Unknown Screenwriter: Developing your Protagonist
GITS reader Mark Rovner sent along this link from the Unknown Screenwriter blog. In the middle of a post titled “Tweaking, Polishing, Adhering to Structure,” the Unknown Screenwriter talks about an interesting way to develop your Protagonist:
I know I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating… You’ve got to know your characters. I get a lot of email about writer’s block. I never really experience writer’s block anymore… Sure, I used to.
A long, long, long, time ago.
And then on that last day I actually experienced it, it occurred to me that I might not know what comes next in my story because my character sure as hell didn’t know what to do next. I took that concept and ran with it… I made the character bio from HELL thinking that it would certainly solve all my problems…
It didn’t.
Fuck. Now what? I happened to have been reading a book at the time and as I was reading later that night, I somehow inserted my Protagonist into the book — substituted him for the book’s protagonist and when I did that — basically day dreaming in the middle of the night, something MAGICAL happened.
My Protagonist did things DIFFERENTLY from the book’s protagonist… Wow. It blew me away. It was like I had tapped in to some huge secret. A secret that gave me CHILLS and GOOSEBUMPS. A secret that I didn’t have anyone to share it with… The best kind of secret… LOL.
As I kept reading through the book, I jotted down some notes about my Protagonist being in the same situation… I basically, just did some clustering-type notes. Cause and effect based on what I knew of my Protagonist at the moment. Sure enough, my Protagonst tackled these events WAY DIFFERENTLY than the guy in the book… LOL. From there, I went to earlier chapters to see if this concept would hold up and again, my Protagonist continued to WOW me with the way he handled the obstacles in the book.
Unknown Screenwriter then goes on to describe how he screened the movie Three Days of the Condor and did the same thing — imagined his story’s Protagonist in the situations confronting Condor’s Protagonist Joseph Turner / The Condor (Robert Redford). Again with remarkable insights and understanding.
Sounds like a great idea — and similar to something I’ve posted about here — Switch Protagonists:
Here’s something you can do with character archetypes that is both illuminating and fun: Switch Protagonists. Not literally, but as an exercise in getting to know your characters better, imagine each one of the primary ones as a Protagonist. For example, let’s look at The Silence of the Lambs (1991). My character archetype breakdown for that movie looks like this:
Protagonist: Clarice Starling
Nemesis: Buffalo Bill
Attractor: Catherine Martin (Buffalo Bill’s final kidnapping victim)
Mentor: Hannibal Lecter
Trickster: Dr. Frederick Chilton (Director of Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane)
But per the exercise, what if we switched things around and imagined that Hannibal Lecter is the story’s Protagonist? What character archetype breakdown might we get? How about:
P: Lecter
N: Chilton
A: Starling
M: Buffalo Bill
T: Jack Crawford / FBI
Lecter’s goal? He wants to get out of prison. Who’s the first line of defense? Chilton. When Lecter causes Miggs to swallow his tongue, Chilton strips Lecter’s room bare of all his drawings and artifacts, then blares a TV evangelist at Lecter. When Lecter negotiates his deal with Clarice, he states, “I want to be in a federal insitutation, away from Chilton. Chilton = Lecter’s Nemesis.
Is Lecter romantically inclined toward Starling? It seems clearly so in the movie. Further proof: Thomas Harris’ sequel “Hannibal” in which Lecter and Starling are lovers. She’s Lecter’s Attractor.
I would argue the Mentor is Buffalo Bill for it’s the clues BB gives and the influence of his crimes that provide the opportunity for Lecter to escape.
And Trickster? Jack Crawford and the FBI. Crawford literally prepares a test (“questionnaire”) for Clarice to bring to Lecter. Crawford essentially uses Clarice under false pretenses to gain information re Buffalo Bill — very tricky. Crawford sends Clarice back to Lecter, offering him a deal from the FBI — but the deal doesn’t actually exist.
Okay, now what if we shifted the Protagonist function to Buffalo Bill?
P: Buffalo Bill (Jamie Gumb)
N: Clarice Starling
A: The female version of Jamie Gumb
M: Moths
T: Catherine Martin
What is Buffalo Bill’s goal? To become a woman. When he is rejected for a sex change operation, he starts to kidnap and kill young women, skinning them in order to sew together his own female body suit. Catherine Martin is another step toward that goal. Clarice intends to save Catherine. Hence, Clarice is BB’s Nemesis.
Re the Attractor: There is a very telling sequence in the movie in which Gumb dresses up as a woman and dances in front of a video-camera, exposing his ‘feminized’ body — makeup, wig, even to the point of tucking his penis between his thighs, then standing proud, fully nude as if he has a vagina. It’s that persona to which Gumb is most emotionally attached and, therefore, in my view his Attractor.
http://www.youtube.com/v/xjTqoMFyIIw&hl=en&fs=1
Mentor: There is a scene (which I can’t find on YouTube) where Gumb extracts a moth from its larval cocoon and talks to it saying, “So beautiful… so powerful.” Lecter amplifies the significance of the moth to Buffalo Bill:
LECTER
The significance of the moth is
change. Caterpillar into cocoon into
beauty... Billy wants to change,
too, Clarice. But there's the problem
of his size, you see. Even if he
were a woman, he'd have to be a big
one...
The moth represents change, a living symbol of what Gumb wants to do — therefore functioning as Gumb’s Mentor.
And the Trickster? How about Catherine Martin who tricks Gumb’s dog — “Precious” — down into her pit and threatens to kill the dog, presenting a major test for Gumb.
As a writing exercise for your own stories, you can not only shift Protagonists in order to identify character archetypes upon which you can more fully develop their personalities, you can also dig deeper into each of your primary characters, seeing the world through their eyes. How much more interesting might you find your Nemesis character, or your Mentor, Attractor, or Trickster if you imagine that they are the story’s Protagonist?
So two good exercises for developing your characters:
* Per the Unknown Screenwriter, imagine your story’s Protagonist in the role of some other story’s Protagonist — how would your P react differently?
* Per moi, take each of your primary characters and imagine events through their perspective as
the story’s Protagonist.
As the Unknown Screenwriter says, “You’ve got to know your characters.” Any exercise you can do to walk in their shoes should be a rewarding one.
H/T to Mark Rovner for the heads-up!
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