Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Character development.

Question for all you writer folks out there: What's your approach to character development? I'm particularly interested in the screen and stagewriter perspective on this, but I welcome all responses, even from those of you who write writing that other people have to actually read.

In addition to BFE and my attempts to make Lonnie more interesting, I'm working on a screenplay that I've been developing for, oh, too long. I love the premise and plot, love the relationships, love the conflict. I used to love the two main characters, too (brother and sister), but I've been exposed to some character flaws lately that are bugging me (by character flaws, I mean flaws in the character development, not human-type flaws that make characters interesting).

So I tried something new the other day. I sat down and just started writing about the brother, Shawn. I rambled and rambled about Shawn, about things he's done and things he likes and things he hates and all kinds of shit. It was completely unstructured, very stream-of-consciousness.

I really like Shawn now. Well, he's got some annoying-as-hell qualities about him, but he's so damn rich now. So much so that I see a number of places in the script where I need to go back and rework him because this Shawn, this guy who's much more real than he ever was, would never have said some of the things I had him say.

Now I need to do the same thing to his sister, Stephanie.

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