by Will Dunne
For the dramatic writer, a single main character provides the easiest way to unify the action of the story, communicate its theme, and create an experience that feels dramatically complete. Traditionally called the "protagonist," the main character is the one who commands the spotlight as the story unfolds and usually drives most of the dramatic action. In the end, he or she emerges as the character most revealed-and affected-by story events.
The more characters you add to the center spotlight, the more difficult it will be to find and maintain a clear focus for your story. This may explain why most dramatic stories center on one-and only one-main character.
2. Dual protagonist. Many dramatic writers have looked beyond the boundaries of the single-protagonist structure and successfully centered their stories on two main characters who have something of importance in common.
Whether they are Estragon and Vladimir waiting for Godot, Thelma and Louise fleeing the law, or Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom producing a Broadway flop, two individuals can share the role of protagonist by having the same goal and equal time to pursue it. It is their common quest that unifies them as "one" and provides a central focus for the chain of events that make up the story.
Or, instead of sharing the role of main character, two equally dominant characters can compete for it, as in Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks or True West by Sam Shepard, which each feature a pair of competitive brothers trying to best each other. In this type of duo, the characters have related but irreconcilable goals that unite them as adversaries. Each is the hero of his own story and the antagonist of the other's.
Other dramatic stories with some type of duo at their center include Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Oscar and Felix in The Odd Couple by Neil Simon, Sam and Willie in Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard, and Gil and Ray in Thief River by Lee Blessing.
3. Group protagonist-or, no protagonist. Sometimes it "takes a village" to tell a story. This has been demonstrated many times in plays like The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov and films like Nashville by Robert Altman, where no single character or throughline dominates. Such stories focus instead on a set of individuals who either have a common purpose or comprise a larger collective identity. For example, a story may center on a group of individuals with the same goal, such as the taxi drivers fighting management in the play Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets or the airline crew and passengers resisting terrorist hijackers in the docudrama film United 93 by Paul Greengrass.
Or, a story may center on the collective identity that is suggested when a group of different story lines are combined with a common focus. This collective identity often functions as a metaphor for something greater than the sum of the story lines we have seen, just as the collective identity of August: Osage County by Tracy Letts might be defined as the dysfunctional American family, and the collective identity of Crash by Paul Haggis might be viewed as racially divided American society.
Other dramatic stories with a multiple focus and no single main character include Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, The Women by Clare Boothe Luce, The Hot L Baltimore by Lanford Wilson, Angels in America by Tony Kushner, and Dealer's Choice by Patrick Marber.
DECIDING WHOM TO SPOTLIGHT
Think about what happens in your story, who is involved, what they want, and how they function in relationship to one another. Use the following checklists to help you select a specific single, dual, or group protagonist from the characters you are developing.
i. Single protagonist. If your story will revolve around one main character, you need to know who among the population of your story is best suited for this role. He or she will need to be someone who can stir up and maintain your interest as well as ours, dominate the dramatic action, and cause the story to happen. This character is most likely to succeed dramatically if he or she
• is the character most affected-in a positive or negative way-by the inciting event of the story;
• embarks on a quest that begins with the inciting event, drives the story forward, and does not reach its success or failure point until the story ends;
• has a strong will and is so motivated to complete the quest that it seems virtually impossible to compromise or give up;
• pursues the goal actively by tackling problems and initiating strategies rather than passively responding to the actions of others;
• has the most to do and say in the story, and consequently commands and receives the most attention;
• has the strongest emotional investment in the story;
• provides the dominant point of view for dramatic action;
• faces bigger problems than anyone else and has to make the most difficult decision in the story;
• is sympathetic-someone we like-or at least empatheticsomeone we understand and care about even if we do not like what the character does; and
• embodies the subject and theme of the story.
If your story will center on one main character, who is it? What does this character want overall? What is his or her central conflict? What is at stake?
2. Dual or group protagonist who function dramatically as one. This approach will pose the same demands as a single-character journey, except that you will be juggling more than one individual in the central role. The challenge is to keep the focus on these characters equally balanced. A pair or group acting as a single character is most likely to succeed dramatically if these individuals
• are pursuing the same story goal;
• have an equally important motivation to achieve the goal;
• face the same problems or equally challenging ones;
• remain in synch as they move forward through the story;
• are equally active in their pursuit of the goal;
• equally shape the story's point of view;
• carry the same dramatic weight so that neither character dominates;
• face either the same crisis or an equally demanding one; and
• have to make an equally difficult crisis decision. If your story will center on two or more characters who function dramatically as one, who are the characters and what is their common goal? What is the biggest obstacle they both face? What is at stake?
3. Dual or group protagonist who function dramatically as more than one. This approach will pose the same demands as a single-character journey, but repeatedly, since each story line must be composed as a dramatic journey of its own. The key challenge is to bring focus to the script where there is no single dominant character or throughline to anchor it. You will need to figure out what the different journeys have in common, how they intersect, and why their presence in the same script is not arbitrary. A story with no main character is more likely to succeed dramatically if the individual dramatic journeys
• are essential because each tells part of the whole story, reflects a common theme, or suggests part of a central collective identity;
• are unique because each represents a quest different from the rest;
• each center on a character with a difficult but important objective and a reason to achieve it;
• are limited enough in number that we have time in each story line to find out who the characters are, understand their situations, and track their progress;
• unfold at a complementary pace;
• raise enough interesting questions to keep all of the story lines moving forward as the focus shifts from one to the next;
• intersect without disrupting our interest or creating a competition for our attention;
• have ties that become evident as different journeys intersect and either affect or inform one another in increasingly significant ways; and
• carry similar dramatic weight so that no single character begins to dominate the script to the extent that he or she might be mistaken for a weak protagonist in an underdeveloped central plot.
If your story will center on two or more characters with individu
al story lines, who are the principal characters? What traits, actions, circumstances or other elements will provide a common focus among them? If they suggest a central collective identity, how would you describe it?
WRAP-UP
For any dramatic story, you need to know who has the center spotlight and why he, she, or they are more important than anyone else. If two or more characters share this spotlight, you need to understand what brings them together in the same story. If they each have a separate goal, you also need to juggle the demands of a multistory structure where different journeys must unfold without distracting from one another. In effect, you face the challenge of not only writing a great story, but also writing a great story again-and again and again-all in the same script.
THE QUICK VERSION
Determine the point of view from which your story will be presented
BEST TIME FOR THIS
During early story development
SETTING THE STAGE FOR YOUR STORY
Regardless of whom or what you are writing about, you face a number of basic decisions about how to develop your story. For example, you need to determine its genre, such as drama or comedy, and style, such as realism or expressionism. You also need to know whether the script will be short or full-length and, if full-length, how many acts it will require. As you think about your story at this fundamental level, one of your key tasks is to define its point of view.
"Point of view" in this case does not refer to opinion, but rather to the vantage point from which we will see story events. This vantage point may offer a view that is broad or narrow, personal or impersonal, reliable or unreliable. Like Bryony Lavery's Frozen, for example, a dramatic story may be presented from an omniscient viewpoint which lets us see and hear anything happening in both the external and internal worlds of the characters. Or, like The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the story be may presented from the more limited and subjective point of view of a narrator. Or, like Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, the story may be presented from an objective point of view which shows us only external events with no literal access to the inner workings of any character.
Point of view is a unifying principle that affects how we will experience your characters and story events. It will contribute to how well we understand each character, which events we see and how much we learn about them, and how close or distant we feel emotionally to the dramatic journey in progress.
ABOUT THE EXERCISE
Every story is unique. Use this exercise to explore storytelling possibilities for the script you are working on now, and then develop a point-of-view "contract." This basic set of rules will govern many of your writing choices and later determine what we in the audience can know and not know as we watch your story unfold.
During the writing and editing process, you may wish to revisit this exercise periodically either to ensure that you are playing by the rules you established, or to revise these rules if they no longer seem to be serving the story.
i DIFFERENT WAYS TO VIEW THE EXTERNAL WORLD OF THE STORY
From what vantage point will we see character interactions and story events?
I. Unlimited external view. From this standpoint, you can take us freely through time and space to see and hear anything happening anywhere in the world of the story. As a result, we can find things out before characters do and know more about the whole story than any single character does. In Hamlet, for example, we get an omniscient view of the kingdom of Denmark. This enables us to learn about the ghost of the dead king before Hamlet does and to observe many activities that Hamlet doesn't, such as Claudius plotting to kill him.
2. Limited external view. In many cases, a story is about what we do not know. The withholding of vital information for a certain time and the revealing of it later become key elements of the storytelling process. Here are some of the most common ways to limit our knowledge of your story's external world:
• Main-character perspective. We accompany a main character through time and space and discover the story only as he or she does. Our view is limited, therefore, to what this character experiences. In David Mamet's Edmond, for example, we follow the title character through many places-from a fortuneteller's parlor to a prison cell-over an extended period of time. However, we never see or hear anything that Edmond doesn't. The Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window written by Cornell Woolrich and John Michael Hayes adopts a similar vantage point: the main character is a photographer confined to his apartment with a broken leg and a third-floor view of his neighbors' apartments. We can see only what he sees. The implied rule is that the main character must be present in every scene.
• Dual or multiple-character perspectives. In some cases, it is a certain set of characters whom we follow through time and space in order to experience the story. They may be two protagonists, a protagonist and antagonist, or some other combination of two or more important characters. Our knowledge of story events is limited to what they-and only they-collectively know. In Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for example, we see things from the perspective of George and Martha as they entertain their late-night guests. The implied rule is that George or Martha must be present in every scene. As a result, we never see or hear the guests, Nick and Honey, by themselves.
• Narrator perspective. We learn the story through a narrator who may be the main character (How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, or Wit by Margaret Edson) or a minor character who steps out of the action to report from the sidelines (A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller, or Our Town by Thornton Wilder). Either way, the view is not omniscient, since it is limited to what this particular narrator could conceivably know. Nor is the view objective, since it is colored by the narrator's emotions, attitudes, memories, abilities, and needs. As a result, the narrator may be a reliable or unreliable source of information.
In some stories we see the narrator, and in other stories we only hear the narrator as a voice that introduces scenic action or is heard over it. The narration may be addressed directly to us, to the world at large, to a particular onstage or offstage character, or to someone outside the story, even someone famous. The implied rule is thatright or wrong-we can learn only what the narrator shares with us.
We traditionally watch the events of a play or film through the "fourth wall," an imaginary boundary that separates us from the characters and makes us invisible to them. When narrators speak to us, they "break" the fourth wall through a device known as "direct address."
• Special space limitation. This technique enables us to travel freely through time, but not space. Our knowledge of external events is limited to what happens in a certain setting, as in A. R. Gurney's The Dining Room, which, though it spans generations of New England life, never takes us out of the dining room of a house, and in jeanPaul Sartre's No Exit, where three strangers find themselves eternally trapped with one another in a windowless drawing room in hell. The implied rule is that we can observe the characters only when they are in the designated setting.
• Special time limitation. Our knowledge of the story also may be limited by an overriding time factor, as in Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother, which unfolds in ninety minutes of real time before a woman's suicide, or in Bernard Slade's Same Time, Next Year, where each scene occurs one year after the previous scene so that we can watch a love affair unfold as a series of annual weekend trysts. The implied rule is that all of the dramatic action must occur within the designated time period.
• Any combination or variation of these techniques. If you wish to limit the external view of your story, you can combine any of these techniques-or others-in whatever ways best fit your script. Possibilities are limited only by the imagination. The classic Kurosawa film Rashomon, for example, experiments with character perspective by showing us four versions of the same rape and murder-each from a different viewpoint: that of the murderer, the rape victim, the murder victim, and a witness. While designed to explore the elusive nature of truth, Rashomon also highlights the
power of character perspective as a dramatic technique.
The film Sunset Boulevard written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder gives narrator perspective an unusual twist by letting a dead man tell us his story after we see his corpse floating in a swimming pool. This approach creates immediate suspense by raising questions about why he is dead.
The film Groundhog Day written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis uses a unique time frame to limit our external view of the story: the dramatic action takes place on a particular Groundhog Day-not just once, but over and over again as a weatherman keeps reliving the same February 2 with slightly different consequences.
Betrayal by Harold Pinter creates another unusual time limitation: the story is revealed backward, starting with the end of an affair between a married woman and her husband's best friend, and ending with the start of the affair. This approach forces us to know the future of most scenes as we watch them and lets us view the initial moment of betrayal with the ironic knowledge of how it will later ruin several lives.
The film Memento by Christopher Nolan uses two timelines to control our view of a story about an insurance investigator who can no longer build new memories. One timeline moves in forward direction as he struggles to figure out his past. The other timeline moves in reverse direction to reveal more and more about what really happened.
I DIFFERENT WAYS TO VIEW THE INNER LIFE OF THE CHARACTERS-IF AT ALL
In drama, the most common ways to access inner life are interior monologue and interior dramatization. In an interior monologue, a character thinks out loud so that we can hear what's going on in the character's mind, as in Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech. This technique is also known as "soliloquy" and, in abbreviated version, as an "aside." The implied rule is that no other characters can hear these words.