Creating and Developing Characters for Screenplays (Part 1 - The Character Cube)

At the core of any story should be a single defining question. In academic studies reports of tens of thousands of words are written, all to answer a single hypothesis. What is your hypothesis? What is it that you wish to ask of the real world? This is what you will answer in your story.

Whilst this may seem simplistic, watered-down or naïve even, a single defining hypothesis shapes the world, characters, direction and audience of a story. It also allows a story to be finished. We start with a question; we must end with an answer.

Once you have this idea, you can develop “theme”, “flaw”, and “threat”.

Theme - this is the world and the problem combined. If the question is “have we become so focused on electronic communication that we’ve forgotten how to talk to one another?” then the theme is interpersonal relationships within the digital age.

Flaw - put simply, this is the internal personal obstacle to answering the defining question. The protagonist could be impatient, or socially awkward, and so depends upon the electronic communications to have any sort of social encounter.

Threat - this is the external danger of an impending negative outcome. The tragedy in this instance would be the total social collapse of non-electronic communication.

These three key factors help us define the three key characters (notice all the “three”s?):

There should be three key characters to a story, simply to demonstrate that there is a spectrum of good (love interest) to bad (antagonist) with the protagonist sitting somewhere in the middle. The three characters are defined thus:

Protagonist (Theme & Flaw) - The protagonist wishes to challenge the theme and ask the defining question, but can not until the flaw is overcome.

Antagonist (Theme & Threat) - The antagonist also wishes to ask the defining question but either wants a different answer or is willing to do morally questionable things to get the answer. Through this pursuit he poses a threat to the world.

Love Interest (Flaw & Threat) - the love interest (not always romantic - see “red” & “Andy Dufresne” in “The Shawshank Redemption”) should act as an enticement to make the protagonist challenge their flaw. Consequently the love interest will typically not have such a flaw and will highlight the merits of the protagonist’s potential change. The other main function of the love interest is to personify the threat imposed by the antagonist. It is very difficult to care as much about the fate of the world as about the specific people within it.

So in three very different ways these three key characters should fully embody the theme of your story and ask the question you want answered.