Putting Yourself in Your Characters' Shoes

The work of the playwright is to tell an engaging story. The work of an actor is to bring that story to life. These tasks have two sets of very differing needs. A playwright has to think about theme, tone, plot, and so forth. The burden often falls to the actor, set design crew, and so forth to actually figure out what it means to live in this strange world of the playwright's imagination. Trust me, it's much harder than it looks.

Imagine someone asks you why you don't cut in line at the cashier. You'd probably be taken aback before mumbling something about "it's just not how things work." Well, a foreign actor used to people all mobbing the stalls in the marketplace would have to figure out some way of understanding that unspoken thing that the Americans do every day with the lines in the supermarket.

This isn't limited to foreign fish-out-of-water scenarios, either. I did all domestic scenes in acting class, and I still felt overwhelmed even without the director calling me out on anything. You have a huge painted rectangle on the grass. It is the unspoken rules of the game that turn it into a sports field. Same for a bar, a school, the mall, and so forth. Relationships are the same way. How does it feel to really be in a 50 year marriage or be a subject before your ageless princess?

As authors, we are not immune from bad acting. We have different names for it: OOC, "broke my immersion," boring characters, and so on, but it's still a concept that can and will shoot us in the foot. To get better acting characters, it pays to take a moment away from your epic plot and clever symbolism to consider your scene from the perspective of the actor who has to go in and bring your setting/characters to life. The best way I've found to do this is to ask the questions my director asked me over and over again:

What do your character relationships mean in this moment?

What is the relationship between Twilight and Pinkie Pie? Well they're friends, silly! But what does it mean for Twilight to be friends with Pinkie? Twilight is Rarity's friend as well, but they interact completely differently. More troubling, sometimes Pinkie drives Twilight up the wall, while other times, Twi might be helping Pinkie set up for a party or laughing at Pinkie's antics. Point is, our normal everyday labels don't actually do a good job of describing the reality of real relationships. To write relationships according to our labels for them is about the same as Twilight planning her slumber parties out of a book.

So you've got a word to describe your relationship, but what does that relationship mean to your characters in the moment your scene is taking place? What relates your characters and why? What could break the relationship and how? If they broke the relationship right now, what would each of them miss? Do they enjoy having this relationship? Would they prefer a different one? If so, why are things the way they are? How do they expect to feel around each other? How do they actually feel around each other right now and why? How have they interacted in the past? Of that, what does each remember most strongly and why? How does the presence of other characters, settings, or circumstances change these answers? Would each character in the relationship give the same answer to these questions?

That's not even an exhaustive list, but certainly something to get you started. The point is that relationships aren't these platonic ideas: there's a lot of moving parts that change from scene to scene. Getting a gut level understanding of what each major relationship is about will help you write natural character interaction. It's also useful in the editing phase. Pre-readers think your character interaction is off? Then sit down with your writing, ask your questions, and see if the relationship your questions lead you to is the same one you wrote.

What does your setting mean to your characters?

You wouldn't shout in the library, would you? Why? Twilight would tell you that it disturbs the patrons. Rainbow Dash would gripe that whenever she does, the mean librarian throws her out on her rump (geez, Twilight, do you have to yank my tail every time?). Setting plays a big role in shaping how we behave, and if our world is to be fully realized in what we write, we have to let it impact our characters.

How comfortable is your character with the setting? What experiences have they had there in the past? What do they expect from the setting under their present circumstances? Does the setting expect anything of them? Do any sensory features of the setting stand out to your characters? If so, how do these notable features make them feel? Can anything in the setting hurt or help you? How? Do the characters care one way or the other? We describe the details of the setting at the top of the scene. Giving these questions proper consideration will ensure we're still feeling the impact of the setting at the end of the action.

Of course, settings are also flavored by how everyone interacts with them. A library may naturally be deathly silent, but without a librarian you can shout at the top of your lungs to your heart's content. Does any character have a duty to the setting? How strongly do they feel about this duty, and why do they have it in the first place? What are the consequences if the duty isn't done? All good questions to consider if your setting is not feeling as strong as you'd like it to be.

What happened just before now?

Real life doesn't have scenes. We are all in our own little movies starring ourselves and the camera is always rolling. As such, an actor needs to picture what (unshown) scene their character is walking onstage from when making their entrance. What circumstances brought each character to the scene you're about to write? How do they feel? Why? What do they expect to occur right now? Do they even expect the action at all?

We've all probably been in circumstances where we started writing a scene rather blandly, but things improved as we warmed up. You may find it helpful to try starting your scene before you intended it to begin and then throwing away the extra during editing. The chaff helps you get warmed up and figure out how it feels to actually enter the scene, so you can hit the ground running when the scene actually starts for real.

Then there is the question of what happens after the scene. It's almost natural to ask the question, but sometimes we still forget to do so. This is usually an issue if you feel like the scene just... ends. When that happens, it's time to ask what the next "event" in everyone's day is. How do they anticipate that event? Is it just daily routine? Enjoyable? Dreaded? How will they get there? Do they have to prepare? Are they late? The reader never even needs to be told anything explicitly, but asking these questions gives an author something to drive characters' actions while the scene is wrapping up.

Where is the humor?

Most of the time, we think of comedies as shows that are funny for the audience, and there's no problem with that. However, what is often overlooked is that humor is as necessary to sentient life as food or water. When drama gets too much to bear, we crave humor to lighten the mood not for the benefit of the audience, but because the characters themselves can't take it anymore. Humor often has us pushing the envelope, which helps us see familiar concepts in interesting new ways. And, of course making others laugh can be as satisfying as laughing ourselves, so humor is a form of social currency as well.

For an actor, humor is not making the audience laugh, but instead coming onstage with a fun-seeking attitude. Remember that deep down everyone wants to have a good time, and if you look for humor, you'll find it. The place you should start looking for humor is where it is needed most: dramatic moments. Pick through your scene and ask yourself who really wants to be let off the hook? Who's stressed out? Where has the situation built up to an unbearable degree? Then take the situation and ask how your characters might play around with it to let some of the pressure out.

If you need a starter example, watch some Rarity. Rarity loves the dramatic, so when the situation becomes heated, she always takes a step over the top, which thrusts her terrifying circumstances into the realm of absurdity where it's easier for her to deal with them. She makes light by pretending the situation is absurdly heavy.

Another good place to look for humor is in the detestably mundane. Don't let your characters settle for being bored or performing drudgery without protest. Let them play around and spice up their lives in whatever way is appropriate. When do your characters not want to be where they are? When are characters doing things that they detest doing? Now how might they change things up so they at least get some enjoyment out of it? They might met out some poetic justice, perform so gloriously incompetently that they are never asked to do so again, bend the rules to do things with their own unique style, or simply spend the whole time cracking wise. Whatever they do, just make sure they're not accepting their fate without scraping some kind of enjoyment out of it.

Where is the variety?

There is nothing worse than a consistent character. You know exactly how they're going to react, you've already seen them react that way a thousand times before, and it's wearing thin. The mundane and samey fades into the background only to gore us with antsy boredom when it surfaces. Hence, actors are trained to ask: what is the defining emotion/idea of my current performance, and how can I bring its opposite into the scene?

The philosophy behind this is the idea that you cannot truly know something until you know its opposite. In fact, you can always find a bit of the opposite of what you are feeling down in you somewhere waiting to surface. We love what we have, but hate all those little imperfections that come with it. We're excited for what is to come because what we have right now is so boring. Just as acknowledging both sides of an argument will make you sound as though you've considered the matter fully, examining a feeling and its opposite will give your audience a sense of completeness.

Of course, you can't just ping-pong between a strong feeling and its opposite, else you'll get bipolar characters. The idea is to be aware of how the opposite plays in so you can draw on it when the opportunity arises. It's adding emotional paint to your palette. Another good question to ask is: if a character had to stop feeling their strongest emotion in this scene, what would be the next most important feeling/idea to surface? So sometimes you love triumphs over hate, but why care about either of those when you could be greedy or generous instead? This brings their current struggle into perspective and provides more fodder for when your characters need to take a breather from their current conflict.

What don't I know?

Last but not least, always remember that despite all your planning and notes, the future hasn't happened yet for your characters. As such, there are always things that your characters have questions about. It is your job to sit down and figure out what kinds of questions might your characters have right now? What information do they not have that is important to them? Why haven't they gotten their answers yet and how might they play to find out? Don't just stick to plot-centric questions either. Does anything about your characters' surroundings catch their attention? Are they uncertain about the future? What silly little questions might they have about each other?

The more you wonder through your characters, the more you engage yourself with their circumstances. Keeping a sense of wonder helps us to keep a 'here be dragons' at the edge of our plot/character notes. It gives us room to improvise, make discoveries, and see things for the first time again at any point in the writing process. Remember: the only one who can explore your world for us is you. If you don't think to imagine an aspect of your world, then we'll never get to see it. There was never a greater tragedy than what should have been but wasn't.

As always, comments, questions, and concerns go down below. Thanks for reading!