Story comes from a well conceived character

While necessary and ultimately fulfilling, the process of developing compelling characters for their narratives can be challenging for writers and directors alike.

In this post, author and professor Jeff Bens gives advice on creating and developing characters for fiction and film, in addition to story structure and writing in general.

Jeff’s inspiring, professional insight is a must-read.  Read on for the entire interview.

Name: Jeff Bens

Experience: Jeff directs the undergraduate writing program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, where he teaches fiction writing and screenwriting.  He is the author of the novel Albert, Himself and his short fiction and essays are published widely.  Bens also directed the documentary film Fatman’s, which has played in festivals around the world.  He was founding faculty at the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts.  He is finishing a novel, story collection and screenplay.

Q. We’re here to talk about developing characters for fiction and film.  Do you have a preference as to which comes first: characters or plot?

A. For me character, occupation and setting come first.  I think story comes from a well conceived character who has some kind of inner psychological tension the the reader/viewer can identify with: be it Marty’s gentle shyness in Marty or C.C. Baxter’s cloying need for approval in The Apartment or Travis Bickle’s violent need for order, justice and self-validation in Taxi Driver.

Creating characters is more about feeling than mathematical equation.  Once I have a feel for a character — the beginning of an emotional understanding and connection with a character — I am looking, maybe simultaneously, for an occupation that will increase pressure on this character’s internal tension.  This pressure causes the tension to grow and eventually burst, in a way that might be healthy (Marty and The Apartment) or unhealthy (Taxi Driver — though whether the conclusion is unhealthy for Travis is arguable…) and that often entails some of both.  Most climaxes and resolutions contain both light and dark.  The tone the writer’s chosen shapes the proportion.

So, for me, story comes from pressure put on a protagonist’s unconscious, an unconscious that we are able to imagine.  And this rising tension plays out across emotionally compelling settings (for the protagonist and at least eventually for the viewer — that is, a hair salon might be significant for the protagonist right at the start and come to feel that way too for the viewer).  Without a compelling, visual setting, you’re stuck with two characters jawing at each other as they have nothing to do, and nothing to play off of.  I really work to use jobs and settings in my writing.  I’m fascinated by them and I think they help define a character’s emotion: are her actions in accord with job/settings or in opposition, and how do I want the reader/viewer to react to that?  There’s a lot more to be said on this, but hopefully this is of some use.  And in fact, if you can approach screenwriting from the place of story first, go for it.  That’s a gift.  But I mostly have to write my way into plot, always keeping plot/forward drive foremost in my writing brain, outlining as a I go, even as I spend my most constructive thinking in deepening character.

Q. No story is possible without complex, intriguing characters.  In creating these, where do you find inspiration?  In your opinion, where should writers look for this inspiration?

A. I think characters need to be empathetic, or at least connect with the viewer/reader in a felt sense.  How this plays out, how deeply empathetic, depends on the genre and tone of the story.  But mostly I think as writers we want to give characters their dignity.  Ray Bradbury’s great on this in his Zen and the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You.  And William Faulkner in his famous Nobel Speech.  Bradbury talks about how all men are poets if you give them enough time to speak their heart.  Faulkner talks about shared pain and sacrifice.  That’s what interests me as a writer.  I think every good story is a love story.  So that’s where inspiration comes from — the love, the pain, the connection that we all hold with each other inside of us.  Part of what makes Chinatown great and tragic is the pain we see in Jake — he’s closed down at the start from this pain, the story pressure opens him back up emotionally, only to compound this pain again.  What makes Casablanca great is the same, only this story has a happier ending, though of course still with shades of dark — at the conclusion Rick opens up to something larger than his love for Ilsa (at least in terms of the film), a love for justice and all humanity.  These are mainstream classics.  Of course if you want to go into the world of Cassavettes (and if you haven’t, please do!) or Altman, love and pain are explored more deeply.  The trick is not to pander.  I need to feel the connection inside myself.  In my experience, if I feel a deep, empathetic connection to my characters, many of my readers will too.

A long way for me to say what is pretty simple: I find my characters by looking inside and discovering people in interesting, visually compelling jobs and settings who share the fears, loneliness, shame, yearning, joy, fun, hope, happiness, fight that I find inside myself.  I’m looking outside too of course, all the time.  But I’ve written about old tobacco farmers, a teen-aged girl, a gay kid, rabbinical students, an adulterous geologist, and an Irish-American fishmonger.  I am none of these things.  But I share with them Faulkner’s yearnings of the heart, the bruises of living, the hope, sometimes false or unflattering, for a better tomorrow.

Q. What should writers keep in mind as they conceptualize the antagonist, whether human or not?

A. Stories need antagonists and/or antagonistic forces.  That is they need someone/some force embodied in someone to put the pressure on the protagonist’s unconscious.  Antagonists need to be powerful, or apparently powerful, that is powerful from the perspective of the way the protagonist initially sees the world.  In The Apartment there is that scene where Jeff eviscerates the (neurotically) cocky Baxter until he ends up screwing the woman Baxter loves in Baxter’s bed while Baxter sleeps in the park in the rain!  In The Last Picture Show, Sonny is speeding out of town, about to break away from the place that smothers him, but he cannot, the antagonistic force is too strong (embodied in so many of the important characters in Sonny’s life and in the dying settings as well) and so he goes back, literally half-blind, to the arms of Mrs. Popper and the decaying pool hall.

I think the best antagonists also need some empathy, though sometimes pure menace can be enough (Chinatown, The Apartment).  But pure menace is hard to sustain and some light, again, with the dark helps the reader/viewer connect to the power of the antagonist.  It’s hard to like Mary Tyler Moore’s character in Ordinary People, but it’s hard too not to feel her pain and understand it.  Even in Silence of the Lambs, it’s Lecter’s human qualities that make his unhuman qualities so chilling.

Antagonistic forces are like in The Verdict or The Bad News Bears.  In both those cases, it’s booze and inertia that is the antagonistic force, the lure of liquor to (falsely) take away problems.  The idea here is to land that force onto a person we care about — usually a lover or a family member.  So when Frank Galvin (Newman) comes after Mickey Morrissey and eventually Laura Fischer, this antagonistic force causes us to cringe.  When Coach Buttermaker makes Amanda (Tatum O’Neil) cry, we see what his demons can do.  Again, action trumps the internal here– in both fiction and film we want to see the antagonistic force play out, not hear about it through internal monologue or exposition.

Q. So much importance is placed on the introduction of your main characters.  Do you have any tips for writers as they do this?

A. Introduce your protagonist doing something that indicates what’s going on inside, and have him doing it in a visually useful and compelling setting.  Marty is cutting meat in a neighborhood butcher shop in the first scene and everyone’s asking the chubby, thick-browed, unfailingly polite, middle-aged (in terms of that film!) bachelor when is he ever going to get married.  Marty chops the meat with a cleaver, smiles politely, takes their money, then finally with his back turned to the customers, pounds the keys of the register when he rings up the last customer, his angry and sad face reflected in the shop mirrors, before, we are left to assume, turning again with a smile.  I love the simplicity of that scene and of the movie as a whole.  Again, I like to think action and visual.

I often like the supporting characters as much as the protagonist.  I don’t think this is a bad thing.  Every character needs to be given dignity, even the ones who have small, sort of one-note roles.

Q. Can you talk a bit about the evolution of characters within a story?

A. Characters grow in healthy or unhealthy ways as pressure is put on their empathetically drawn internal issues.  This pressure, shown in active scenes, builds out too from occupations and settings.  That’s pretty garbled, but you get the idea: inner issues, building pressure from antagonists that force the protagonist to move and change (not always in healthy ways), actions that play against dialogue and audience expectations, visual scenes, pressure rising toward climax and the opportunity for real change, climax leading into resolution, which may or may not be a happy one and is best if it has both happiness and sadness.

Resolutions need to be satisfying, but that of course does not always mean happy: The finale of Five Easy Pieces is bleak but wholly earned, the finale of Gladiator has that heroic mix of happy and sad, with the protagonist having given his life for the greater good.  In happier finales, it’s best I think not to do too much; the reader or viewer just needs a sense that the protagonist has moved past some of the inner issues that were established at the start of the story: The Misfits and My Life as a Dog do this to different and equally satisfying degrees.

Q. How is developing characters for fiction different than developing them for film?  What is important when developing characters in screenplays?

A. I think that the main challenge in screenwriting is in externalizing the internal.  Fiction’s advantage (and also its trap) is the internal, that is we can write what the character is thinking and feeling.  In screenwriting, with the rare exceptions of the compelling use of voice over, we have to get that internal feeling expressed into action, into scene.  (Actually, I think this is what fiction must do as well.  We have to guard against the dull convenience of internal monologue.  But certainly back story is simpler in fiction.)  Film, of course, has the advantage of picture and sound, what fiction hopes to create in a reader’s mind, but I think they both share the overwhelming need for connection with the better part of our humanity, however messy and violent the story from that connection might become.

Q. Anything else?

A. A writer has to make time for her writing.  With all the demands, real and made up, to fill the pages well takes commitment.  There’s no shame in not writing — but if a beginner wants to write, then he’s got to get at it every day, reading and viewing constantly, writing and finishing work and then writing more.  And we need to practice finishing.  Every successful writer and filmmaker I know, and I know a bunch, works really hard, that is they give their full attention to the work.  This doesn’t mean you can’t give your attention to other things, but it does mean that the work doesn’t ever get neglected.  You neglect it, it dies.  And years can go by.