Situation Drives Character Drives Plot

A guest column from screenwriter Tom Benedek (Cocoon) and co-founder of Screenwriting Master Class:

SITUATION: a condition or combination of conditions that exist at a particular time

Each moment of our lives is a situation. Every scene of the movie or TV series we are imagining is a highly magnified situation as well.

CHARACTER DRIVES PLOT.

It’s true. It’s simple. And it is doesn’t always resonate perfectly in scene writing.

SITUATION DRIVES CHARACTER — Let’s add this to the mix and see how it might help build out story.

CHARACTER DEFINED THROUGH SITUATION

How things will move forward, what the character or characters want to do, are able to do, given the circumstances of story, the nature of the obstacles at a given point in the story. That is a situation. How our characters behave, given a set of circumstances, a situation is why we keep reading, keep watching. Characters, real people, respond to situations based on their personalities, their current life circumstances.

• Know your characters’ lives as the story opens — understand the current emotional, social, economic currents in their lives

• Embody your characters with personal qualities large and small, weaknesses, strengths to be called up in them constantly

• Consider the smaller things going on in scenes, in story that characters might react to in specific, inherently personal ways

Sideways (2004)

If we understand what our characters have going on in their lives, how things are rolling for them, who they are unconditionally as human beings, then we will be able to write in the ways they will respond to obstacles, conflicts which in human terms feel like situations. Plot movement changes situation for our characters. When character is really driving plot, it is those details of situation which offer great satisfactions, memorable moments to the audience along with the big plot turns. Sideways mini-journeys of character behavior may offer golden opportunities.

Try marking up the margin of your draft or outline with situation angles for our characters.

• Ask yourself what their specific situation is in the moments of scenes.

• Reflect on how things feel personally for them.

• Brainstorm how they might react emotionally as story tracks forward.

I have two fun, rapid fire one week classes starting next Monday, March 28. We’ll be discussing this and a lot more…

The Character Driven Screenplay –Alexander Payne and David O. Russell

Writing the Original TV Pilot

Two great learning opportunities with Tom Benedek. Check them out here.