In a post on the Stage 32 blog, Zelene Dolton suggests four reasons your characters aren’t working and ways to fix them.
- Your characters experience hardship but never suffer. Do you characters go through the wringer but come out unfazed? “As much as we all would love to be invincible and incapable of feeling negative emotions, we don’t find these characters interesting because pain is part of being human,” Dolton says. Be sure that your characters have emotional balance, which means some negative along with the good.
- Your character is either a flawless angel or the demon of all demons. Characters who are all good or all bad seem flat. Add complexity on both sides of the equation.
- You have too much plot and not enough character. Do your characters move the plot or are they just following along with outside events? “Events need to happen because of other characters’ actions and reactions, not because the plot says to do this or do that,” Dolton writes.
- You don’t know enough about them. Go deeper than goals, backstory, and motivation to craft truly original characters. “Even if it’s trivial and won’t make it in the screenplay, it’s still worth knowing,” Dolton says.
