Unnecessary Characters
(The following is an excerpt from the book “Scriptcake Secrets: The Top 10 Mistakes Novice Screenwriters Make and How to Fix Them” Written By Lovinder Gill )
“The key to creating better plots rests in a deeper understanding of character.”
—Kristen Lamb
Novice writers often create a bunch of characters with no real purpose in their story. Unnecessary characters waste time, take up space, and really slow your screenplay down. Sometimes they write a story with four friends because they had four friends when the impetus for the screenplay happened to them. Many times they can’t even quantify why they have so many characters in a scene.
The problem with that is that many of these characters are not necessary to the point you’re trying to make. This results in the audience having to learn about and process extra characters for no reason, which can be confusing for them.
When you watch a movie, you must know who you need to pay attention to. If there are a bunch of characters with no apparent purpose, that’s hard to do.
When I wrote my third feature screenplay, I loosely based the characters on myself and my three best friends from high school. I based the protagonist on myself, one of my friends was a major supporting character, and the other two characters were just in the background.
Eventually, it dawned on me that those other two characters were serving no real purpose. I wasn’t quite ready to kill them both off, so I combined them into one character. Guess wha happened? It didn’t impact my story at all.
That’s when you know a character is not needed in your screenplay. I deleted one character, gave his lines to another character, and it changed nothing.
That’s a great way to learn if a character is necessary. If you can combine them with another character and there’s no notable difference, they weren’t that important to begin wit
So, be sure to look at your screenplays to see if you have any unnecessary characters. If you do, you need to either give them a purpose or delete them altogether.
SCREENWRITING TRUTH: Every character in your screenplay
must have a very specific purpose
As far as your main characters go, they must each serve a specific purpose. The protagonis and the antagonist must have a direct correlation between them. Once you start breaking down the purpose of a character, you’ll start to see them representing certain classic archetypes, such as the hero or the mentor.
In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi is Luke Skywalker’s mentor. A mentor is a character that has already gone on a similar journey as the protagonist. They’ve been through it and know what to expect. Their purpose is to prepare the protagonist to be able to succeed at the end of their journey.
In Rocky, it’s his trainer Mickey. In the Harry Potter movies, it’s Professor Dumbledore. In The Karate Kid, it’s Mr. Miyagi. In Dead Poets Society, it’s Professor John Keating. In The Empire Strikes Back, it’s Yoda.
Do you see how all of these characters serve the exact same purpose in each of these films? I you go back and watch them, you’ll start to see that many of these characters say similar things to the protagonists.
The key takeaway here is that when you design a character for your screenplay, they must serve a purpose in your story. Most of the time, that purpose will be in support of your protagonist or antagonist.
Each of your supporting characters will represent some aspect of the protagonist or antagonist, and this is a great way of externalizing the internal emotions of both.
So, when you’re creating characters for your screenplay, make sure they represent something important. If they don’t, you need to either kill them off or combine them with another character.
If you’d like to read more, you can get the book here: Scriptcake Secrets