Characters as ‘profound individuals’: Part 1

How to create compelling and authentic characters? How to breathe life into them? How to lift them off the page? How to write what we may call “profound individuals”?

First, let’s parse that phrase profound individual.

By profound, I mean a character into which the writer has entered deeply, penetrating their most inner thoughts and knowledge.

By profound, I mean a character where the writer has gone beyond what is superficial, external or obvious.

By profound, I mean a pervasive character, a thorough character, a complete character.

By individual, I mean a distinct character as distinguished from a group, stereotype, or class.

By individual, I mean an original character imbued with their own specific set of experiences and memories, emotions and feelings, beliefs and values.

By individual, I mean an authentic character whose presence, actions and dialogue feel true.

This concern about creating great characters keeps surfacing for a very good reason: It’s damned hard to do. Just go back and re-read those qualities I laid out for a profound individual.

Penetrating.
Pervasive.
Thorough.
Complete.
Distinct.
Unique.
Authentic.
Far beyond superficiality.

A daunting task, indeed, to create characters who measure up. And yet, our goal in a screenplay is no less than that: Congregate a cast of profound individuals, matching up in terms of their depth to the specifics of the genre and story.

How to create authentic, compelling, “profound” characters? In this blog, I’ve posited a number of angles into that process: Consider each character’s narrative function (“Character = Function”). Explore character archetypes. Have your characters answer detailed questionnaires. Write script diaries. Brainstorm. Each of these is at their heart about two things:

Get curious.
Dig deeper.

Next I will follow up on this discussion with a powerful metaphor about the writer in relation to the characters we create, a metaphor steeped in the theological writings of Martin Buber.

[Originally posted February 24, 2009]

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