sin from the sinner is an important moral and artistic discipline, and if not accomplished, your work will suffer. If you don’t love your characters, neither will anyone else.

Think of starting a new screenplay as the first day of kindergarten: play nice, try to make friends, and… don’t eat glue. (That last part is more of a life lesson than a writing tip.)

By day, Dave Terruso is a mild-mannered editor at a standards publisher. By night, he's a screenwriter/novelist/actor/director/singer-songwriter who loves separating things by slashes and hyphens. Dave is currently a member of the Philadelphia-based sketch comedy troupe Animosity Pierre. He's working on his third spec script, a romantic comedy set on a college campus.  

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