by Paul Ashton
and Gogo have waited for Godot before, but that doesn’t tell us many details
about where they came from, while we might presume or even know of a
fundamentally formative experience that has helped shape sitcom charac -
ters (such as Mum dying in Only Fools and Horses).
For other characters in other kinds of stories, audiences (and actors)
tend to want to feel that there is a history that has formed and informed
their psychology. The audience rarely needs to know that backstory in
detail, unless it becomes a pivotal point of story and plot. For example, in
concluding-twist psychological thrillers the revelation of backstory is fre -
quently a fundamental part of the genre and character storytelling (as, for
example, in The Machinist). But generally speaking, you can have as much
backstory and character profiling in your notes and preparation as you
want and deem fit.
The trick is to utilise and show to the audience only things that are
crucial in the present-tense story. Writers far too often waste valuable,
irretrievable time bringing the backstory into the present tense when fre -
quently it just isn’t necessary. But for the audience to feel the character has
a fullness of history and personality, you as a writer need to know that
history first in order that you can keep it in reserve. I often read characters
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that just don’t seem to have anything to them beyond what is on the surface
of the script – and often this is because writers haven’t done the legwork.
You won’t get any brownie points for all this unseen work on backstory
and history, because most of it is meant to remain hidden. But if you do it
well and do it thoroughly, it will serve your characters and story in unim -
aginable ways. As in any other element of the process, though, you need to
resist cliché and the obvious as if under scrutiny from an audience. I’ve
read a million scripts about troublesome and troubled characters that were
beaten / abused / ignored / abandoned (delete as appropriate) as a child; this
is an obvious, linear observation to make and by itself doesn’t offer any -
thing new about character that we haven’t already seen.
MORAL COMPASS
Backstory and POV help define the direction to which the needle of the
character’s moral compass points. Characters with no moral instincts are
impossible to engage with on a human level. Without some level of self-
consciousness about the meaning of their actions in the world, they become
like animals, literally inhuman. (Even anthropomorphised ‘animal’ char -
acters display human moral characteristics.)
What codes do your characters live by, whether conscious or uncon -
scious, acquired or intrinsic? How do differing codes contradict one another?
Again, how do Tony Soprano’s Mafia ‘ethics’ square with his potential to be
brutal? How do Frank Gallagher’s opinionated, neo-politicised rants square
with the apparent amorality of many of his alcohol-fuelled acts? Does the
avenger in Dead Man’s Shoes (or indeed in any revenge tale) lose the moral
high ground the moment he crosses the line and punishes those who have
wronged his brother?
Within the moral POV will most likely be found not only your charac -
ter’s defining strengths, but also their flaws and the roots of conflict in their
story.
MORALITY AND CONFLICT
When a character has a strong POV, you necessarily create a tension
whereby anything that contradicts that standpoint is a cause of possible
conflict. If you put a moralistic, Christian, virginal policeman on an island
88 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
that celebrates fertility in pagan ritual, then you set him on a course for a
fundamental clash of moralities – thus The Wicker Man. If you put an
anachronistic, autocratic warrior hero in a city that has developed demo -
cratic principles then you set him on a collision course of world views – thus
Coriolanus.
If your characters don’t have a strong moralistic POV – whether moral
or immoral – then nothing will challenge them and there will be no conflict,
no tension, no story. Amoral characters tend to be a void, a vacuum, with
whom we do not engage, for whom we do not feel.
THE ‘AGON’
You will probably have heard the terms ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ –
often misappropriated as ‘hero’ and ‘villain’. The ‘agon’ in both terms is the
conflict, but although the term derives from a contest in ancient Greece
(such as in athletics or music, where prizes were awarded to the winner),
a conflict is not just a physical conflict. It describes the verbal dispute
between two characters – the dialectic. But it also means a test of will, a
test of personality, the attempt to surmount whatever obstacles stand in
the way of a character’s wants and needs, whether physical, emotional,
psychological, social, political. Hero and villain are qualitative terms – now -
adays they tend to mean good and bad, light and dark, beautiful and ugly,
right and wrong. But a protagonist doesn’t have to be a good, handsome
hero, they just have to be the character that sets out to achieve or realise a
goal; an antagonist doesn’t have to be a bad, ugly villain, they just have to
be what stands in the way of the protagonist.
HERO AND VILLAIN
What does fundamentally characterise the hero and villain in western
storytelling is what the character does as a consequence of who that char -
acter is. A hero is selfless, willing to suffer sacrifice on behalf of others or
for what they believe to be right and true. A villain is selfish, willing to
inflict suffering on others in order to get what they believe they want.
Anti-heroes are trickier beings because they subvert the usual course
of heroic behaviour and can do bad, wrong or weird things – yet their POV
gives them the dramatic, heroic focus.
THE BEGINNING 89
Alex in A Clockwork Orange began life in a novel, but is one of the
most infamous anti-heroes of the big screen, a charming, intelligent young
man who appreciates beautiful music and the feeling it inspires in him,
yet who is a violent gang leader capable of deliberate, extreme, sickening
physical and sexual violence. He is manipulative, self-centred, even self-
pitying. But in the book, film and stage versions alike, it is the strength of
POV that makes this difficult personality compelling.
The same goes for Carlin in Scum, Stanley in The Birthday Party,
David Wicks in EastEnders, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Dexter,
Napoleon Dynamite, Frank Gallagher. In all of them, it comes down to
POV – what the characters want and believe, and the things they do as a
consequence.
DESIRE AND NEED
The stronger your character’s POV – even though complex and contra
-
dictory – the clearer will be their desire and need to the audience. What
your character wants and needs may not be clear to them at the beginning,
and may only become clear at the very end, but wherever that recognition
comes, it is a crucial and indispensable p
art of great dramatic character
writing.
Characters who want nothing and need nothing will come to nothing
in dramatic terms. Pursuing want and need is what constitutes their jour -
ney forward. Without this journey, you don’t have a story. Ask this of your
characters: what do they want / need not simply now (in the scene), but by
the end of that day, the following morning, a month later, in a year’s time,
and ultimately at the end of their lives?
Desire is what a character believes they want. They may be wrong, they
may change their mind or heart, but they must desire something.
Need is what a character requires, whether they want it or not, whether
they are aware of it or not.
Desire and need are utterly relative – a question of scale not impor -
tance. Theo’s desire to protect the only pregnant woman in a world without
babies in Children of Men is, from the character’s POV, equivalent in mea -
ning to Shaun’s desire in This is England to create a new family around
him after the loss of his father in the Falklands War. The success of the
former affects the world on a macro, epic scale; the success of the latter
90 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
primarily affects just Shaun. The scale of desire in the worlds of the two
films are different, but the dramatic importance of their desire to the char -
acter is fundamentally the same.
DESIRE VERSUS NEED
Character can become complex when desire and need have a necessary,
causal connection. In Star Wars, Luke wants adventure but needs purpose;
the former he already feels, the latter he isn’t aware of until Obi-Wan
Kenobi reveals he is a Jedi. He cannot truly realise his desire for adventure
until the need to become a Jedi is realised too.
Characters become more complex when desire and need are in conflict
and tension. In Shameless, Frank Gallagher wants oblivion but needs clarity;
avoiding the fallout of the former and resisting the sobriety of the latter is
the engine that drives his character and the story he generates. At the
outset of Prime Suspect, Jane Tennison wants acceptance as the southern
woman heading up an extremely masculine police department in the north,
yet she needs a sense of conflict and abrasion in order to bring out her best
policing and man agerial instincts. And vice versa – she also in a sense
wants conflict because that is how her personality best expresses itself, yet
she needs acceptance because conflict will eventually drive her to the edge.
Characters become multilayered beings ripe for ongoing reinterpre -
tation when such complexities pile on one another. Hamlet wants justice
over his father’s death yet he needs endless justification to realise that; he
wants answers to justify revenge yet what he really needs is faith in what
to do next: he thinks he wants evidence but what he really needs is resolve;
he wants to escape Elsinore and other people yet he needs to stay and put
the world back in joint; he wants the confusion of others not knowing what
he feels by believing he is ‘mad’ yet what he really needs is clarity of
knowledge and purpose; he wants the book and the library yet what he needs
is the arena and the sword; and in the final irony, he both wants and needs
peace, but can only reach it through death, destruction, tragedy.
If the wants and needs of your characters are too simple – the want is
revenge, the need is a gun – then they will remain one-dimensional, card -
board cutouts, and the story will remain flat. In Dead Man’s Shoes, Richard
wants revenge but he needs peace, and the two simply can’t coexist; this is
what makes it a tragedy.
THE BEGINNING 91
ACTION
From POV, desire and need come action. Passivity is the death of character
– or rather, a severe limit to the dramatic life of character. Only masters of
craft can push the limits of characters delaying action or appearing to avoid
it, as in About Schmidt, The Man Who Wasn’t There – and, indeed, Hamlet.
In all three, action and the mistaken appearance of being passive is at the
heart of what the story is about.
Drama without action is not drama. Drama stems from the character’s
need to show and be itself at the start of the story. If you tread water at the
start, you are wasting time. Cut to the action.
By ‘action’ I do not mean big explosions, wild car-chases or crunching
fight sequences (although it can be these things in certain genres, or at cer -
tain times in any genre – and if you are writing an action thriller then
you’ll probably need all three).
Fundamentally, action is the true expression of character through
what they do or don’t do – however big or small that action might be or
seem. Again, the scale of action is relative to what is important to the char -
acter in the world they occupy.
To Shaun in This is England, wearing flared cords in 1983 when no
other kid does is enough to spur him to get into fights, join a ‘gang’ and
adopt a radical new look – because he hates standing out in the wrong way.
The subtext to this is that he is searching for something that will assuage
the loss of his father. In fact, though, it’s not the flares that make him dif -
ferent and stand out – it’s his personality, his POV, his actions. Which is
why Woody and Combo are both so impressed by him despite his youth. It is
this that makes him a compelling hero. At the start, you know he is a
character who feels, thinks, believes, and who acts upon all three.
VULNERABILITY
Character-driven action makes characters vulnerable as well as making
them engaging and compelling, because, as I have said, want /need brings
about not only action but conflict too. In This is England, Shaun puts him -
self in ultimate danger when he joins Woody’s gang of mates, even though
the danger (racism and violence) at that point from his POV couldn’t really
be anticipated. The moment Billy Elliot hangs back to watch the ballet
92 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
class, he sets on course a series of events that could lead to total breakdown
in his relationship with his father and brother.
Characters without real vulnerabilities that are driven by their per -
sonality are, in a sense, not really in any more danger than you or I – we
could all be hit by a bus tomorrow because accidents do happen. But great
characters make their own jeopardy, not necessarily out of foolhardiness or
bravery, but because they do things they feel they ought to do, whatever the
reason, because of who they are. This is what binds us to them.
Even characters who appear to have an impenetrable armour around
them need some kind of chink that exposes the flesh beneath. Hence the
notion of an ‘Achilles heel’, for without a physical weakness Achilles would
ultimately be more killing machine than human warrior hero. Frank
Gallagher has an extremely thick armoury of drink, drugs, bad behaviour,
opinion, cowardice and aggression. But he also has crucial moments where
the guard drops and the sorry, bewildered, incapable father that any man
is
potentially capable of being is laid bare. In fact, the first time we see him
in episode one of series one, he is utterly comatose and incapacitated – one
huge chink in the armour we will come to see in all its grubby glory.
Feeling for and fearing for a character’s vulnerabilities is not ‘feeling
sorry for them’. This kind of ‘pity’ is the lowest denomination in the possible
scope of our relationship with a character. Vulnerability is not about bad
things happening to characters and us feeling sorry for them; it is about
characters creating jeopardy through the force of their personality and us
being taken along on the ride with them. The former is drippy sentimental -
ism; the latter is dynamic drama.
CHARACTER AND MEDIUM
Great characters are great characters and perhaps there’s no fundamental
difference in how you should approach them in different mediums. But there
are differences in how they play and how we relate to them.
THEATRICAL CHARACTER
Theatrical character relies on what an actor can perform, and is limited in
the amount of technical resources that might be available in radio and on
screen. In theatre, characters are physical beings in a physical space in
THE BEGINNING 93
relatively close proximity to an audience. This pure physicality can (and
arguably should) be at the heart of your characters.
RADIO CHARACTER
Radio character is curious. It is fundamentally no different to any other,
except in the crucial fact that we cannot physically see the person. There -
fore all the simple clues and signs that one can pick up on stage and screen
cannot be relied on. You only have their voice, their actions, and the
reactions and indications of the other characters around them. There is,
therefore, a huge pressure and reliance on the word – on what is said and
what you write in order to delineate what happens in the acoustic environ -
ment. In radio, the voice must go a very long way in characterising who the
characters are, how they project, what they feel, what they think. You
should try hard not to state (or at least overstate) them through exposition.
In radio, character is voice.