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Beginning Screenwriting: Character Development, Part III

© Travis Sexton

Character is the most important part of any screenplay – don’t forget this. In the past two articles, we’ve taken the steps to get to know what your character looks like, what their name is, and what their history is. Remember, these are steps designed to help you while you’re writing your actual screenplay. It’s critical that you know your character better than anyone else. It’s you, as a writer, who has to take this character through an entire story filled with challenges, dramas, dilemmas and dangers. But the character development process cannot stop here. The next step in the development process is to establish the need of your character(s). Here’s where we finally get to work:

Screenwriter Christopher Keane, in “How to Write a Selling Screenplay”, suggests writing out the following statement to help establish your character’s need – “This is a story about (so and so) who wants (such-and-such) and will do anything to get it!” Keane suggests writing this statement out and taping it to your computer or typewriter. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this exercise. Why? Because this statement clearly defines who your character is and what it is he needs. Both of these aspects are the essence of your entire screenplay.

Ask yourself “What is the need of my character?” You have to establish the need of your character because it sets a goal for the entire storyline. Your entire screenplay will involve your character’s drive to accomplishing this need. Here is where you incorporate your story idea into the writing process. All of us, before we begin to write, have a story idea locked safely in our heads. We, too, as writers, have needs. Our need is to tell this story from start to finish. Because I have a journalism background, I love challenging myself to tell an entire story in two or three sentences. It’s a process of elimination that allows me to look at only the foundation of my story. Here’s an example:

A woman is given a million dollar bribe to kill her boss’s husband. The woman, who is sleeping with her boss’s husband, takes the bribe because she’s upset that he never left his wife like he promised. Ultimately, the woman gets entangled in a love triangle that leads to her own death.

Now that I have the foundation of my story down on paper, I can then define my character’s need. “This is a story about Corrina McFall who wants to marry the man, John Slain, who she is having an affair with and will do anything to get it!” It would be too simple if the million dollars were Corrina’s need. No, it’s more complex if she actually wants to marry the man she’s agreed to kill. Corrina will do anything to get John to marry her – anything! Corrina is at a very critical point in her life. She’s thirty-two, single, desperate, at a dead end job, and having an affair with her boss’s husband. Agreeing to accept her boss’s bribe is the moment where she goes beyond the point of no return.

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