5 Hidden Tricks Screenwriters Use To Create Deep Characters (That Live Rent-Free Inside People’s Hearts)

Hi Friend,
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Welcome to the new edition of The Storytelling Wizard!

Most beginner writers create caricatures, not characters.

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I have always been a rebel without a cause in my life.

So, when I heard about screenwriting rules, I immediately wanted to break them. But after writing:

• hundreds of incomplete drafts,
• a bunch of complete ones, and
• fixing some poorly-crafted drafts

I went through a character arc (myself) and realized,

I felt like a rebel because of an INTERNAL CONFLICT I had within me.

But before I share mine, let me share the 5 elements that can help you create internal conflicts that give rise to deeper character arcs:

1/ Longing

Stories that explore character arcs go deep into the character’s inner journey, and when you go deep enough — you’ll find that characters always possess some “longing.”

A deeply felt desire that the hero openly articulates but does nothing about it.

In Titanic, Rose says at the beginning of the movie — “To everyone, it was like a ship of dreams, but to me, it was like a slave ship.”

The subtext is that she longs for adventure. She wants passion in her life. This is not something our characters hide, or it’s not hidden from them, too. Here’s something we need to remember — the protagonist is:

• Just talking about it
• aware of the reality, but they don’t do anything
• because they’re too afraid, too scared — they’ve almost become comfortable with slavery.

In the beginning of “The Truman Show,” the protagonist declares that he wants freedom.

In the external story, freedom takes the form of going to Fiji to find the woman who left him in college/ high school. He tells his friends he wants to go to Fiji, and when his friends ask him when he is going to do it, he tells them,

• these things take planning,
• these things take time
• I’m waiting for my bonus
• Don’t worry, I’m going to do it.

But that’s not true. And this is how longing is shown on-screen.

I love another example in the movie called Collateral, where we see Max (Jamie Fox) telling all his customers in the taxi what he’s planning to do, but is afraid to take any action until the story plot hits him like an uninvited storm, and things take a wild turn.

2/ Wound

Before your story begins, your protagonist has already suffered a wound.

A wound is an unhealed source of continuous pain.

And this creates an identification for the audience with your protagonist because it’s usually an undeserved misfortune. Let’s say something happened in their childhood like in many movies, the child version of your protagonist has seen their parents die in front of their eyes. So many years later, when we see them grown up, they still suffer (at least subconsciously) from this wound.

The pain has never healed, and as a result of suffering through that wound — it creates Fear (which is our next pointer).

This wound can be a past event, but sometimes, it could also be an ongoing situation — something that occurred throughout their childhood or for some extended period of time.

For example —

In “The Firm,” what was his wound? It wasn’t the one day something traumatic happened to him. It was that he grew up in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather, an alcoholic mother and a brother who went to jail.

The existence that he led before the movie began is affecting him now and throughout the movie.

Now, the wound may not be revealed right at the beginning of the movie. Notice that the scene where that is first revealed is in the interview, where we can tell he’s lying about not having any brothers or sisters. But even more clear is when his wife tells him that this is not about making money and it’s certainly not about doing anything for me.

This is about a brother you pretend you don’t have and a mother in the trailer park.

That pain of growing up being dirt poor and his response is it’s easy to say you know what it’s like to be poor when you’ve never been there. He’s still feeling the effects of that wound.

3/ Fear

Through these wounds, the character develops Fear.

A fear that they would be subjected to the same kind of pain again. In the movie Shrek, he is terrified that if he allows himself to get close to the other people, the fairy tale creatures, Dorcy (Donkey), or certainly the princess, Oh my god, that’s unthinkable.

For example — There’s this wonderful scene in Shrek where Dorcy asks the princess if Shrek is your true love. She says yes, and Dorcy starts to laugh. Shrek starts laughing hard, but we see him taking a moment of subtle beat to show it’s not funny. He’s laughing to protect himself from that wound, from the pain of that wound.

Of course, he’s going to pretend it’s funny, but it’s really terribly painful because just the thought that he might be entertaining that he could get close to her would be terrifying because whenever he got close to people before, they turned around and ran away.

In Rain Man, Charlie, Tom Cruise's character, had three people he was close to when he was a child: a brother, a mother and a father; the brother was taken away, the mother died, and the father abandoned him. My God, of course, he was screwed up, who could get close to people after suffering that kind of wound.

So, he’s terrified, if I get close to somebody, I’m going to do that, the pain could occur again.

4/ Facade

Out of this fear grows a facade.

An outer identity that the character presents to the world. Who we are is what we are attached to; it is the way we define ourselves in the world. So, your facade becomes whatever you latch on to say this is who I am.

It could be:

• your job
• your family
• your age
• background
• geography
• ethnic
• beliefs
• upbringing
• your kids

Whatever you cling on to, whatever you’re attached to — you somehow embrace that identity. But here’s the thing — it’s not true. It’s not who you really are.

Because the “true” version of you is hiding behind that mask.

This applies in real life and great movies, stories, and fiction/ non-fiction.

5/ Truth

The truth can be best defined by what it’s not.

Facade covers up the real you and presents so many superficial masks for you to the world. It’s like an armour that protects our characters from the world and the pain it can cause them.

Their truth is that:

• spiritual
• deeper
• universal
• invisible

quality of who that person really is.

Last

There’s a trick you can use to figure out what your protagonist’s facade in your story is or what the facade of a character in a movie you see is —

Just ask yourself how your protagonist fill in the blanks

• do whatever it takes to achieve their goal or
• whatever it takes to get what they’re after, or
• just don’t ask me to blank because that’s just not me

That’s a facade statement. It’s not

• I don’t like this
• I don’t like carrots

That’s not a facade statement. That’s a preference.

It’s when you ask your protagonist to do something, and he’s like, “Ohh no no no, no no no, that’s not me, I don’t do that, I don’t do that!”

In Titanic, Rose will do whatever it takes to have freedom and adventure just that no one should ask her to let go of the millionaire and the security of having a place for herself and her mother. Because of the way she was raised, she was forced to believe that as a woman, you cannot survive without a rich man to take care of her.

So, here you enter as a writer and say, OK, here’s the brass ring. Get to the climax of the journey. Win the day. Either win or retrieve or stop the bad guy or whatever it is, and you will achieve what you long for.

But to get there, you have to gradually get rid of all this protection and stand up for who you truly are.

And that’s terrifying because if I say to you that your facade is what you believe and what you own, your family, your job, your friends, and your background, And I’m going to take it away, you feel like I’m taking away who you truly are. And there’s a name for losing who you are: death.

Every story involving a character arc is about life and death because it may even be literal.

What is called an Ordeal in The Hero’s Journey and what we call a “Point of No Return” in the outer journey is very often a literal death.

But more than that, real life and death in story form are the “necessary death of one’s identity in order to be fulfilled and achieve one’s destiny.

To conclude,

And this applies to the writer's journey as well.

Until next time,

Ciao!