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07/11/2008: Making People Fast


I was in a situation recently where I had to create an original character for a series of scenes. Great. I gave him some interesting character traits and wrote some dialogue that reflected those traits and I was happy with the result. Then all the scenes had to be made drastically shorter. Instead of being a character with a dozen lines, this guy now had half that many. And suddenly, he didn't pop any more. There was no sense of a character there anymore, just a person who said things.

The problem was that what can read as character complexity over lots of lines can just read as random noise in the short run. If you need a character to pop in just a few lines, it's going to be hard to make them display the interesting apparent contradictions that give a character depth. I would recommend that you pick a nice simple description: optimist, trouble-maker, peace-maker, crank, blowhard, naif. Now you've got a way to focus their few lines and the audience has a hope of getting a sense of their core nature. If you ever get to come back to the character for a more extended scene, you can give them planes and angles then.

And it's not as if you're doomed to stereotype, either. You can write an interesting, even surprising, optimist. I know you can! And, of course, you can pick a trait that's unexpected for the context. An innercity innocent or a plucky hell-denizen may have only one salient characteristic, but it's an unexpected one given their situation.

Lunch: sushi at Echigo. Oh boy, I love that warm rice.