Robert Mckee - Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen

For most writers, whats past is past, and so they focus on future trends, hoping to improve their chances for production or publication by adapting to whats current. Writers should indeed stay in tune with their times, but while cultural and aesthetic vogues come and go, there are no trends in human nature. As evolutionary science has shown in study after study, humanity has not evolved for eons. The guys and gals who stenciled their handprints on the walls of caves forty thousand years ago were doing then what we do todaymaking selfies.

For thousands of years, artists and philosophers portrayed and studied human nature, but then, beginning in the late nineteenth century, science focused on the mind behind that nature. Researchers evolved theories of human behavior ranging from psychoanalysis to behaviorism to evolutionism to cognitivism. These analyses labeled and catalogued traits and flaws by the dozens, and without question their perceptions stimulate the writers creative thinking about characters and casts. This book, however, does not favor any single school of psychology. It gathers concepts from many disciplines to trigger the imaginings and intuitions that inspire and guide the talented.

Characters primary purpose is to enrich your insights into the nature of the fictional character and sharpen your creative techniques as you invent a complex, never-seen-before cast of personalities, starting with your protagonist, then moving outward through your first, second, and third circles of supporting roles, ending with the nameless passing at the far edges of episodes. To that end, expect reworkings. Chapter by chapter, refrain by refrain, certain primal principles will echo inside new contexts. I reiterate ideas because each time an artist rethinks the familiar in a new light, her comprehension deepens.

In the chapters that follow, the principle of contradiction underpins virtually every lesson in character design. I play opposites against each other: characters versus human beings, institutions versus individuals, traits versus truths, the outer life versus the inner life, and so on. You and I know, of course, that along any spectrum strung between polar extremes, shades of possibility blur into overlaps and admixtures. But for clear, facile perception of character complexity, a writer needs a sensitivity to contrast and paradox, an eye for contradiction that unearths the full range of creative possibility. This book teaches that skill.

As always, I will call on current examples, both dramatic and comic, taken from award-winning films and screen series, novels and short stories, plays and musicals. To those contemporary works, I will also add characters created by canonical authors from the past forty centuries of literacyShakespeare first among them. Some of these titles may be unread or unseen by you, but hopefully youll add them to your personal program of study.

Characters taken from all eras serve two purposes: (1) The task of an illustration is to exemplify and clarify the point at hand, and, as it happens, the sharpest example is often historys first. (2) I want you to take pride in your profession. As you write, you join an ancient, noble, truth-telling tradition. Brilliant casts from the past will set the stage for your future writings.

Character has four parts. Part One: In Praise of Characters (Chapters One through Three) explores sources of inspiration for character invention and lays out the foundational work that shapes your talents toward creating superbly imagined fictional human beings.

Part Two: Building a Character (Chapters Four through Thirteen) pursues the creation of never-met-before characters, beginning with methods from the outside in, followed by the inside out, expanding into dimensionality and complexity, ending with roles at their most radical. As Somerset Maugham expressed it, The only inexhaustible subject is human nature.

Part Three: The Character Universe (Chapters Fourteen through Sixteen) contexts character by genre, performance, and reader/audience/character relationships.

Part Four: Character Relationships (Chapter Seventeen) illustrates the principles and techniques of cast design by mapping the dramatis personae of five works taken from prose, cinema, theatre, and longform television.

All told, I will parse the universe of character into its galaxies, galaxies into solar systems, solar systems into planets, planets into ecologies, ecologies into the life forceall in order to help you uncover creative meanings in the human mystery.

No one can teach you how to create story, character, or anything else. Your processes are idiosyncratic, and nothing I teach will do the writing for you. This book is not a how-to but a what-is. All I can do is give you aesthetic principles and examples to illustrate them, laying out parts, wholes, and their relationships. To this course of study, you must add your brains, taste, and long, long months of creative work. I cannot take you by the hand. Instead, I offer knowledge to leverage your talent. To that end, I suggest you read this book slowly, stopping and going to absorb what youve learned and give thought to how it applies to your work.

Character strives to deepen your insight into character complexity, sharpen your eye for expressive traits, and in those dark days when inspiration needs a friend, shepherd you through the configuration of an entire cast.