Character Development is one of most important aspects of writing a screenplay. I actually consider it to be the most important.
The development นิสัย
of a good character is essential for any screenplay to work, whether it be for the big screen, a television series, or for the theatre.
I know screenwriters that are incredible story tellers yet they just don’t know how to develop there characters. This leaves the characters absent and detached from the flow of the story.
All this is simply because they haven’t spent the necessary time doing research and building up their characters before writing their screenplay.
A truly good character can make an average screenplay a great screenplay. So I’m going to go through five points that I think are essential when developing characters in a screenplay.
Character Research
When developing your characters you should always start by thoroughly researching them. Think about who your characters are and why.
This may feel like a tedious task but if you’ve done good character research then the rest of character development will be much easier for you
Like every script yours will have a main character. You’ve already got the idea for your story and you’ll most likely know everything your main character is going to do, but that isn’t enough.
If your story consists of the main character becoming the world’s greatest acrobat, do you know exactly the rigours and problems that an acrobat would have to go through on a day to day basis in order achieve this goal? I’ll be surprised if you do without being an acrobat yourself.
You will need to know what the character’s drive is. What forces them to strive to achieve their goal everyday? What problems do they have? Why do they do this? Why do they do that?
Questions like this are what your research is all about. If you answer all these questions then you’re well on your way to developing a good character for your screenplay
A lot of screenwriter’s characters will possess traits and habits of people they already know. Your friend may pull a face when asked anything personal; your Grandma might have her ornaments facing a certain direction.
Traits like this are what screenwriters use to create their characters in any script. It’s very rare that a character totally from thin air.
When researching a character the Internet is obviously the ideal place to do it. I personally reel off no end of print outs and then I go through pick and choose the aspects that I want to incorporate into my screenplay.
You need to be careful though. You don’t want to put every single task of a profession into your screenplay. There are some things your audience would rather not know about.
Unfortunately there isn’t a step by step guide on how to perfectly rese