by Chuck Wendig
You just have to give us a shovel.
We need to relate. It’s one of the reasons that, to my mind, viewers connected more easily to the original three films of the Star Wars series (Episodes IV, V, and VI) than the later prequels—the prequels present characters rooted to Byzantine politics and trade agreements and zzzz *snore* whoa, hey sorry, fell asleep there for a minute. Did I drool? I probably drooled. Here, hold on, I’ll just clean that up.
The prequels try to give us human stories, what with Anakin’s fear of losing Padmé and his eventual jealousy over Obi-Wan, both of which start to creep up in Episode II, but by then it’s too late. Anakin ultimately becomes the antagonist (meaning he turns perpendicular, working against all those around him), so it becomes even harder to relate—because while it gave us some emotional through-lines we understand, Anakin’s responses to those emotional beats are not ones to which we relate. He throws tantrums and acts out and embraces the Dark Side, and (though we’ve probably all been there) the writing doesn’t convincingly sell that transition as something we can be sympathetic or even empathetic about. He’s mostly just a petulant monster at that point.
And as for the rest of the prequel characters? Their concerns and emotions are mostly academic—elite and haughty. We don’t connect easily to abstract concerns. All the mechanisms of plot, all the flywheels flipping and gears turning, don’t mean squat to us if we aren’t grounded in feelings we understand. Obi-Wan comes closest in that he loses a mentor early on and is forced into being a teacher and proxy parent when he wasn’t ready to be one, but no other character comes closer than arm’s length because their worries are all about the Big Story.
The problem is, though, it’s always the small story that matters. Even the biggest story must have a smaller, more human story nested at the center. (For more on that, please see the interlude on page 79.)
Like nougat.
DELICIOUS, NARRATIVE NOUGAT.
God, now I’m hungry for a candy bar. See what you’ve done? But at least we can all relate to that, because who amongst us does not occasionally let our sweet tooth have a say? Let’s indulge!
*shamelessly eats a candy bar while staring at you*
*and another*
*and twelve more while never once breaking eye contact*
What was I saying? Right.
The small story is more important than the big story. In Saving Private Ryan, the war is a vital and necessary component to that story, but it isn’t the story. It provides the plot, yes. It creates context, true. But the story is about the characters: the soldiers moving through the battle, trying to find one other wayward soldier who has survived when his literal brothers have not. And the soldiers we travel with, these characters, are men—boys, practically—who just want to go home, but aren’t allowed to because they first have to help this other soldier go home. They’re in the middle of something they can’t control. They have only each other.
That’s fundamental, ground-level humanity right there. We don’t just understand it intellectually. We feel it right here, in our chests. It allows us to tether ourselves to the characters—so when they’re in danger, we’re in danger. When they’re triumphant, we’re triumphant. The act of storytelling is in part about creating those tendrils of empathy that bind us to the story. The act of storytelling is, weirdly enough, one where we hurt or help the characters in order to affect you, the audience. We want you to cry. We want you to cheer.
Really, we’re monsters.
(And it’s so much fun.)
Point being this: If we can’t understand the character? If we don’t see ourselves or something recognizable glinting back at us in their eyes? If there’s no glimpse of humanity? We will put the book down or turn off the movie, because our options for Other Things To Do is not in short supply. We will fuck right off to the next book, the next show, or some app on our phones, or maybe we’ll just eat a candy bar and take a nap.
A RESPONSE BEFITTING THE PROBLEM
Not only does the emotional journey (the quest resulting from confronting the problem) need to be something we grok, but we also need to respect and understand the response of the character.
To reiterate, when a character has a problem, that character also intends to solve that problem. And the journey from problem to solution is where we find the roots of our story and the events of our plot.
Just as the problem needs to be one we understand, so too does the solution need to be simple, clear, and relatable. John McClane’s problem is his broken family, so his response is in no way alien or bizarre: He goes out to see his family and try to mend the damage. Now, that gets a lot more complicated when Gruber and the Gang shows up, but it’s not mysterious. It’s not a solution that leaves us scratching our heads. The motivation is clear, and the solution that comes out of that motivation is straightforward.
To go back to the Star Wars prequels, those films give Anakin an understandable, relatable problem: He’s trapped in the throes of forbidden love and is slowly driven mad by his recognition of mortality—first witnessing the death of his mother, then becoming obsessed with a fear of Padmé dying, too. From there grow the limitations of his character: jealousy, anger, fear. Where the prequel trilogy starts to fall down a little is when Anakin’s response to his problem is muddy and inconsistent. He becomes afraid of losing Padmé, even though the story offers us little evidence for why this fear grows so strong. And when his response to that fear is, WELP, GUESS I’LL FALL TO THE DARK SIDE, KILL SOME JEDI, MURDER SOME CHILDREN, MAYBE FORCE-CHOKE THAT LADY I LOVE, THEN ATTACK MY BEST FRIEND ON A LAVA PLANET, he gets further and further away from being a character we understand. Even as a villain, his journey seems strained and designed only to force29 the plot to happen.30
Worse, Vader’s eventual redemption at the end of Return of the Jedi is complicated by the events at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Luke believes that there is still good in his father, and Obi-Wan tells Luke as much—so we, the audience, believe that. But what we later see in the prequels is an impetuous, vengeful teenager whose decision to murder children and abuse the mother of his own future children is so far outside of our relatable experience that it strains, or even breaks, our belief that he is someone worthy of redemption. It becomes less credible that Anakin has any good in him at all because his decisions are not ones we comprehend. If Anakin had jealously attacked Obi-Wan but obsessively sought to protect Padmé—oh, and if he hadn’t just killed a bunch of kids—we might be able to get on board with him being a good person who was led astray. But the atrocities he commits, especially without due cause for his actions, are signs that he wasn’t led astray—he was always astray.
THE UNCHANGING CHARACTER
An arc is predicated on a character changing—she transforms throughout the story, exiting a different person from when she entered.
Ah, but. There exists a type of character—often one cast in a more “heroic” mode—who never really changes. In most stories, a character engages with the world, it engages with her in return, and both come out different. Sometimes subtly, sometimes apocalyptically. But in certain stories, heroic characters push on the world—and it never pushes on them in turn.
This is where you have static characters instead of dynamic ones. In the original Ghostbusters, the four protagonists don’t change much at all during the course of the film—they go through plot stuff, they bust ghosts and say funny things and save the whole damn city, but the characters who saunter out as heroes at the end aren’t much different from when we met them at the beginning. Their plot is different. They have new roles—from shlubs to saviors, from zeroes to heroes—but that hasn’t changed them in an organic, emotional way. Similarly, Indiana Jones as a character changes from film to film, but within each given film there’s not a lot of movement for him emotionally. It’s different in Star Wars—there, the characters are more dynamic. We talked about Luke already, but Han Solo goes from scoundrel to soldier; Leia’s journey is less overt, but she goes from resi
sting love to embracing it, her veneer as a haughty princess cracked by the charm and smarm of the scoundrel, Solo. (That said, her badass-ery and her heroism is not diminished by any of this.)
Point is, it’s totally okay to have a character not change throughout a story—depending on the type of story. It’s certainly common in comic books and TV shows, where the writers don’t really know how many episodes or issues they have to work with—could be five, could be five hundred. Which means you have no real ending to contend with, no shape, no dimension, and it’s hard to plan for a character changing if that character might be, for all intents and purposes, eternal. (It has been said of television, and I’ll say it’s also true of long-running comic series, that the stories are “all middle.”) Batman is still Batman decades later. He’s changed somewhat with the times, but overall, his story remains the same, and his character exists within a spectrum of a degree. Superman, still Superman. Gregory House in the series House, M.D. remains the same cantankerous, ego-fed jerk-off that he was at the beginning.
What’s interesting is that, sometimes, the static nature of a character is the point of the character. Tony Soprano and Don Draper (of Sopranos and Mad Men, respectively) are two characters who try to change. They are desperate to be different men with different lives. But at the conclusions of the shows’ final seasons, the arc of each character was revealed to be not so much a bending rainbow as an ouroboros—a snake biting its own damn tail.
Still, when in doubt, give your characters an arc. Find a change for them, even a subtle one, even if the attempt to change reveals that they cannot. Consider how James Bond these days is seeing some emotional wiggle room (particularly in Casino Royale), which creates a deeper character—not a shallow trope-painted automaton marching bulletproof through the plot, but a three-dimensional person who has wants, fears, a problem, a quest. Creating characters with some transition, some transformation, makes them interesting—it breaks the status quo and gives us a reason to care.
And speaking of reasons to care …
SAVING THE CAT, ONE CHARACTER AT A TIME
There exists a popular book on writing screenplays called Save the Cat! by the late Blake Snyder. It’s a damn fine book to help tuck your brain-meat into the conceptual sandwich that is “structure in film.” It takes your expected three-act structure (which we’ll talk about more starting on page 88) and makes it more granular, offering a more detailed view of those peaks and valleys that you need to hit in the screenplay. One of those peaks is a moment that earns the book its name: At some point in a film, the protagonist needs to perform a “save the cat” act—which is not literally to say every character in every film needs to actually perform feline rescue operations, but rather, that every character needs to give us at bare minimum a single moment where they are heroic. They do something noble or good to prove to us why we’re with them on this journey.
As a piece of advice, it’s not bad.
But I don’t know that it’s quite right, either.
Here’s what I propose, instead:
I often refer to a “give-a-fuck” factor when writing characters—meaning, we need reasons to care. Having them metaphorically save a cat is one possible way to do that, especially if their arc is heroic. But we have another way, and it connects to what I’ve just been talking about:
Give them relatable moments. And not just one, either. As many as you can give us within the appropriate context of the work. A relatable moment occurs when a character connects with humanity in common ways, demonstrating shared experience.
It’s like this: John McClane is tense from a plane flight, so another passenger has him do the “ball up your toes and push them into the carpet” ritual. That’s very human. And a guy like McClane needs that humanity. He needs to be grounded, because otherwise he’s just Snarky Supercop. But he smokes, he gets emotional, he makes bad decisions—and these are all very human things. We want him to feel like he belongs in his world, but also that he belongs in ours. In the movie John Wick, the titular assassin offers up a number of small human moments during the first act: waking up to an alarm, loving his new puppy, replaying a video of his deceased wife. None of these moments are related to his BADASS ASSASSIN life—they’re moments related to regular life. To life-life. The kind we all have and can understand. Buffy Summers gets a lot of these moments as a kid in high school, and so does Peter Parker outside of being Spider-Man. Why we care for these characters—the give-a-fuck factor—isn’t just about their heroism, big or small. It’s about how human they are, and how that helps us to understand them.
ANAGNORISIS, PERIPETEIA, CATASTROPHE, AND OTHER ARISTOTELIAN SHENANIGANS
If you care to glance at Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, or you really want a few words that will get you some big wins in Scrabble, I give you: anagnorisis, peripeteia, and catastrophe. My definitions here are very limited, but might give you a new way to look at both a character and her journey through a story:
Anagnorisis is a discovery made by a character.
Peripeteia is a dramatic change (positive or negative) in the story.
Catastrophe is the final resolution of the interplay between the above two forces within a story.
Anagnorisis and peripeteia are forces of order and chaos, respectively, that tumble around and around like a pair of hedgehogs fighting in a washing machine. So a character makes a discovery, which leads to a change, and/or a change leads to a discovery. And inevitably these two forces ratchet up and up until the conclusion—or catastrophe. You can think of this interplay between anagnorisis and peripeteia as encompassing the whole story, or perhaps see a story as a series of catastrophes (climaxes and resolutions) creating greater and worse conflicts until the end. Arguably, the former has a more typically mythic storytelling structure. A New Hope sees the dread order of the Empire battle the noble chaos of the Rebellion—and the Dark Side battles the Light, as well—leading to the rather large catastrophic conclusion of the Death Star going all explodey.
A television show, however, might be more useful to view through the lens of the battle of order and chaos resolving in a series of episodic catastrophes and conclusions—one after the other, act to act, episode to episode.
CHARACTER AGENCY IS EVERYTHING
If you’ve read this chapter on character and you’ve faded in and out, I don’t blame you. It’s okay. You, like some of my readers, have read the chapter and fugued out, waking up in an unearthed coffin somewhere west of I-95 in Maryland. You have no pants and your wallet is gone. It’s okay. This happens all the time. It’s a normal side effect of reading my books.31
Just the same, I want you to leave this chapter with a point, with something actionable. So if you exit this section learning nothing else, I want you to come away with this:
The greatest thing you can do for your characters and their story is to give the characters agency.
Agency does not mean they are literal members of, like, the CIA or the NSA. It doesn’t mean they belong to some character guild or union where they’ll demand a certain appearance ratio in your story. (“If these characters don’t get at least ten lines of dialogue and a proper arc, then we’ll see you on the picket line, Mister or Missus Fancy-Pants Writer-Person.”)
No, character agency is this: a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.
Let’s break that down a little.
MAKE DECISIONS AND AFFECT THE STORY. This means that when the character says, “I need to go to my mother’s house,” the story follows her there. It means that when she says, “I am at my mother’s house and I’ve decided that she needs to go into a nursing home,” that becomes the story, or at least one part of it. The story isn’t a train heading down the tracks and the character isn’t a goat that the train is goin
g to run over. The character is the train—or, better yet, the character is a helicopter or an ornithopter or a giant-ass bird who chooses her own three-dimensional pathway through the world. When her wings beat, currents are stirred and the world changes.32
THE CHARACTER HAS MOTIVATIONS. At the fore of this, we said that characters have problems and they want to solve those problems. That’s the motivation. They have a drive to do something—they want to gain something, they want to be rid of something, they want to love a person or find a widget. This is their quest, and they are on it not because the plot wants them to be, not because you the storyteller need them to be, but rather because they have the motivation to traverse the labyrinth.
ACTIVE VERSUS REACTIVE/PUSHING ON PLOT MORE THAN IT PUSHES ON HER. Characters are not paper boats in a stream going where the story takes them. The story goes where they bring it. That’s not to say a character cannot be reactive, in part—each character is not a divine being with perfect and supreme will. A character acts, and the world (often through other characters) pushes back. And she is forced to contend with those oppositional reactions—but even in that, she is acting in return. We’ve all met characters who don’t feel instrumental, who feel like they could be replaced by a person made of balloons or a sexy hat rack. The plot keeps elbowing them this way and that, and it’s totally inorganic. They don’t feel like characters on a quest so much as they feel like characters dragged behind a pickup truck. When the plot pushes on active characters, they don’t fall over. They don’t let it happen. They respond and push back. Reactive should never mean passive.