Monday 17 May 2010

Strip your characters #2

A while ago I wrote a post on stripping your characters, using Supernatural's Dean Winchester as an example:
Strip your characters down and take them to a place they'd do anything to stay away from. Expose their dark side. Make them overflow with emotion. That might result in buckets of tears, a psychological breakdown, a suicide or a blast in the chest from a sawn-off shotgun. Expose their fears and see what happens.
This time, why not take a look at this scene from Frasier. In this episode, Frasier is receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award for his broadcasting services over the years, but encounters his old mentor and delves into some serious self-analysis.

Examine how Frasier is stripped bare, at first by his mentor and then by himself:

(after the first segment, you'll have to skip through the awards ceremony to the self-analysis)


Now obviously this is slightly easier in a show all about analysis and psychiatry, but maybe it's worth entering into this sort of debate with your own characters at some point? Just to get to know them better? The key to this technique, as I said last time, is to force the character into this situation. If it takes no effort to get them there, then they have no internal conflict and nothing for us to care about.

Have fun!

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