Inneresting 51
issue 51
May 7, 2021
Knowing when you have “A Real Character.”
Some characters just have a natural way of driving story.
Maria Popova profiles Rosalie Edge, a pioneering conservationist who chose to protect migrating hawks by buying a mountaintop the birds used as a rest stop and kept hunters out.
The podcast Cautionary Tales features the story of David Philips, whose attention to detail found a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotion and earned him over 1 million air miles (inspiring P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love).
During WWII, an all-female Soviet bomber regiment used surprising and dangerous stealth tactics against the Nazis to make up for the antiquated planes they were issued, coming to be feared as “The Night Witches.”
Isn’t it ironic?
In an introductory lecture on Near Eastern Religions, Dr. Ralph Williams told students:
“If you want to understand any religion, look for the thing that it pains believers to affirm, but they affirm it, nonetheless.”
Ironic juxtapositions, cognitive dissonance, and internal contradictions help make characters feel more specific and real.
The blog Writes With Tools looks at different types of contradictions you can use to define your characters.
Debbie Moon offers a quick reminder that larger-than-life characters often have a clear, inherent contradiction at their core.
E.M. Welsh describes the way pitting a character’s beliefs against their actions can add complexity to a character.
But do they make sense?
Even if a character defies expectations, clear internal logic can help make them believable and defined.
The blog Naturalish looks at how deciding the way gigantic monsters become gigantic changes the way they would behave.
The Kool-Aid Man is a unique spokes-being, but there is a plausible explanation for how a sentient glass pitcher could safely smash through a brick wall.
For a deeper dive on extraordinary characters, check out James Kakalios’s The Physics of Superheroes, which includes how the X-Man Cyclops’s greatest superpower is the neck strength that prevents his optic blasts from snapping his head back.
Highland How-To: Character Tools
Highland’s Character Highlighting tools can help you revise your dialogue and check your character’s arc throughout your script.
From the menu bar, select Tools > Character Highlighting and you’ll get a pop-up that lets you select colors to highlight dialogue throughout the script.
You can also click the pop-out button in the corner of the highlighting window to open a new document with a table showing how many lines each character has and when they first appear in the script.
To learn more about how to use Highland 2, check out our Knowledge Base!
Other Cool Things
John Swartzwelder, one of the original writers for The Simpsons, explains how getting to the second draft as fast as possible makes writing easier.
Take a look at how Douglas Adams adapted The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a twisted, confounding text-based adventure game.
Helena Fitzgerald wrote about loving The National, and how the things we love deeply are inherently embarrassing.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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