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08/17/2008: Battle of the Bloggers!


Hey! We've got controversy! Last time, I cited this hypothetical character intro as a good one:

SHERRY, 40s, sharp-tongued, rich and proud, is the woman you sit next to when you want to hear snarky comments about everyone else. She's all offense because her defense sucks -- she's shockingly thin-skinned. Chain-smoker, stylish, bright-eyed, attractive in a surgical way.

Friend of the blog Alex, over at the Crafty TV Writing blog suggests that this description is a bit of a cheat. He says, while observing he's become less of a purist about this recently, that:

My personal effort is never to put anything in a script that an actor can't play and communicate to the audience.

He points out, with specific reference to Hypothetical Sherry:

Until we see her say something snarky, she's not really a snarky character, is she? The danger is that a newbie writer will write a direction like that and expect us to like the character because, hey, she's snarky!

His remedy:

Personally, I usually minimize the description, but then have the character immediately bust out a distinct line, or do something out of the ordinary that defines them.

I certainly have nothing wrong with immediately giving a character a line that strongly defines their attitude -- in fact, I encourage it. And it's certainly true that stating that character has a given attribute is not enough to give them that attribute. You actually have to give them that attribute.

I still like my character intro, though. For one thing, I think "the woman you sit next to when you want to hear snarky comments" evokes a TYPE of person, in the same way that "the guy who always spills soup on his shirt front" or "the kind of baby who smiles at strangers" is a type. It doesn't mean there's going to be any actual soup-spilling, stranger-smiling or snarky-commenting necessarily going on. It's just supposed to evoke a certain category of human, and it seems to me that membership in that category is something that an actor can portray in any number of ways.

I've certainly been guilty of exactly what Alex is talking about here. I'll often say, "his humor, when it appears, is self-deprecating," or things like that -- things that certainly could be left for the reader to discover through the examples that follow in dialogue. But I'm still not troubled. In a world in which readers often miss elements in a script because of distractions or time pressures or inattention, I have no problem with building in a little redundancy. It's a little like that old formula for giving a speech: tell them what you're gonna tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. It doesn't work if you skip the middle, but why would you skip the middle?

I'm reminded many old stories about Hollywood writers hired to rewrite a movie because readers weren't finding the main character likable enough, or because the studio felt a character wasn't proactive enough. In the story, the heroic writer always adds one word to the character introduction ("likable" or "proactive") and turns the script back in, receiving mystified compliments as the execs wonder how he achieved such a positive change. I actually heard another one of these stories recently, a bit more plausible than other versions, in which the change was actually slightly more than one word. The new phrase added to the intro was something like, "she's off-putting now, but trust me, you'll grow to love her." Is it cheating? I suppose it is -- you're certainly describing things unseen -- but it also shows confidence. The writer is telling the reader to relax, that they have things under control. The readers feel that their initial reaction is validated, and they also know where the writer is going to take them next.

Rules are supposed to help you communicate with the readers, so they know with consistency how the words on the page are supposed to translate into the hypothetical filmed product in their heads. When the rules stop helping, I believe in stepping away from them.

There are limits to this kind of free-wheelin' writin', of course. Alex and I are in total agreement about "backstory intros," in which the reader is told that this character is recovering from a divorce, or that they're secretly the sister of the other character in the scene even though neither of them know it yet. That is almost always a mistake, since it forces the reader into a position in which they have story-influencing info that the potential viewer doesn't have. And when you split the reader and the viewer, you're making the reader keep track of two separate story-experiences in their head. Bleah.

Now, I should point out, Alex may very well be right all the way through. If the person reading your script likes for rules to be followed, and you break the rules, even with style and purpose, then you might have lost their enthusiasm right then and there. Maybe you're willing to take that chance, and maybe you're not. Check out Alex's blog and his books -- wonderful stuff! Have fun making up your own mind on this point!

Lunch: pork pot-stickers homemade by my own mother, who has taught herself how to prepare a wide variety of exotic cuisines to perfection. Better than a restaurant.