Creating Unforgettable Characters Read Online Free PDF Page B

character right. No one else can tell you whether or not you've got a character that's credible, real, and consistent. You must rely on your own inner sense of what people are all about.
    Writer after writer emphasizes this aspect of writing: "Whatever I know, I know from my own experience," says James Dearden. "In the end, the writer has to draw on himself. I have Alex inside me, and Dan inside me. And if you haven't got the experience, then you have to go out and get it. All the characters I write come from me. I draw from within. I always think, How would I react in that situation?"
    Carl Sautter agrees. "I think you have to find the element in characters that is you. And it isn't that every character is auto-
    biographical but often you ask, 'Who is the character you wish you were? What do you wish you could get away with?' When you start writing stories that only you can write, you raise yourself as a writer to a whole new level. So, whatever it is, even when it's a supporting character, I try to find a part of it that I can really identify with personally."
    Barry Morrow, who wrote the original screenplay of Rain Man, says, "Movies have to be about the things you're interested in or it's no fun to write them. In Rain Man, Raymond likes the things I like. He likes baseball and pancakes. And Charlie likes what I like—money and cars and women."
    Ron Bass, who did the rewrites for Rain Man, adds, "I carry Charlie and Raymond inside of me. I have all their faults and their good points in my personality. Certainly there's a part of me that is frightened of human contact and overcompensates for that, and certainly I have all those defenses that Charlie has. And there's a part of me that's very soft and wants to be loved. Writing is a very intimate process, and I know when I've got the guy, and I know when I don't have the guy."
    In television, often there's one writer on the show who represents the character. This person becomes a kind of plumb line or measure of whether the character works.
    Coleman Luck, co-executive producer of "The Equalizer" and writer of a number of shows in the series, identifies with McCall. He was with the show for four years—almost from the beginning—and became a guiding force for a number of character decisions.
    "Some writer on the show has to become that character," he says. "There has to be an empathy between the writer and the character. I don't think there's any other way to do this. There's something inside of me that's like McCall. I'm not McCall, I've not been a CIA agent, but I've lived a few years. I was an army officer in Vietnam and I was in combat when I was twenty-two, and I've been through a lot. I can understand his concerns, his sense of guilt, his need for forgiveness, his need for absolution. So if you don't have the experience of self-examination, and knowing yourself to some degree, you're never going to know your character. Flat out you are not."
    PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
    Readers will form a visual impression of a character they meet in novels. Most novels give vivid character descriptions to give the reader an immediate sense of who this person is.
    Occasionally a novel, such as Ordinary People, avoids physical descriptions, focusing instead on details about the character's inner life. But readers still make an imaginative leap, forming their own pictures from these psychological details.
    Screenplays almost always give one or two lines of strong character details, in order to hook both the reader and potential actors.
    What does a physical description do? First of all, it's evocative—it implies other aspects of the character. The reader begins to associate other qualities and imagine additional details from the few lines of description you've given.
    Let your imagination play with the following description, from a script called Fire-Eyes by one of my clients, Roy Rosenblatt: "A sweet-faced guy who's probably done his job too long. "
    What other qualities come to mind? You