Character vs. Story
I read a quote somewhere on someone’s blog (or possibly I’ve read it in several places, I’m not sure - I get hit in the head a lot) by Tony Jordan which was a rant something along the lines of:
“You have to start with characters, mother fucker. Characters first and then you can start work on your fucking story, you twat.”
I’m paraphrasing, obviously. There may have been a bit less swearing and a bit more information, but that’s it in a nutshell.
And I can’t help thinking … it’s wrong.
If you start by thinking up some characters and then find a story to fit them in, you end up with, well, a soap opera.
I just don’t think that works for feature films, it’s more of a TV drama thing. I can’t believe, for example, that when they wrote ‘Back to the Future’ they sat down and worked out Marty McFly’s character and then tried to find a story to fit him into. Surely the story must have come first then?
Or at least the basic concept?
The character is the one best suited to tell that film’s story, true; but the story probably came first. And I think that’s true of most of my favourite films, I can’t imagine …
It’s at this point my thinking comes off the rails.
Indiana Jones, Batman, Superman, James Bond … all these films must have started with the character, even the original comics/novels must have started with the character and then found stories to fit them.
So maybe he is right?
Except, I can’t believe ‘Hustle’ started with the characters. That must have been the concept first, then the characters, then the individual stories?
I can’t believe he started with “What about a character who, on paper, sounds like Hannibal from ‘The A-Team; but in reality is about as charismatic as a damp sponge. Now, let’s think of a TV show to put him in.”
Surely it started with “Let’s do a TV show about conmen who get into all kinds of entertaining scrapes, just like that movie ‘The Sting’.”
But is that story or characters first?
And that’s for a TV series where you’re generating new stories every week. In a feature, do you think up the characters or the story first? Or does one define the other?
For example, once you’ve come up with the character of Superman, you’re unlikely to then think of a story about him battling to get his social security money from an unfeeling bureaucrat so he can bring up his kid as a single parent.
Or if you start with that story, you’re unlikely to end up with a character like James Bond.
This got me thinking about what is a film? It’s the story of someone who does something, or the story of someone who has something happen to them.
Can you come up with the concept for a film without coming up with story and character together? Surely they are interdependent, you can’t have one without the other?
Except in the case of Superman, Batman, James Bond, Indiana Jones … etc. Quite clearly every new film starts with the character and then looks for a story. With varying degrees of success.
But then again, as soon as you come up with Superman, you’ve defined your genre and the type of story you’re going to tell. So maybe …
After a little lie down, I came to the following conclusion:
Tony Jordan IS wrong*, but only in so far as trying to generalise. Sometimes the character comes first, sometimes the story comes first; but mostly they arrive at roughly the same time.
Or to put it more succinctly: there are no hard and fast rules, stop pissing about on the net and get back to your writing.
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* I’d like to add as a disclaimer, I may well have misread the original quote and taken this whole thing out of context - I do that a lot. Comprehension is not really one of my skills, neither is paying attention, listening or concentrating for more than thirty seconds at a time.
Saturday, 28 July, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Oh, and going to bed at a sensible time. That’s not one of my skills either. I’m off to Manchester tomorrow, I have to get up at stupid o’clock and I’m still pissing about on the net.
I should really pack something.
Sunday, 29 July, 2007 at 7:34 am
One thing a lot of writers seem to do is write characters…that have no plot to actually go in. Then they wonder why I write that I wasn’t sure what the story was. So they are supposed to be interdependant, but not always.
Sunday, 29 July, 2007 at 11:41 am
i’ve always been immediately suspicious of people - writing gurus in particular - who proclaim they have The One True Way to write.
the only way their approach works is with themselves (and those Who Can Now See - and’ve forked out for the seminar). the audience doesn’t care how the story got put together. they want to be transported. some of that audience will think the story was like, so freaking cool because Keyser Soze has a clubfoot; the others will wonder what childhood trauma brought on Soze’s affectation of a clubfoot.
whatever works, baby - whatever works.
Sunday, 29 July, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I heard Tony Jordan say, somewhere, ‘The concept behind Hustle is that conmen are cool.’ So, starting from that premise, what would you most likely do next? You’d think about who your conmen are, why they do what they do, how they relate to each other. Then you start on plots, researching classic cons, and that.
I think you’re right, in a sense. “Conmen are cool” comes before you start developing individual characters, and it tells you what sort of characters to develop. But you’d want to know your characters before you start writing scenes. So you do what you have to do. I’d imagine an experienced writer like Tony would do that pretty quickly, probably just making a few notes.
Sunday, 29 July, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Surely all the best creative work starts with a writer wondering, “What if . . .”, and if you agree with that, then naturally comes the character.
- so to take Pillock’s line and add what if: what-if-conmen-were-cool? Then comes the character “what would these conmen be like? witty? Urbane? shifty? callous? nerves of steel?
Works for everything - Superman: What if an alien arrived on earth and discovered our atmosphere imbued him with superhuman powers? Greater powers than he would have had on his own planet? What would he use those powers for? What type of person would it make him?
“What if” begets the character. What if a scientist has an accident in a laboratory experiment and due to the involvement of a harmless household spider he develops the attributes of a spider applicable to one as if scaled up to six foot tall?
What if a rich man who has the means to indulge his whims, blah,blah blah . . . Batman! And so on.
What if the dummest man ever, and a former alcoholic, was voted in, on a controversial voting foul-up as US President?A man who can barely string two words together such as “I’m not to be misunderestimated” . . . comedic character yes?
What if the dummest man ever and a former alcoholic, was voted in on a controversial voting foul-up as US President, a man who can barely string two words together such as “I’m not to be misunderstimated and was challenged by a world-wide terrorist organisation? . . . nah we’re into Naked Gun territory here and people would say that’s so unlikely it lacks credibility, so I dunno.
Monday, 30 July, 2007 at 11:45 am
As Danny K says, when you come up with a story-based premise for drama, you’ve almost simultaneously created at least one character. They need much fleshing out, obviously, but they’ve been born as part of the idea. It’s obviously important for characters to be real and robust, but surely it can’t be as cut and dried as them always coming first in the creative process.
I very much doubt that Tony Jordan, Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham sat down and said, “So we’ve come up with this character Sam Tyler - a decent, everyman cop. We’ve worked out every detail of his personality and life. Now, what can we do with him? Ooh, how about some coma/time travel action?”
Monday, 30 July, 2007 at 2:53 pm
You may well have read the Tony Jordan quotes here: http://viciousimagery.blogspot.com/2007/07/tony-jordan-television-is-my-priory.html
Specifically, he had this is say on the subject: ‘You need to find your characters first and your story second when you create a show. It’s madness to go story first, characters become story vehicles. In the case of Holby Blue, the premise came first, then we started talking about the characters … In Holby Blue the central character and his conflicts drove the story, how he overcame his problems, such as difficulties with his estranged wife.’
And on the creation of Hustle: ‘The premise was conmen are cool. That’s it. But it needed to have heart, soul, passion to it … There’s no domestic elements to Hustle, it wouldn’t be cool. So I had to create a family of characters, even though they weren’t related.’
Monday, 30 July, 2007 at 5:22 pm
David, although I didn’t read it at your blog, the wording seems identical - so maybe wherever I read it, they read it on yours first?
In the context of creating a TV show: it makes sense to me to go premise, characters, stories - because the stories are multiple. I still think there’s going to be a bit of symbiosis going on, whilst plotting an episode or story arc it might become clear you need to go back and tweak or add some of the characters - or maybe one or more seem redundant and are best removed.
But wherever I was reading this quote, people were applying it to feature film and that’s where I think it doesn’t work - the premise usually is the character and the story all in one.
Except when it isn’t.
As an aside, that ‘you can’t con an honset man’ line annoys the piss out of me. Of course you can, and they blatantly do more than once in the series. To me that smacked of sanding the spiky edges off the characters: conmen are cool in films, most bad guys are cool in films - qualifying it by pretending they’re not that bad makes them all a bit bland to me.
I also liked the bit where he says about research for ‘Hustle’ - which I thought consisted of watching ‘The Sting’ and ‘Paper Moon’ since most of the cons came from those two films.
I thought ‘Hustle’ was fairly mediocre, but I appear to be wrong since everyone else raves about it. Tony Jordan does seem to be the man of the moment, he must be doing something right.
Monday, 30 July, 2007 at 7:43 pm
The story versus character debate has been doing the rounds for centuries. Me? I’m a story first, story last man as I don’t believe memorable characters are created in isolation - they’re born out of the story being told. Once that’s achieved you must make the story more about being character based than story-is-all drama. It’s not that one is better than the other, more a chicken and egg conundrum.
Jason and the Argonauts I’ve watched a thousand times; I couldn’t tell you a thing about the character of Jason, just your typical boring hero - but what a story! What sfx! The skeletons rising from the ground to fight Jason and his men. What was Jason like? I don’t know, how he behaved wasn’t important - only the story was.
Remember Trainspotting and the plaudits laid at Ewan Mcgregor’s feet?
Well deserved though they were it was the character of the violent psycho Begsy that made the film for me. In fact the character made such an impression it was Robert Carlye’s finest moment - nothing he has done since has had anywhere near the impact, including The Full Monty. Without the excellent Trainspotting story, (and the sfx), the character would have been just another everyday thug.
For character first supporters I hear them say - what about House? Surely a case for character is all?
Well that reminds me of the NCIS series. I hate all those CIS etc., mnemonic cop/forensic derivative shows with a vengeance. But NCIS I like. The story or crime they are asked to solve each week is unimportant, in House you might think you’re interested in the medical case House is asked to solve but really you’re not - you tune in to see how the characters, mainly House, interact and play off each other. After seeing early stories which display House’s amazing deductive prowess, seeing more stories of the same would rapidly tire. The highpoint to date of all the episodes, (for me), being the battle-to-the-death between Vogler and House, (Holmes versus Moriarty? If so, Vogler must rise again from the ‘Reichenbach Falls’).
Back to NCIS - In fact anyone who’s ever worked in a competitive environment will feel right at home, (it reminds me of my days as a trainee manager working for a large company). So the unexpected shooting dead (bullet through the forehead), of one of the principal NCIS protagonists last week came as quite a shock.
At this point it would appear I’m making a case for character over story, but hold on: NCIS was an offshoot of JAG - so although the entertainment comes entirely from watching the interaction of the NCIS characters, their setting and back-story has already been done to death in JAG. To make the story all-important would make the series derivative and die the death of: ’seen it all before’. We want to see more of the interaction of the NCIS characters and how they deal with issues, not see great stories, Something that happened to its predecessor JAG. Which is why I hope the follow up to Life on Mars plays more on the foibles of the characters rather than making the story all-important otherwise it’ll suffer as if it was a re-run of what we’ve already seen in the excellent Life on Mars. So before all these ‘great’ characters can live - they first need life breathing into them from a ‘great’ story. Then we wanna know about the characters.
Tuesday, 31 July, 2007 at 10:20 am
‘Twas indeed Big Tony Jordan at an event the BBC writersroom hosted recently. The first part of the transcript - dealing mostly with Holby Blue - is up now and contains the quote in question. More to come.
“Surely it started with “Let’s do a TV show about conmen who get into all kinds of entertaining scrapes, just like that movie ‘The Sting’.””
Yuh-huh, that’s pretty much what he said about Hustle, only Ocean’s 11 rather than The Sting. And thence to characters, and thence to story.
So to rephrase: “First comes concept, you quimlicking fool. Then character, then story. You dogswiving son-of-a-doxy.”