Great characters are the cornerstone of storytelling. For a story to work, the audience must bond in a meaningful way with a cast of fully realized individuals whose actions and conflicts create drama. I find that truth to be self-evident. So does pretty much any writer worth their salt.

In stark contrast to that clarity, how a writer imagines, develops, and challenges a character through a narrative may be one of the great mysteries of our time.

A great deal of my early education as a writer—especially in classes geared toward more literary forms like short stories and novels—centered the idea that you begin with a great character, you put that great character in a bunch of great situations, then see how their great character leads them to behave in those great situations. Based on that, you create more great characters that you put in those great situations alongside that first great character. From those experiments and explorations evolves conflict and eventually a complete story befitting those great characters.

In support of this methodology, John Irving, a novelist whose work I admire, summarized his manner of creation this way: “I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.” In one college class, I was even taught that in order to create a great character, the writer must know everything: the family history and relationships of their character, how they dress, what they eat and why, all the way down to what they carry in their pockets.

Because so much of my education as a writer centered on the idea that the psychological exploration of a story’s protagonists is the prime take off point for “serious” writing, I have always harbored a little inferiority complex when comparing myself to my more literary counterparts. You see, I have a dirty little secret to confess…

I always start with plot.

I love plot. I have never wanted to watch a movie because someone said something to me like “holy fuck, man, Ordinary People is AMAZING—the scene where the repressed middle aged white guy finally unloads on his materialistic wife about her cold and callous response to the suicide of their favored son just EXPLODES with character!”

I have, however, wanted to see many a movie because someone said something to me like “man, that Star Wars is amazing, the farm boy who just found out he’s a space wizard from the old desert samurai who saved him from desert marauders and went on to hire a space pirate to rescue a princess before he unloads on the Death Star just EXPLODES with lasers!”

Of course, starting with plot doesn’t make me a better or worse writer than anyone else, even if my process differs from what I was so frequently taught. The difference between starting with character and starting with plot is strictly methodological and has nothing to do with how good, thoughtful, or wise a writer you are.

Whether you truly are a good, thoughtful, or wise writer depends on how you answer one of two questions. If you start with character, the question is “what sort of plot needs this character?” If you start with plot, then the question is “what sort of character needs this plot?”

I would love to claim the idea above as my own, but it was something I heard from screenwriter Rick Jaffa (who co-wrote the modern Planet of the Apes films as well as a number of James Cameron’s Avatar sequels with his writing partner Amanda Silver) during a panel discussion. He stated it as “what kind of character needs this movie?”

Upon hearing Jaffa explain this, I was hit by a force of divine revelation. This is pretty much the question I have asked myself in almost everything I have ever written, though I had never found a way to state it so elegantly. It is pretty much the Grand Unified Summation of “my process.”

Here is a practical description of how it works for me. I recently completed a screenplay (don’t worry, it’s not coming to a theater near you any time soon) that began with a conversation about the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

As the friend with whom I was conversing extolled the virtues of Joss Whedon’s creation, I found myself thinking up a “what if” scenario (neither Whedon nor his creations are my cup of tea, so I often repair to my own thoughts during exultations of his work). The “what if” scenario was as follows: In the TV series, Buffy was recruited and mentored by Giles—her school’s librarian—and trained by him to become a slayer of vampires and other supernatural threats…

But what if Giles was a fraud, a con-artist, and a murderer? What if Giles profiled a particularly susceptible young woman and drugged her to believe she was seeing monsters? What if Giles was taking money from people who wanted other people dead and duped Buffy into becoming his unwitting assassin?

What if Buffy wasn’t a hero, but a deluded youth—drugged, and deceived into sacrificing everything to become a hitman for another person’s enrichment?

As this “what if” took shape in my mind, it immediately collided with my growing rage about income inequality. Another annoyance doing laps inside in my brain at the time was the phenomenon that author Cory Doctorow has termed “enshittification”: the manner in which tech companies continually degrade products in order to charge more and more for an ever longer and higher ladder of upgrades.

More and more, I have come to believe that the enshittification of everything is the hallmark of our lives under the yoke of late-stage capitalism. Applied to a broader context, enshittification is the treadmill on which we have all been placed: working endlessly to pay more and more for things that may have even once been (or should be) free, but are now “unbundled” and “tiered.”

Where once you bought a cup of coffee with milk, enshittification means being forced to buy a cup with no coffee in it, then you must upgrade to “plus” and pay extra to fill half the cup with the standard rocket-fuel, or to “pro” to get the full cup, and to “platinum” to get the full cup with a spoonful of skim milk. If you want whole milk, in greater quantity than a spoonful, then you have to upgrade to “platinum max”—and if you want a better class of coffee than the usual rocket fuel, that’s reserved for those in the plusproplatinummax gold circle, which requires a lifetime subscription.

It’s a pernicious cancer that has metastasized into every facet of our lives with the express purpose of keeping us all subscribed, in debt, and paying for all eternity.

So now you know two things that bother me: income inequality and living in an enshittified world that cares for nothing more than milking human beings of all they possess in exchange for less and less satisfactory goods and services in the name of shareholder enrichment. Also the adoration of Joss Whedon.

And, of course (not really but I’m a genre guy, so really), any movie riffing on a similar premise to Buffy the Vampire Slayer would, by nature, have to be a horror movie.

So now I know the theme, genre, and some of the organizing ideas that will propel the story. Now it’s time to ask the question: what sort of character needs this movie?

It would have been easy to make the protagonist of this film a put upon middle-aged man who, after a ruinous divorce, finds himself in a tempestuous second marriage where he is now parenting young children just as most of his peers are becoming empty-nesters, and who is finding his earning prospects decreasing daily as a result of paradigmatic shifts in both the economy and the political views of his country while seeing the economic demands of raising a family soar limitlessly. Bob Odenkirk in an even darker and more nihilistic take on his Nobody franchise.

That, however, would have been a boring movie for me to write, as I am already living it. We all want to make ourselves the protagonists of our movie, and most of the time we do. The trick is finding the right disguise.

One of the reasons I couldn’t put anyone like myself at the center of this movie is that, at the end of the film, I wanted the main character to face a choice. Having tracked down the head of the organization that conned them, the protagonist learns that the drug that made them see people as monsters would never wear off and they could simply continue to be a hitman and make loads of money without ever seeing a human face as their victim. The protagonist then has the choice to live out their life in abject poverty—and pursued as a mentally ill fugitive wanted for multiple murders—or to accept the money and protection of the organization and live a cushy life as an assassin for hire.

The protagonist chooses the money. It’s a horror film. It needed a tragic, doom-foretelling conclusion.

Here’s another reason why the middle-aged guy who looks suspiciously like me would have been a bad fit for this film: I have children. In a situation desperate enough, there is little I wouldn’t do for them. If I absolutely had to kill people to feed my children, being drugged into thinking I was killing monsters would not be the worst way to go.

I wanted a character for whom this dilemma would have implications as an individual and as an individual alone. This was to be a movie about the existential loneliness and isolation brought about by a cruel system that only cares about profit, and how this system feeds on its young without any heed for the future.

Because of that, I wanted the script to be about a population born after my own. While some lucky Generation X-ers were able to sop up the last dribs and drabs of the so-called American Dream (job security, home ownership, disposable income), most Millennials and Gen-Zers were born into an America long past the expiration date of its promises: few prospects for jobs, much less opportunity for career advancement, a massive and ever-widening gulf between the poor and wealthy, a legal system that protects the corrupt and powerful while ruthlessly persecuting the weakest and most vulnerable, and health care that insures that anyone who doesn’t have savings in the millions could be driven to indigence by a single medical crisis.

The eventual protagonist of my script—the person who needed this plot—is named “Nico De Landa.”

Here’s how the reader meets Nico in the script:

       
I made Nico a young woman—but I leave the casting open to a male or non-binary actor—living in a heightened, enshittified version of modern-day Los Angeles. I made Nico gender-fluid because I like the idea of them being someone either in or close to the throes of figuring out their identity. I made Nico a poet because I wanted them to have crippling student debt in service of a career that our society does not find valuable enough to either justify or monetize. I made Nico an activist using their creative gifts to raise consciousness, not because I wanted to make fun of these efforts, but to show them as feeling more and more insignificant when set against the totality of a world on the brink.

By the time the film ends, Nico has suffered—and inflicted—more violence than most human beings will encounter in their lives. Nico has seen the profit motive at its most nakedly insidious, and it has corrupted them beyond return. Nico has seen the futility of their own struggle and is faced with the choice of “selling out”—not as an abstract career decision with opaque future consequences, but as a literal “take the money or your life will suck” conundrum.

Nico chooses selling out because the other option is, indeed, intolerable in the world in which she lives.

An older character than Nico might have approached this choice with a greater sense of perspective born of life experience. Someone in their thirties or forties might have questioned the binary, or even come up with a third and more personally satisfying way of solving this conundrum. I wanted Nico to have limited material and emotional resources when facing the decision because, in real life, these sorts of dilemmas are placed before most of us before we truly have the emotional faculty to project and process the potential consequences.

So that’s how I create a character.

While this is a very specific example, I can go back to the very first things I ever wrote and see a clear and direct line from there to here. I always start with the parameters of the plot as dictated by a series of thematic, poetic, and real-world concerns and decide what character could help me elucidate them.

Nico De Landa is not an “everyman,” she represents a very specific demographic facing very specific issues that nevertheless reflect the plight of the average person in some way. More importantly, I can see Nico when I close my eyes, she is someone I see behind and in front of every counter of every coffee shop in every arts district I have ever visited. It is my hope that in that specificity of character and circumstance, the audience will find something universal with which to bond.

Now all that was left to do was to make sure that Nico De Landa suffered immensely.

Creating a character for the needs of a plot means that in every fork in the road, the plot needs to serve the character back. I do this by identifying each and every one of their soft targets and striking at them with lead-pipe cruelty.

In the course of this story, Nico loses her friends, family, and home. She murders four adults and accidentally kills two children in the escalating grand guignol of psychological devastation and high-order violence that becomes her life. She becomes a fugitive and is believed to be insane.

It was crucial for me, in devising the rapid degeneration of Nico De Landa, to drive every conflict straight into the most vulnerable parts of her character and to put her in situations that reveal and test the irreconcilable contradictions of that character.

This idea of “irresolvable contradictions” is key to my approach to character. In my previous writing about television, where irreconcilable contradictions within a character power episode after episode in season after season, I refer to this as the protagonist’s “operational theme,” but that doesn’t mean the concept is unique to television drama.

We all have contradictions within us that we deal with in one way or another in the shaggy, non-linear, and generally undramatic river of disjointed confusion that is Real Life. We find ourselves loving relatives whose political views we despise and holding them as close family even though we know that their ideology wants us dead, for example. We hold these conflicting beliefs in our head and live our lives because we are all, each and every one of us, flawed and needy people. Also, ordinary people are seldom truly tested or faced with a decision that cuts to the core of those contradictions.

In drama, however, the key to the success of each and every scene is whether, and how close, they slice into internal character conflicts that can’t be settled without a high price. A good writer, whether they work plot- or character-first, discovers and then reveals the depths of their dramatis personae by putting them in singular situations that demand they decide what cannot be decided.

How characters work within situations that test their contradictions, whether temporarily or as the end of their narrative journey, is where the writer first—and the audience second—finds out who the characters truly are. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Honestly.

Except it’s the most difficult thing a writer has to do.

In life, the simplest choices are often the hardest. Just ask your friend who can’t bring themselves to break up with their abusive wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend. Or ask Prince Hamlet of Denmark his feelings about a “simple” conundrum like “kill or be killed.”

From the moment Old King Hamlet’s ghost shows up and explains to his son that his brother Claudius snuck into his bedroom and stuck a horn full of poison in his ear before marrying the queen and taking the throne for himself, Hamlet, and the audience, understand that his life as the legitimate heir is in clear and present danger. In spite of that immediate danger, the totality of the play is an almost ludicrously long dramatic exploration of Hamlet’s absolute inability to reconcile the absolute need to kill for the sake of his own survival, and that of the nation he was born to rule, with his absolute incapacity to perform the act. Even as character after character suffers and even dies as a result of Hamlet’s lack of action, his unyielding indecision, prevarication, and mental litigation of his “simple” choice is the dramatic fulcrum of the play all the way to the bitter end.

A playwriting teacher whose class I was fortunate to take told us that a dramatist should be like an insane train conductor. Instead of guiding the trains to safety, this mad person constantly works the levers to get the trains to crash against one another with continually escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In bringing this up, it may seem that I am talking more about designing plot than character, but plots only succeed when they form a constant barrage of moral conundrums slowly chipping away at the core of a character’s most deeply held values, secrets, and lies…and the ability to design such plots is dependent on how well the dramatist knows their character.

My storytelling process may not begin with the psychology of a character I find interesting but with a situation or concept I find interesting. What that means, though, is that once I know what I want to happen and what sort of person I want it to happen to, I have to do the very same deep dive into their psyche (and their pockets) with which many other writers begin.

At the end of the day, I still have to do what I was taught, just in a different order!

In a recent essay, Amanda Knox wrote that “our available decisions in life are the result of choices made by others that shape the world we find ourselves in” (the Atlantic Monthly, July 2025). While she wrote this in apropos of the nature of evil, it is also a perfect description of the plight of a character in drama: someone other than them—in this case the writer—provides multiple choices in every scene. The character’s answers reveal their true nature.

One of the best pilot episodes in the history of television is ER. At the time the series pilot was developed, network executives worried that its vérité “you-are-there” style would disorient the audience, but the audience responded and the show became a defining work of its time.

One reason is that the characters in the pilot never stop to explain themselves. The plot is simple—a cast of health care professionals work day in and day out in an ER and face an endless torrent of human suffering that demands their constant and complete focus and attention. They never give long expository monologues about their childhoods. They never tell patients anecdotes about their lives to ease their suffering.

These doctors and nurses make decisions, dozens of them per scene, many of them are purely about plot, some are purely about character, but they all further the audience’s understanding of the characters. You grow to know and love the characters based purely on what they do. To me, this pilot achieves greatness because it articulates an ideal: Plot and character can be the same if plot consistently demands that characters act and react in ways that reveal a consistent picture of who they are.

The best example of this in the pilot is the character of Dr. Douglas Ross, played by George Clooney. The audience meets Ross when he stumbles drunk into the ER before his shift. Without judgment, Ross’s best friend, Dr. Greene (the series’ lead played by Anthony Edwards) hooks him up to an IV for hydration and leaves him to sober up. In this scene we learn three crucial things: the ER is way too busy to send Ross away and be a man short, Greene likes Ross and isn’t about to turn him in but rather helps him get ready, and Ross is obviously a “fun guy” outside of the ER.

In the climactic scene of the pilot, a now-sober Ross, revealed to be the ER’s pediatrician, realizes that the infant he is examining has a number of healed fractures and contusions indicating that he has been abused by his callous mother—a lawyer who shows up at the ER with her date, demanding a swift resolution to the child’s condition so that she can continue with her evening. After patiently suffering a tongue lashing from the woman, Ross explodes, excoriating the mother for so horribly mistreating a defenseless child before storming off to call child protective services.

When Dr. Ross’s professional calm in the face of the thoroughly detestable person finally breaks, the audience applauds. I am convinced that this single dramatic beat is what made George Clooney the star he is today. In this moment of action, the audience understands better that perhaps the reason this doctor showed up a little tipsy to the ER is not because he’s a bad person or an incompetent doctor, but because he faces this sort of injustice day in and day out and it deeply taxes him on a personal and emotional level.

To make a transcendent dramatic moment like this happen, you need to understand your characters on a molecular level. The good news is that you don’t have to write five hundred pages of backstory for them (though many have). The beautiful part of this process is that eventually, your unconscious will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Once you have done this much thinking about your characters, whether you start with plot or psychology, whether you break story and write an outline, or start writing a script as an exploratory means to discern story, there comes a time when your characters take up residence in your head.

We have all heard writers explain that “the characters started talking to me.” On more than one occasion I have even heard a showrunner say “the show is telling me it wants to go in a different direction,” as if the show itself were a growing and evolving organism gaining more and more sentience, and charting its own course, based on everything the writers feed it. This is the greatest gift a writer receives from the work; the moment your creation takes on a life of its own and takes some of the burden from your conscious mind. That, to me, is the writer’s version of the “runner’s high.”

While every writer has a different way of getting there, my map to that place always begins with the “I Want” song.

As the father of young children, my life is saturated with Disney musicals and their ilk. If you don’t think there are valuable lessons in the craft to be learned from Disney musicals and their ilk, let me dissuade you from that right now. One of the most useful lessons you can learn about drama writing is in each and every one of these films (and in most musicals for that matter).

The “I Want” song is the one where the main character (in Disney films usually a regent-in-waiting) delivers the entirety of their character in musical form—usually just as the plot kicks in to either give them exactly what they want or deny it to them completely, and with increasingly escalating dramatic stakes. Here are some of the greatest hits:

Moana: I wish I could be the perfect daughter/But I come back to the water/No matter how hard I try!

Belle: There must be more than this provincial life!

Elsa: Don’t let them in/Don’t let them see/Be the good girl you always have to be!

Simba: I’m gonna be the mane event/Like no king was before/I’m brushing up on looking down/I’m working on my roar/Oh, I just can’t wait to be king!

It goes on and on down the line all the way to the very first full-length animated feature in the history of cinema. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Walt Disney himself set the template for decades of memorable characters and box office success.

Snow White’s “I want” song is about as clear as it gets: I’m wishing/For the one I love/To find me/Today.

The reason for this detour into the Wonderful World of Disney is that, though I have no gift for music or lyrics, one of the ways I wrap my head around a character is to compose the “I Want” song for them before beginning any project, and it often winds up in the script itself. The “I Want” song is the north star from which I build landscapes of challenge, pain, and suffering, which the character must cross in order to find the end of their story, and while I am speaking metaphorically about it being a musical number, “I Want” is the closest you can come to the song of a character’s soul.

A very clear, non-musical example of an “I Want” song setting up not just the pivotal and most character-revealing moment for its protagonist, but also sets the stage for all he suffers after, can be found Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, co-written with John Spaihts and Eric Roth. Moving forward, I will shorthand that to “Villeneuve,” not out of disrespect for his co-writers, but because Villeneuve initiated the project, was the lead creative, and directed the evolution of both the script and visuals. In most artistic collaborations there usually is one creative who steers the creative discussion and has the last say.

In Dune, protagonist and regent-in-waiting Paul Atreides plays a somewhat aimless character. For the first third of the story, Paul is more batted about by the winds of fate, his own ambivalence about his place in the universe, and the many factions interested in the power he is fated to wield, than he is in control, or even aware, of his own fate.

One of these factions is a coven of super-powered witches called the “Bene Gesserit.” These women have an outsized influence on Paul’s life as they trained his mother to be one of their own, ordered his birth, and secretly believe Paul might be their Chosen One: a superhuman able to chart the species’ best path into the future.

As a result of the genetic manipulations of the Bene Gesserit, Paul has the gift of clairvoyance. The gift presents itself when Paul experiences the greatest emotional trauma of his life to that point; his entire Royal House, including his beloved father, has been murdered in a massive attack spurred by an intense personal betrayal.

In this moment of extreme duress, Paul hides in a tent in the deep desert, accompanied by his mother. In an apocalyptic vision of the future, Paul gives up his “I Want” song (or, much as in Hamlet’s case, his “I DON’T WANT” song):

“Holy war. Spreading across the universe like unquenchable fire. A warrior religion that waves the Atreides banner. Fanatical legions worshipping at the shrine of my father’s skull. A crusade. In my name. My name. That’s the future. It’s coming. You did this to me! You BENE GESSERIT. You made me a freak!”

In this speech—and the rage with which he delivers it—Paul articulates the most important thing with which a creator can declare a character: a defining desire. Paul wants to be anything but a freak, an emperor, or a ruler of fanatical followers waging a jihad in his name. Of course, the machinations of the plot will conspire to ensure that he tragically ends the story a freak, an emperor, and ruler of fanatical followers waging a jihad in his name.

The next three hours and change of Villeneuve’s Dune consist primarily of Paul, like Hamlet, refusing this destiny—and cursing his mother for damning him to this fate. While doing all he can to avoid falling into a nightmarish reality where he becomes a genocidal God Emperor of the Known Universe, Paul is inexorably drawn to it both by the needs, faults, and ambitions in his own character (as well as the machinations of an entire universe of kings, dukes, barons, princesses, warlords, and witches).

The plot of Dune, especially as distilled by Villeneuve and his collaborators, exists entirely to narrow the road before Paul until his only choice is to embrace the awful reality of who he was made to become. I use the word “distilled” here very specifically: Villeneuve did not invent Paul Atreides, Frank Herbert did, and it would be easy to imagine that their work developing the character was made “easier” by having a road map in another medium.

In an adaptation, however, selection, omission, and distillation are the order of the day. The text is lengthy and Herbert lets the character’s thoughts take center page. In the novel, this scene is far from an “I Want”: It includes a far-ranging discussion of the galactic politics of the moment and how the fall of House Atreides could affect them, the location of the family’s atomic arsenal, how the planet Dune has affected Paul’s cognition, and Paul’s parentage. The reason it all works is that readers can always pause to figure it all out, as well as which part of the character to attach to.

Movie Paul needed a simpler (but not more simplistic) character arc that better lent itself to a visual but not textual experience. This simplicity is, at least in my opinion, more fitting to the experience of watching a story rather than reading it. Villeneuve’s Paul is driven by much more primal fear, grief, and anxiety; the movie only has you for a fixed amount of time and has to direct your understanding of character toward what will make the greatest impact.

So, yeah, you can’t even expect that doing an adaptation of a classic work—or finding some awesome collaborators to help you out—will rid you of the burden of developing your own characters and their own “I Want” song.

To bring it all back to my script that will never see the light of day, Nico De Landa’s “I Want” song is her introduction. We meet Nico reciting a poem about the plight of the homeless at a public protest attended by her best friend. I set the scene in front of a City Hall because everyone understands the shorthand of “fighting city hall.” Nico wants to make the world a better place through her art and she has drafted her pals to the effort. She may not be singing it from a promontory on a Polynesian island, or the balcony of the royal palace of a Scandinavian-coded kingdom, but the intent and effort are the exact same.

Naturally, the scene ends with the police violently breaking up the protest, and Nico being arrested. In the following scene, Nico’s best friend breaks ties with her, fearing that her increasing brushes with the law will damage his chances for a job with health care benefits. The entirety of the first act of Angels is a clockwork designed to strip Nico De Landa of her ability to thrive in a late-stage capitalist world that doesn’t want her in the first place, and in doing so to get to the core of her character when placed in extremis.

One of the reasons I quoted John Irving at the beginning of this article—aside from my love of The World According to Garp—is that like so many other artists, myself included, he often contradicts himself in his discussion of his own process. The man who said “I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible” is also on record with:

“Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. They’re going someplace.”

And this is the reason why trying to teach a creative process is less about telling anyone what to do and more about saying “this is how I was able, through sheer tyranny of will, to force my broken and dysfunctional brain into successfully performing a (one hopes) meaningful act of creation.” This is especially true, and vexing, when it comes to creating memorable characters. Most of us, myself included, barely understand ourselves; how are we to understand and express someone who exists only in our mind?

And yet we do. If it sounds like alchemy, that’s because it is. Creating compelling characters is the intersection of an inexorable will to create, no small amount of artisanal skill, a mind full of disparate ideas waiting for a coalescing lightning strike, and a biochemical reaction deep in your brain that lets the people you create take on a life of their own that they may become your willing collaborators in stories that often wind up hurting and changing them beyond recognition.

Every writer has a bag of tricks (though some merely have a bag of trick). Every writer has a way of doing things. Every writer has a unique style and set of personal and thematic concerns. Most crucially, every writer will gleefully break every rule they have set for themselves if it means a faster way to end the suffering and deliver a completed product.

In that way, writers are no more noble or virtuous than any other working Joe. Whether you are the sort of writer that starts with character, like John Irving, or the sort of writer that starts with plot, like John Irving, you would do well to heed the following advice from a writer like John Irving, because no matter where you are, the end result of your explorations of character always need to fulfill a promise:

“A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building—it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.”

Now that we have settled that, I am off to begin a profound psychological exploration of a fascinating character for whom I do not yet have a story. May the gods of alchemy bless and keep you.

© 2025 Javier Grillo-Marxuach