How do writers come up with character names for their scripts?

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character, character names, characters, David Nicholls, drama, naming, scripts

Don’t be a Scrooge when naming characters for your scripts

I came across a fascinating article in the Guardian last week about how writers come up with names for their characters in scripts, plays, novels, even for themselves.

It’s worth a careful read. Many scripts I see are far too lazy when it comes to character names. Top of my list of faults are names that are bland, cliché, too similar, or just plain wrong.

Lazy script charaCTer names

Don’t automaticaly go for characters named David, Jane, John, Susan… Last week’s TV drama 7:39 by David Nicholls wasn’t helped by the dull names, names I can hardly remember now.

Find surprising names to avoid the clichés. Not all pensioners are called Bill and Edith. Would Mary Poppins have worked so well as Mary Smith? Or Scrooge as George Jones?

Check that you haven’t given every character in your script a similar kind of name. Vary the types, lengths, categories. Instead of Sam, Steve, Samantha and Serena, what about Sam, Osman, Ginger and Bo?

Get your script names right

Lazy name writing also means names that simply don’t add anything to the character or sabotage it. A hard-nosed detective can’t really be called Detective Sergeant Small. Unless you really want to play for laughs.

It’s worth spending the time to find names that have resonance – that special spark. A good name can make a character come to life.

Have a look at the Guardian article – Nailed It! and then try some new names out for your script… or even yourself.

How to express yourself without killing your screenwriting career

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audience, character, flaw, Hollywood, inner story, inner struggle, movie, Screenwriting

There’s a phrase that’s popular among writing courses at the moment – we’re all expected to “express ourselves”. Self-expression is the thing. And it certainly is, if you want to kill your career stone dead. But you can beat the system.

Producers, agents, distributors, channel commissioners don’t give a damn about whether you’re expressing yourself. Nor, to be honest, do audiences. They care about entertainment, stimulating characters, exciting plots.

But wait – what if you actually do have something important to express? What if you didn’t just get into this business to write the next half-baked RomCom, or rip-offs of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? How do you say something without getting thrown off the set?

Here’s the trick

There is a trick, and Hollywood discovered it decades ago.

Hollywood writers knew that you didn’t get messages across by making Misery-Film and rubbing the audience’s noses in depression. However, they certainly did make films that had meaning.

1. Isolate the most important thing you want to talk about. Maybe it’s how inequality rules the world. Or the importance of gender politics. Be very specific and disciplined – you can’t deal with every issue in a single script.

2. Look at the flaws you feel underly the issue. Greed, say. Or prejudice.

3. Turn to your central character (or invent one) and give him or her that flaw, in spades. Or, alternatively, give her a flaw that means she has great difficulty in dealing with it. For example, you could make her greedy, or prejudiced. Or you could ensure that she is unable to deal with greedy people (maybe she’s low in self-esteem) or afraid of prejudiced colleagues.

4. Once you’ve created your flawed character, you need to put her in the worst possible situation for someone with that flaw – one that will bring up all her issues and force her to face them or fail.

5. Keep pushing her buttons to the end.

inner struggle

Lincoln’s issue, in Spielberg’s movie, is slavery, and the flaw which underlies it in the film might be expressed as heartlessness and bigotry. Screenwriter Tony Kushner focuses on Lincoln’s own inner struggle – to win he has to become as heartless, though not bigoted, as his opponents. He has to be prepared to prolong the war in order to win.

By contrast, Juno’s central issue is the masculinisation of women in our society, but treated with a light, indie touch by Diablo Cody. Juno’s flaw is that she has become more masculine than the father of her child, who is almost emasculated. Becoming pregnant forces her to be a woman, like it or not. Mind vs matter.

Juno has a happy ending, Lincoln tragic (Lincoln wins his battle, but is killed). Though totally different in tone, both films take tough issues and work through them with intelligence, avoiding easy answers, but not avoiding a strong storyline and entertaining drama.

Now can you go and find your issue and your character and beat the system?

If you found this useful, my next workshop is Exciting Treatments at Euroscript in London, Saturday November 23 2013. Personal teaching and feedback on how to express yourself honestly and powefully in treatment form – maximum group size: 12.

Booking is open now.

8 ways to make your characters come vividly to life

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character, film, movie, voice, writer

House – NBC

Fully live characters leap off the page and out of the screen at us. We become fascinated by them, want to spend time with them, care about their hopes and fears.

Think of Bonnie and Clyde, Romeo and Juliet, Mr Darcy, Sarah Lund, Gregory House… and also anti-heroes, villains and bit parts in a thousand movies and TV programmes, from Hannibal Lecter to Private Godfrey.

To create living, interesting characters, you need to draw on your experience of life, and add to it. Or to put it another way, bring us your unique take on people.

1. Draw on people you know

Some of the best characters come from the people around you. But, strangely, that rarely means direct copy. You don’t have to portray your friends and relations, in fact it’s often best if you don’t (if only to avoid loss of said friends and libel actions).

I usually take a combination of character traits from a number of people I know and combine them for best effect, and no-one has so far ever recognised themselves.

One of my favourite characters, an aged, homicidal Portuguese farmer, was based in part on my maternal grandmother. She was neither Portuguese nor homicidal, but she gave me just the right flavour of salty sharpness and odd-ball humour the character needed. And she never knew.

2. Surprise us

Does your lawyer need to be white, male and middle class? Does your drug dealer need to be young and black? These are obvious clichés, but also watch out for the less obvious assumptions we all make. Surprise us.

Boogie Nights is full of surprising twists on character. One of the most memorable is the almost invisible part of a night-club doorman – invisible that is until it was decided that he should be enormously camp. That one twist made what was virtually a walk-on part stand out.

3. give them contradictions

Strong characters show strong contradictions. The boxer who loves ballet. The good detective who can’t stop shoplifting. Contradictions bring characters to life.

Othello can fight anyone, except his own jealousy, which brings him down. Jed Bartlet is a liberal history buff and an economist, who – in more than one episode of The West Wing – has to be restrained from overusing American armed force. How many of your characters could gain from being less consistent?

4. give them goals

All the characters in a well-written script have goals, even the smallest. The taxi-driver whose only role is to find the briefcase, what might her goal be?

Without a goal, she becomes a mere plot device. But give her a goal, say, to get home quickly, or to mend the car stereo, and the character (and the scene) come to life.

5. give them flaws

People are not perfect, not even heroes. Flaws draw in an audience. We care about House all the more because of his almost autistic inability to empathise, his drug abuse, his bolshie attitude towards his colleagues.

Without those, he’d be a clever-dick who wouldn’t last a scene, let alone eight series.

6. give them strengths

At the same time, characters need to be good at something, whoever they are, even if they are evil incarnate! Hannibal Lecter has charm, intelligence and considerable talents, even if they aren’t necessarily put to good use. Even Hitler is given strengths in Downfall.

At the other end of the scale, Norah Ephron took care to ensure that both Harry and Sally had strong positive elements to their characters – this indeed is what attracted them to each other. Harry has the practicality and groundedness that Sally needs to counterbalance her. While Sally brings a positive attitude to Harry’s dark broodiness.

Your characters’ strengths show us why we should care what happens to them.

7. find their picture

Can you see your characters in your mind? In how much detail? I always want to have a clear picture of each character before I write them. (This does not mean that I will write that picture in the script – it’s far better to leave that to the reader’s, and casting director’s, imagination).

One very useful trick is to “cast” your characters from photographs, for example in magazines or on the Internet. Here’s an exercise: search through Google images for pictures that fit the characters in your current script. This is particularly valuable for any character who is refusing to come to life, or insisting on remaining a cliché.

8. hear their voices

Harold Pinter started The Homecoming with two lines of dialogue. That line would suggest two voices, and from those two voices grew one of his greatest plays.

Listen for your characters’ voices. You may find them in your head, or on TV or sitting next to you in the tube. Then, when you have their voices, listen to what they tell you. You may find your characters tell you more about themselves, and even more about how the story should go, than you ever could yourself.

If this is useful to you, you might also like:

Fun writing exercise – using the moment
Four steps to starting a compelling script
Give your flashbacks the kiss of life
Why do we call them Screen – Plays?
Avoid the mistakes made by would-be thriller writers

And you may like to check out the courses I’m running in London and elsewhere. You can find details here

Fire Up Your Writing Career

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mental game, motivation, procrastination, psychology, psychology of writing, self-sabotage, values

One of the biggest challenges in dealing with career problems as a writer is focusing your writer’s  mind – dealing with issues such as procrastination and self-sabotage, and staying creative.

Here’s one psychological test that is as profound in its message as it is simple to do.

It reveals our hidden values – what we think important in life. Many people unwittingly run their lives according to values they’ve taken on without thinking – for example from parents, influential leaders, society or even adverts and other media.

To find out what’s driving you, try this:

1. Write down a bullet-point list of what’s important to you in life.

Single words, like “happiness”, “friends” or “food” – or at most two or three word phrases. Write down as many as you can think of. If you run out, keep searching, there will be more values hiding in your unconscious mind. Tease them out.

2. When you’ve covered everything that is important, you may have already learned a few things about yourself.

Now look deeper: at the number, range, variety, focus. Look also for conflicts between your values.

3. Not all these values are equally “valuable”.

Number the values – but not according to how you’d like things to be but how you act in real life.

In other words, you might like to think your primary value is “generosity” – but if you actually spend most of your time and effort on the value of “obeying my boss” then that’s where you put your 1.

Continue to number all your values according to how you normally use your time, money and energy, until you’ve finished the list.

4. Now look at what you’ve discovered.

Are you surprised – or has it revealed something you suspected deep down but never acknowledged?

Of course, nothing is final.

This information can help you change. You can focus on different values, make different decisions.

It’s not hocus pocus – it’s a very simple and direct tool that you can use to refocus your life and work.

Try it.

There are many simple, yet strong and practical, psychological tools that creative artists can use to deal with all kinds of problems. If you feel you need to focus your energies, deal with inner conflicts, use your talents more effectively, or simply gain insight into the characters in your scripts, then this is a taster of my two-day workshop – The Mental Game for Writing Success.

I’ve run it now for hundreds of writers, directors, actors and other creative artists, with dramatic effects. Many have emailed me later to say that they finally finished that script they’d been stuck on for years, sold that series that they couldn’t finish, made that career move they were putting off.

Click here for details.