2 Quick Tips to Make Your Stories Characters Come Alive

One of the most important parts of any narrative is the character. It's your job as a writer to turn what could be a sketchy, unmemorable person into a fully-fleshed character with a unique personality, quirks, and motives that will come to life in film.

To make your characters come alive from script to film, you have to be able to get inside their heads and see their world from their perspective.

Here are some tips to help make the characters of your script come alive!

Tip 1: Dive deep into their psyche

Character creation should go way beyond simply giving them a name and describing what your characters look like. Crack open their heads and jump on in!

You as their writer and creator need to have an intimate understanding of their likes, dislikes, personalities, values, flaws, etc. For example, is your main character an introvert or an extrovert, and can anyone who will read your script be able to determine this by how they interact with the other characters and situations?

Is your antagonist an evil jerk that needs to be stopped simply because you need a villain for your story or does your antagonist have strong ambition and persistence to snuff out half of all life in the universe because they fully believe this mass genocide will bring balance and life back to a dying universe (Thanos from Avengers: Endgame).

Tip 2: Place them in unthinkable situations and see what they do

Now that you have a good understanding of your character's psyche take those characters and put them in some utterly ridiculous situations that are as far from your story as possible and see how they would react to get an even better feel of who they are as a person.

Take the villain of your story and place them in a world setting and problem that is as opposite as it can be from their normal environment i.e. their normal environment is in the futuristic dystopian world of the year 4356 where people live in spaceships, so place them in a zombie apocalypse in the medieval era and figure out what they would do.

Know your character better than you know your family and friends.

If you can nerd out for hours on end detailing and describing all the nuances of your characters both good and bad and can show that type of life in your writing then your readers and viewers will be able to see these characters truly come to life.