Film characters are much more than just the words they speak. They're more than action, emotion and expression. It takes powerful acting to bring a great character to life, but without great writing and a compelling backstory, that character will never leap off the pages of your screenplay and into the hearts of your audience.
In Creating Characters: Let Them Whisper Their Secrets, Marisa D'Vari provides screenwriters with a framework for exploring the inner worlds of the people they're writing about. Her system, which she calls More-Personality, takes writers beyond the obvious questions, past simple motivation, and helps them unlock those aspects of their characters' personalities that dictate how they relate to the world around them.
D'Vari is a Manhattan-based writer and the founder of Deg.Com Communications. The author of five books, she began her career in the Motion Picture/Literary department of International Creative Management (ICM) and served as an executive at several film studios, including MGM and Tri-Star.
As is the case with Building Buzz, D'Vari's book on public relations, Creating Characters is a resource that is best read with a notebook and pen close at hand. Practical exercises are placed throughout the book, and each chapter ends with a list of assignments designed to get readers into the character-development mindset. For the casual reader, this may be an obstacle that gets in the way of his or her enjoyment of the book. While Creating Characters contains dozens of stories and illustrations that will be interesting to movie buffs, it really is meant for those folks who are serious about improving their ability to write characters who are authentic.
In Chapter One, D'Vari explores the idea of personality typecasting, briefly describing the evolution of such systems, including the ancient Greek Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs adaptation of Carl Jung's personality model. She introduces readers to her own More-Personality system, offering it as a way to enable writers to "quickly and easily brainstorm an endless variety of character traits that correspond to your character's personality style".
Chapter Two uses films like Chinatown, Fatal Attraction, and Pretty Woman to demonstrate how writers bring various personality types together to create conflict. Chapter Three, "How to Summon Characters From Their Magical Spheres", encourages writers to open up their minds and "receive" their characters. D'Vari enters some esoteric territory here, delving into dream states, meditation, and "channeling" as methods of tapping into those unconscious thoughts that have the potential to feed ones creativity. Whatever your take is on these techniques and their effectiveness, it is tough to deny that our best and most creative work happens when we're relaxed and open to new ideas.
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