Screenwriting 101: Peter Straughan

“Like a lot of male writers, I naturally gravitate toward male characters. I tend to think a main character’s going to be a man. So it was fantastic to realize you can just say: ‘No, it’s not; it’s a woman.’ Nothing else changes, but it becomes more interesting. You think: I may have seen that man before, but I haven’t seen this woman before., It was an important lesson for me. I don’t want to be a sexist writer. I love my three sisters. And my wife was a screenwriter. I always knew it wasn’t okay to write male characters so automatically, but the question was: What do you do about it? Well, it’s quite simple: You just stop worrying about whether it’s a man or woman and write a good character.”

— Peter Straughan (WGAW Written By, April | May 2015, P. 41)

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