DESIGNING CHARACTERS
FOR SUBTEXT
Make your characters lifelike and fascinating to your audience and actors alike, using simple techniques describe in this document!
What’s Inside:
Let’s talk about bad guys for a moment.
Is the bad guy in your story a really, really mean, evil, horrible person? To rephrase it, does the bad guy exist only to make the life of your protagonist living hell?
This may not necessarily be a bad thing. There are plenty of villains in film history without any redeeming qualities at all. Why, for example. Anton Chigurth from 2007 movie “No Country for Old Men” is as nasty as it gets. Not only he’s a horrible person, bit he has a nasty-sounding name, and his hairstyle sure doesn’t help either.
The character of Michael Myers from 1978 John Carpenter movie “Halloween” is evil incarnate, and there’s not a hell of a lot of dimensions to him.
If your story requires such type of perfectly uniform negative character, it’s fine. There’s no law against it! But in most cases, you may want your bad guys to have something appealing about them. In fact, you may even choose to hide their evil nature until way into the story, and reveal it either gradually, one clue at a time, or abruptly, through a plot twist.
What about your protagonist?
Is that a perfectly angelic figure, devoid of any flaws or imperfections? This is not necessarily always a problem: there are perfect characters in the history of literature, drama and film. The Wonder Woman and Captain America come to mind, and such amazing characters as Jack Dawson from James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic” and Mr. Miyagi from John G. Avildsen’s 1984 film “The Karate Kid” are pretty much perfect human beings.
Most of the time though, your positive character will become a lot more intriguing if you give that character some flaws.
The document you’re about to download “Designing Characters for Subtext” is a humorous brief roadmap that will help you navigate this tricky terrain. I hope you find it fun and useful!