Creating Unforgettable Characters

by Linda Seger

  HOW DO YOU DIMENSIONALIZE THESE ROLES?

  Writing a character from a culture other than one's own includes, first, creating the character as fully human, with the full range of feelings and attitudes and actions of any other person, and, second, understanding the influence that the specific culture will have on the makeup of a character. As with any characters you create, a character from another culture will be both the same as and different from yourself.

  To move beyond the stereotype demands a certain amount of specialized research from the writer. Sometimes the knowledge a writer brings from even the recent past is no longer relevant to the present. Women, men, people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities have all redefined themselves in the past few years, as they have insisted on their own rights within society. It is important to have some experience with the groups you are writing about—and/or to ask for advice. A number of organizations, including the NAACP, Nos-otros (a Hispanic group), the Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Artists, Asian-Pacific Americans, and the California Governor's Committee for the Employment of Disabled Persons, can be resources if you have questions or need advice, and most have people who can consult on portrayals within your story.

  You might also ask someone from the minority group you're portraying to read your script or novel. For a woman writer, it can be helpful to have a man go over the material. Male writers can ask women to read their stories. Character details may be very subtle, and it often takes someone who understands the character from the inside out to clarify details, and to create a reality that rings true.

  Some months ago, William Kelley (Witness) called me about a religious character he was creating. Knowing that I was a

  Quaker, he wanted to check a few details about his Quaker female character. Those he mentioned seemed well researched and very astute. He then read me a prayer he had written for his character. I told him, "Bill, you've created a Methodist prayer, not a Quaker prayer." Our conversation affirmed the direction of his character, and also clarified one important detail.

  EXERCISE: Imagine writing a funeral scene. What would it be like if it were a funeral from your own culture? Think about the funerals you've attended from other cultures. How do they vary? How would you go about finding out the difference between a Jewish funeral, a Southern black funeral, and a Quaker memorial service?

  Think about the weddings you've attended. What are the differences between them? How did the various weddings express the cultural backgrounds of the bride and groom?

  A CASE STUDY: THE WOMEN IN FILM LUMINAS AWARDS

  Many groups, recognizing the harm that stereotypes can do, have become increasingly vocal about the need to portray women and minorities more realistically.

  In 1983, in an effort to change the way that women were depicted in the media, an international organization called Women in Film designed an award, the Luminas Award, to reward positive nonstereotypical portrayals of women. I was the chair of the committee, set up to create criteria that would help us identify stereotypes as well as positive female characters.

  The criteria can be used to advantage by writers, producers, and directors to break through any stereotypes that are emerging in the characters they are working on.

  Originally, there were eight criteria. In this case study,

  I am focusing on five of the criteria that are most applicable to both women and minorities. (A list of all eight appears on pages 223-224.)

  Nonstereotypical characters are multidimensional.

  Stereotypical characters generally are one-dimensional. They are sexy, or violent, or greedy, or manipulative. Dimensional characters contain values and emotions and attitudes and paradoxes. Breaking a stereotype means humanizing the person to show the depth and breadth of the character.

  Nonstereotypical characters are seen in a variety of social and personal roles and in a variety of contexts.

  Often stereotypical characters are defined in limited roles and limited contexts. A woman might be seen simply as the boss's wife, or as a mother, a secretary, or a vice president. Dimensional characters play many roles and exist in a variety of contexts. They are not limited, but are both individual and relational people, and products of their culture and occupation, of their location and their history. Adding other roles and contexts will expand the character and break the stereotype.

  Nonstereotypical characters reflect the range of age, race, socioeconomic class, physical appearance, and occupations present in society at large.

  To break stereotypes, stories need to portray more truthfully the makeup of our society. In television, most women are young, beautiful, and rich, which belies the important contributions of women over forty, as well as the social reality that women earn less money than men. In most stories, minorities are relegated to only a few occupations and to a lower socioeconomic class, which misrepresents their influence and contributions. Understanding the statistical representation of the

  society of your story, and representing it realistically, will expand the palette of your story.

  Nonstereotypical characters move the story through attitude, behavior, and inner purpose, thereby affecting the outcome.

  Stereotypical characters are often reactive, rather than active. They are controlled by the story and are victims of the more powerful characters in the story. Dimensional characters, in contrast, are inner-directed rather than outer-directed. They influence the story, move the action, and affect the outcome. Giving characters intentionality will strengthen them, and move them from being victims to being powerful influences upon the story.

  Nonstereotypical characters reflect their culture and provide new insights and new role models because of the influence of their background.

  Many stereotypical characters are general characters. They will act just the same as the white male, even though their background has conditioned them to have other perspectives. Many times a woman or a member of a minority will have a different attitude toward a problem, or a different idea about how to resolve it, or will recommend another response. This new slant on a situation can add creative details and unusual twists to your story that you won't achieve by using only characters from one culture. Breaking stereotypes means recognizing the contributions that people from another cultural background can make. By valuing what they have to offer, characters outside your own culture can add color and texture and uniqueness to your stories.

  The Luminas Award was first given in 1986. At this writing, it has been discontinued with some thoughts of reinstituting it at

  a later date. The criteria, however, continue to be used by some industry members in their own character creations.

  APPLICATION

  Think for a moment about the people you know who are black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, etc. Think about how media usually portrays these people, and how that varies from your own experience. Are there any people in any of these groups you have never met? What do you think is true about these people? Try to find out the truth, particularly if you decide to use one of these ethnic groups within your story.

  Apply the criteria from the case study to several films you've seen in the last year. Where is each film weak? Where is it strong? Where could it have been better without compromising its story?

  Think about your hometown. What diversity was there among the people you knew growing up? Were there people from certain cultures with whom you had no contact? Did you have stereotypical ideas about these people? How did you begin to break those stereotypes?

  Think about the context for the characters of your script. Have you explored the diversity within their particular location? Do you need to do further research about some of your people in order to portray them accurately? Who do you know within the minority group who could read your script and give suggestions as to how to further dimensionalize the character?

  SUMMARY

  Breaking stereotypes is not a process that the writer needs to do alone. All of the groups mentioned have printed material that can help
give further understanding of specific minority

  characters. Most of them, too, have other resources available to the writer, such as people able to consult on portrayals within the script.

  Adding positive depictions of women and minorities to your story can expand the palette of your story, and create stronger, clearer, and more dimensional characters.

  Writers get stuck—and characters get stuck. Sometimes ideas just don't come. Sometimes characters don't seem to go anywhere, and all the basic questions—What does the character want? Who is this character? What is he or she doing in the story?—don't seem to have any answers. For some writers, these moments fill them with dread. Others see them as simply part of the creative process.

  Sometimes writers get stuck on characters simply because they've been overworking and are so exhausted that their minds don't function well.

  Some character problems occur because the writer has not done enough research. If you don't understand the character's context, the character won't work.

  Other problems occur because writers spend so much time writing, they've stopped living. Carl Sautter says, "You have to try to have a life. You have to realize that you're more than just a writer and that there is a world out there. Because if you're not in it, then you're not writing as well as you could be, because you're missing what is going on."

  There's nothing unusual about confronting character problems. Every writer does it. Usually the problems fall into several different categories:

  PROBLEMS WITH UNLIKABLE CHARACTERS

  When Judith Guest was writing Ordinary People, she had a difficult time understanding Beth. She says, "Beth works fine to define the plot and move the story. But for my own purposes as an author, she feels like a failure to me. There are too many people who say to me, 'I hated her.' And that seems to be the fault of the writer because I didn't intend for people to hate her except I think I hated her too at the beginning of the book. When I first started writing the book, I blamed her for what had happened to Conrad. The longer I wrote, the more complex the situation appeared to me and the less I blamed her. I decided not to go inside Beth's head because I was afraid I'd reveal how little I knew about her inner workings. At that time I told my friend and fellow novelist, Rebecca Hill, that I couldn't get inside this character and she said, 'I'll tell you why—you hate her and she isn't going to reveal herself to you.'

  "Sometimes writers don't understand the character because the part that they hate is somehow a part of them. I think if you can join with that part of yourself that feels this way it will help you to get a handle on the character. I do think there's cruelty in all of us, stupidity, willfulness, all the character traits about yourself that you dislike, and you try to correct them in yourself and repress them, and believe that they don't exist. When you see them in other people it makes you furious. So I think maybe a way in is to accept these parts of yourself that you hate, and even love them in some way because they're part of you."

  Robert Benton concurs. "There are characters that I knew I needed to write and I just couldn't write them because I didn't like them, and I had to go find some other character. There

  have also been times where I've written a character and I shouldn't have. It never works. "

  If a character is a reflection of your own shadow side, he or she might be difficult to like. By understanding and accepting your own psychology, you'll be more able to write characters you might consider negative.

  PROBLEMS WITH UNDERSTANDING THE CHARACTER

  There are times when writers can't figure out their character. No matter how much work they've done, the character still eludes them. Frank Pierson recommends learning more about the character by creating scenes that will never appear in the script. "Maybe you don't know enough about the characters and how they relate to each other. . . . one way of dealing with it is to sit these people down in a situation which has nothing to do with the screenplay at all, e.g.: One of them orders a lunch and sends it back to the kitchen, which is very embarrassing to the other character. And what happens out of that? How do they talk about it? How do they argue about it? How do they fight? How would these characters change a tire on the Santa Monica Freeway in the rain? How would they get change for a $100 bill in Detroit after midnight? Write those scenes and you will teach yourself more about the characters than you will almost any other way."1

  PROBLEMS WITH VAGUE CHARACTERS

  Characters, like people, are unique and detailed and specific. Sometimes characters don't work because they're too generalized and vague.

  Robert Benton says, "Unless I'm careful I will find myself

  writing characters that are general rather than specific. That is, they never rise above the needs of the plot. If characters are good, they will impose themselves upon the plot and force the plot to accommodate them. They're simply not tools of the plot or tools of a kind of moral concept that you want to get across. Sometimes I've made the character too consistent or sometimes I've made them comment on themselves, and sometimes I've made them abstract ideas. When that happens, I go back and throw the character out and begin to rethink it from the beginning. What I try to do most often is find somebody that I know, or have known, as a model for my character. If you take somebody that you know fairly well, you're bound to have certain insights into them. When it gets hard for me is when I write a character that's based on a movie character, a character from another movie. If I try to write a John Wayne character, as in Rio Bravo, it never works. I've tried it many times. The only time it works is when I take a character from my life and superimpose it over that character. I use certain people over and over—using different aspects of them. I've used my wife in twenty different ways in many of my scripts.

  "During Kramer vs. Kramer, Dustin Hoffman taught me a lot about writing, so that every character at every moment must be specific. He really made me see as we worked on that picture, there was no moment that character had where he could afford to be general. He had to be specific and precise."

  PROBLEMS WITH COMMERCIALLY

  Most American producers and actors demand sympathetic and positive characters. This can create character problems, particularly when a writer has drawn a well-rounded, fascinating, but negative character that isn't workable for the American marketplace.

  Kurt Luedtke says: "I'm having a problem with a character I'm writing now, but it's not because I'm blocked on the charac

  ter. I know the character very well, maybe too well. But he's other than a commercial movie hero. If I didn't have to worry about that, I could do some interesting things with this character. But part of the job is trying to find a character that fifty million people are going to want to see."

  In a case like this, the writer may need to rethink the character, or begin adding positive attributes to balance the flaws.

  PROBLEMS WITH SUPPORTING CHARACTERS

  Sometimes a supporting character takes over the story. Writers have two different viewpoints about what to do when this happens. Dale Wasserman says, "That's trouble. Because if a supporting character starts to take over, I'd take it as something wrong with the story idea or structure. And that I hadn't thought it through well enough to begin with. That happens pretty often. It generally indicates that you have contrived rather than constructed your story. And in the process of contriving, characters were not in balance and did not serve the story in right proportions."

  Sometimes, though, this can be an advantage. Robert Benton says, "In Places in the Heart, Edna Spalding took over the story. Originally the story was about bootleggers in Texas. Edna came into the movie as a minor character and she just pushed everybody away. When I love writing the most is when a character takes over. When I don't like writing is when I have to drag the character with me. That means I know I'm doing something wrong. Sometimes a character taking over can be the best thing for the story."

  Some characters are too obedient. It's as if the writer is manipulating puppets, rather than entering into a dynamic relations
hip with the characters, allowing them also to have their say in the story.

  Shelley Lowenkopf says, "One of the things to get a beginning writer to do is to back off and leave the characters room to expand in the story. Sometimes it's vital to a sense of tension and suspense that the characters take on a life of their own."

  STORY PROBLEMS VS. CHARACTER PROBLEMS

  Sometimes a character won't come alive because it's a story problem, not a character problem. Kurt Luedtke comments: "When there's a real problem with a character, the first thought I have is not to fix the character but to lose him. When you start trying to fix him, you can always do things to make a character more interesting, but it's pretty artificial when you do it. It's not hard to think of a behavior that they have, or a tic or a past or a dress or a style. I don't say that it doesn't work as a matter of entertainment, but it makes me restless. I think it's a little bit cheap to come up with expedient solutions when another character might start taking on a life and be much more interesting. I'd rather lose a character that refuses to come alive and try to find one that will.

  "Maybe there's a very specific story reason why you can't lose the character, but the story can be rather malleable. And if the character who won't come alive seems to be needed from a story standpoint, you've probably uncovered a story flaw. It's not a character flaw, it's a problem in the story, because if that person's critical and the story's right, why wouldn't they come alive? My suspicion is that you're button-pushing the plot. You need someone to walk in, throw a switch, and get off, and you may think that it's a nice story move, but if it's not working, I'd look at the story first.

  "If I can't get rid of the character, because I need him for story reasons to do this thing, my next thought would be, That's a fragile story that depends on a character that won't work to do something; let's look a little more. There's a problem that looks like a character problem, but it's really a story problem."

  TECHNIQUES FOR BREAKING THROUGH

  Character problems are solvable. Experienced writers have many techniques that help them work through character blocks.