Character

When creating your characters, they should each have a specific role and serve a purpose in telling your story.  There’s more to adding characters than giving them lines.  (See the article on Creating New Characters for further explanation.)  Every lead and supporting character should fall into one or more of these archetypal categories:  Archetypes Hero: admirable, likeable, lead to story [...]

Yesterday, I went over location descriptions; today, I’ll go over character action.  Character action is a little bit subjective.  Some writers prefer to leave it up to the actors, others believe they should put in every movement and gesture.  I think it’s best to work somewhere in between. Less is more A simple rule of [...]

I watch these shows about how actors got their big breaks and in one episode, they interviewed Sean Connery.  About his Oscar Award-winning role in The Untouchables, Connery said it was the dialogue that appealed to him; it’s not often an actor gets great dialogue.  When you want to attract A-listers like Connery, you not [...]

In television, no one changes.  Sometimes characters change in serialized dramas.  Growth comes from striving for a goal, overcoming obstacles and taking action.  Yes, every episode is about a character overcoming some minor obstacle, but even if there’s a degree of growth by the end of the episode, everything typically reverts to normal by the [...]

The other week I watched a new TV series and thought, “Meh, why should I care?”  The characters were flimsy, their relationships superficial and the jokes had been done a million times before.  This show is now on the chopping block – no surprise. How do you make sure people care?  To start with, you [...]