Wowza! If you wanted to do a deep dive into character building, LSF Replay has been an incredible resource. First, Gemma Mushington helped us put our characters (and ourselves) through their paces in the Trial by Fire session. Next, Kira-Ann Pelican taught us about how attachment theory can deepen your characters and their relationships. Then the April 10 session brought us a hatrick of awesomeness with a session about Creating Compelling Characters with David Baboulene.
Context is Key
It doesn’t matter how good the performance is, just seeing an actor cry isn’t enough to make 99% of us cry along with them. We can recognize the emotions, but without any context it is just noise, and probably a noise we’d rather avoid. If you walk down the street and see a stranger crying, chances are you will look away. These emotions are uncomfortable, so we don’t want to experience them unless there’s a good reason.
Pass by that same bench but now it’s your little sister balling? You are definitely going to stop and find out what’s wrong. Questions would automatically leap out of your brain – Why are you crying? Who did this to you? How can it be fixed? And once Lil Sis finished answering those questions, you might find yourself crying right along with her and galvanized to take some kind of action.
When it comes to characters, this translates into making the audience understand certain things about them to provide enough context for the events that happen to them to matter. This doesn’t mean you need to get bogged down in sharing their whole life story, just the parts of their life that matter for this story. Many of those details will fall into place once you have a good grasp on their motivation.
Four Types of Conflict
For me, the context and motivation portion of his talk wasn’t totally new information, but when he started to talk about four types of conflicts I was hooked. I know in my heart there doesn’t always need to be an argument or a punch, but I didn’t really have the words to articulate why.
By opening yourself up to many different types of conflict, you can tell more interesting stories about more compelling characters. Conflicts can be layered onto each other to create a much bigger crescendo and payoff than only focusing on only one.
Here are some examples:
Internal Conflict
- Toy Story (and many children’s movies): Buzz is delusional and doesn’t know he’s a toy. Woody is petty and jealous of Buzz and afraid of losing Andy.
Relationship Conflict
- Any Good Guy vs Bad Guy is about a relationship. (Why do you think the baddies are always insisting the goodies join them? “We aren’t so different, you and I.”)
- Which is why bad guys need to have clear and interesting motivations.
- Your “bad guys” don’t even have to be that “bad”, they just have to have conflicting motivations, ethic, etc and put up obstacles
- E.g. Juno. Various people in her life had different viewpoints on how to deal with a pregnant teen. They were not bad people, they just wanted different things.
- Romances and buddy stories are built on conflict that leads to a greater understanding of the other and that they are better/more complete as a unit than on their own.
Institutional Conflict
- Rules of society and how they are enforced
- E.g. Juno going up against high school policies
- Rules of nature/physics and how they limit what your character can do.
- E.g. Marty McFly can’t access plutonium in 1955 because it’s rare and highly restricted
- This one I found especially interesting because I wouldn’t have called it “conflict” but it definitely leads to obstacles that a protagonist would have to overcome.
External Conflict
- “Acts of God”
- Storms
- Illnesses
- Accidents
Knowledge Gaps and The Power of Plans
You may recognize Babloulene’s name from other sessions he’s done for LSF on “knowledge gaps” and how they affect storytelling. In this session, he specifically talked about how knowledge gaps entice us to follow along while we watch characters execute a plan. So let’s define the term.
Start with the basic knowledge that humans are not special like other animals are. We aren’t particularly strong. We can’t fly or shoot venom from our eyeballs. But the thing we have over virtually every other species – and a huge reason why we have become the dominant species on the planet – has to do with our actual superpower. We have a sense of past, present, and future, which means we can construct narratives.
A narrative may be what is actually happening in the moment, but we are also able to project ourselves forward into a myriad of different hypothetical scenarios. Which means we can take steps in the present to gain or avoid a particular outcome. This ability to harness the power of “what if” is the first step on the road to creating entire fictional universes. But if you suddenly find you don’t have enough information to make a projection, then there’s tension/suspense because we have the question and not the answer. These are knowledge gaps, and when they are done well they make our narrative spidey senses go haywire and we find characters compelling.
Baboulene illustrated this by looking at some moments in movies when characters laid out their plan. I have struggled sometimes when collaborating with other writers who think a planning scene is a waste of time. “It’s all going to go wrong anyway, who cares what the plan was?” or maybe “The script is getting too long, let’s just cut it.” I’ve also heard “That’s an infodump and ‘real writers’ know better!” cited as a reason.
The problem is that what we don’t know can’t hurt us – so writers must give enough information for there to be emotional investment by the audience. Laying out a plan isn’t an info dump, it’s an invitation to the ‘inner sanctum’. By telling us what they are going to do, what they are hoping to accomplish at the end, and what they will lose if they fail, the characters have just created a series of delicious knowledge gaps we just have to fill in order to become full-fledged members.
Baboulene talks about three distinct gaps created by laying out a plan as illustrated by Marty and George McFly’s plot to win Lorraine in Back to the Future.
- Will the plan actually accomplish their larger goal even if they do succeed?
- Will Lorraine fall for George, thus saving Marty from fading out of existence?
- In group vs. out group – who knows about the plan and who could muck things up
- Lorraine doesn’t know there’s a plan – and she doesn’t act as expected. Drama!
- Biff doesn’t know there’s a plan and interrupts in the middle. Marty is thrown into the trunk of a car, unable to help. Drama!
- Once it goes wrong (and we can only know we’ve reached that point if we knew what right was supposed to look like) we desperately need to find out how they (and by extension we) will get out of it in the end.
- George arrives to play-act a fight with Marty and discovers Biff in the car instead. What’s he gonna do?
That’s All Folks
That’s it for me on Creating Compelling characters with David Baboulene. There’s plenty in the session I didn’t get to, so I definitely encourage you to check him out if you get the chance. Next week, we depart from our character theme to explore something I’m really excited about – The Screenwriter’s Cookbook: How Cooking Can Transform Your Screenwriting Game. Sounds downright delicious. Care to join me for some tasty treats? Sign up now!
Want to connect with Alison? You can find her on X (@A_Weaverdyck), Instagram (@alisonweaverdyck) or visit www.Alisonweaverdyck.com and her Coverfly account is HERE.
