Creating Great Characters

McKee asks the question in his book on story. Why do we care about MacBeth even though he is an evil person. He kills his King and then he kills the witnesses. And he continues to kill. He is a murderer. So why do we care about him? Because he feels guilt. He questions what kind of man would do such things. We can all empathize with that. Good characters have empathy. but they need to have not only a point of view on things, they need to have an attitude about what they have done, they also need to change as the story moves forward. Good chanters resist changing but need change more than anyone else.

What is Dramatic need? Basically it is what a character wants. It might not be what the story is about. It is what creates an interesting rich character. You want to build your dramatic need into the character as soon as possible. It should be done through the subtext of the story. It should be implied not stated. But like all art there are no rules that must always be confirmed. You want to do this in the introduction. This is what you use to introduce your character. Wait too long and risk your story feeling boring. Think about the dramatic needs of the characters in your story in respect to more than one element.
1) need character wants within each scene
2) need the character wants to achieve within each sequence
3) the dramatic need the character wants to during the story

The point of view that your character posses is what he or she thinks about things. An example of point of view is when you turn on the news. You can usually tell what the point of view is of the anchor reporting. Are they liberal or conservative. This defines who they are and as the story goes on you can see patterns in their behavior. These behaviors are dictated by their point of view. Every character has a different point of view. Even if they are similar they differ to some degree. Point of view dictates everything else in the story relating to the character. How the character responds to situations. How the character acts and behaves is because of their point of view.

I always get confused between point of view and attitude. Attitude is different because attitude is a response to any given situation. Your attitude can change from day to day. Your point of view won't change unless you have experienced some event of epiphany that causes this change. I like to think about it as a specific reaction to a specific stimuli.

The key to telling a good story is showing the change of the character. The character starts in one place and by the end of the story the character has changed based on the events that have taken place.

I like the example of the broken man. As the story starts we learn that our character is broken because of some events that took place before the story started. In Signs the Mel Gibson character has lost his faith in god. This was due to losing his wife. By the end of the story he once again has found faith in god. This is how his character has changed. All the characters in your story should change as the story progresses. The series of events or scenes that take place should have some kind of affect on your characters.

This article was created by Scott Young who is behind the website Movie Script Guide