The Rouge Wave: “Origin Stories”
Our friend Julie at the invaluable screenwriting blog The Rouge Wave has an especially insightful post today. After viewing Iron Man, it caused Julie to think of “origin stories,” typical in comic book type movies that recount the origin of a character. And that caused Julie to have this thought:
So all of this got me to thinking — what is your main character’s origin story? Regardless of genre, your main character is on an arc of change, right? What was that moment that defined the hole your main character has been trying to fill ever since? What defined them long before your story began? If there was a moment of origin for your main character, your script is then going to be the second most defining moment of their lives, right? Because your script is in some ways the continuation of a story that already began long ago.
I’ve been teaching screenwriting at UNC-Chapel Hill this semester and the head of the writing program is David Sontag. We had lunch together a few weeks back and he had a comment which echoed Julie’s. David said he liked to remind his students that they needed to focus on “the story before FADE IN.”
If you want your characters to be alive, then you need to embrace that idea — fully. Search for them, where they were, who they were before your story begins. Reach back in time to find their origin story. What seminal event/events happened to them that, as Julie so aptly put, “defined the hole your main character has been trying to fill ever since.”
Believe this to be true: Your characters have been alive long before you type FADE IN . As a result, you have an enormous wealth of information about them available to you just waiting to be tapped. As Julie says:
So do some spelunking — find that origin story — that pivotal moment that happened long before your script began and then trace it forward — now your main character has reached some kind of uneasy equilibrium and by page ten, you’re going to be the finger of god, upset the balance and set change in motion.