And the casting begins

Full steam ahead: I've put out a casting call for katie55, and with the help of Cake Man have secured a space to hold the auditions. Our co-producer/DP is flying up next week and we'll starting seeing actors next weekend.

It's very exciting to see all of these prospective characters. But, there's a small hitch: Having written the script and being so intimately entwined with it for such a long time, I have a very concrete idea of who the characters are in my head; how they look, how they act. The problem? None of the submissions so far are exactly what I had in mind for the part.

I know I'm speaking way ahead of myself at this point - I'm going based strictly off of headshots. (Very shallow, I know.) I'm hoping that when we hold auditions and see the actors reading for the part that I'll change my mind. I'm hoping someone will bring the character to life before my eyes, possibly changing the way I see the character entirely.

These are questions for any writers who have gone on to direct their own material: how do you shed the image of a character that's in your head and learn to love something that might be different than you'd imagined? Will this feeling go away naturally once the right actors sweep me off my feet?

The Writing Week part 50 - Know Your Characters

Last week, I'd written a page of a brand new screenplay because of an idea I had. I knew how to kick it off, I knew the basic premise, and I knew I wanted to get the ball rolling on it. But I didn't know something very important; I didn't know who I was writing about.

When writing action specs, it's easy to throw in a lot of shooting, a lot of explosions, a lot of naked women (sometimes for no reason), and a lot of tough guys. At the end of the day, though, we writers have to remember something very fundamental: every character (OK, at least every protagonist) must have a goal. Even if it's a Bruce Willis type goal - i.e. keeping your crumbling family together while you kill 300 people - there has to be something the character is working toward. (Don't get me wrong, I dig a lot of Bruce's work. However, if you look at 95% of his movies, I can guarantee you that not only will he be a rogue or former cop, but his marriage or relationship with his children (usually a daughter) will be on the rocks. Somehow, his family life ties into his need to shoot a dozen terrorists every five minutes.) Even the most basic of action movies has a character with some story line, however crappy it may be, and some need, however ridiculous it might seem in context.

My mistake with the script is that I hadn't bothered to think that through clearly enough. I was so eager to write that first scene, to lay everything out, that I wasn't prepared to follow up with what had to come next, namely the introduction of my pro- and antagonists. Rookie mistake? Probably. One I won't make again? Probably not. The thing is, sometimes as writers, we also need that jolt, that first spark of creativity to get us working steadily again. I might not be set to work on the pages to this spec yet, but it allowed me to do something else entirely, something just as important, if not more so. It allowed me to see what I really wanted to write.

After that night of page-length success followed by realization of 99 page impotence, I knew that I wasn't yet ready to work on that project. I popped open Word and set to work on another outline for another script (got a first page for that one, too). The difference? I knew my characters. They weren't running around blowing crap up or racking up body counts that Braveheart would be jealous of. They were just being themselves. And I knew them well. I was ready to write.

Sometimes if you run into a wall in your writing, the best thing isn't actually to bust your fists knocking it down, but to turn around and find another road around it.

Tinkering with your script/draft -- what to look out for

Alex Epstein, over at screenwriting blog Complications Ensue, has a new post up today about revisions and what goals you should keep in mind when tinkering with your work, be it a beat sheet or the script itself:

Your first stab at a scene will often be functional. It gets information across. It gets information into the hands of the characters. It puts characters into conflict.

Then see if you can tweak it to make it more specific to who these characters are. Can you accomplish the same plot goals by having the characters react in ways that only people with their specific flaws would react?

As I've said elsewhere, good dialog is when the character only says stuff that character would say; great dialog is when the character says stuff only that character would say.

This is the same thing on the scene level. Good scene craft has the characters doing and saying only things those characters would do. Great scene craft has the characters doing things that only those characters would do.

It's a tough standard, but I'm told that Jack Nicholson will do a script if it has "three great scenes and no bad ones."

Epstein makes some great points -- if you're a decent writer, your first stab at a scene or chapter will at the very least be, well, decent. But you will gain much more if you go back and work at it. Making the dialogue and actions key to the characters is challenging, but in the long run will make the work more memorable and effective. If your characters sound and act like everyone or anyone, your work will be bland and forgettable.

Sarah Palin: A novelist's view

The L.A. Times book blog, JACKET COPY considers VP candidate Sarah Palin as a character. Worth reading:

As a novelist, I am fascinated by the emergence of Sarah Palin as a character. This lively cross between Annie Oakley and Eva Braun seems to have released Republican chakras to a degree that could be matched only by the resurrection of Ronald Reagan. This is more extraordinary by virtue of her having been an unknown local politician until — what? oh, about five minutes ago. As the nation slouches toward her possible elevation to the second-highest office in the land, we're all taking a closer look at what's gone on in Alaska these past few years.

There's the aerial wolf hunting, the moose burgers, the book banning — excuse me? The book banning? As Jacket Copy reported earlier this week, Palin leaned on the local librarian when she was mayor of Wasilla, urging her to ban certain texts. In other words, we are in danger of going from a nation where the first lady is a former librarian to one where the vice president is a character in "Fahrenheit 451." Clearly, this is what they mean by change you can believe in.