Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Characters

Characters

When my wife Linda and I go to the movies we generally know something about what we are going to see. Of course there is the endless barrage of commercials of upcoming movies and then there is usually a book that has been written which the movie is based upon. So we have usually read that and seen the preview on commercials. We discuss all this in the car on the way to the movies.

Once we arrive, with our soda and popcorn in hand, we wait for the previews to begin and speculate on how well the movie will do justice to the book. Linda is a particularly severe critic and yesterday we went to see "One for the Money," the first in the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovitch. Linda didn’t want to even go see it because she thought the casting of characters, as evidenced by the TV promos, did not jive up with her preconceptions of who the casting directors should have chosen. I made her go anyway and it was a delightful movie. Maybe not academy award material but fun to watch and thoroughly entertaining. These were Linda’s picks

Stephanie: Katherine Heigl (Linda didn’t think Heigl was right)
Ranger: (Linda Wanted “The Rock”)
Morelli: (didn’t have a particular someone in mind)
Grandma Mazur: Debbie Reynolds
Lula: Sherrie (From the View) (Linda want Queen Latisha)

On the ride home we talked about the parts we liked and it was interesting that what we were commenting on were the lines some of the characters spoke…and words like…”Who was the guy that got blown up in Morelli’s SUV?" I don’t think we had a single comment on story line. Everything we talked about was character based.

As I do my reviews for this weeks vignettes in the Exploratory Writing Workshop EWW, I see as the greatest shortcoming, character development. Now story line is important but I submit that character development is even more so. Think about the movie “Girl in the Dragon Tattoo.” In the books she isn’t even the central character. She steals the show and no doubt the publisher changed the title to reflect that but I will bet my butt when the author began writing she was a supporting character like Boyd Crowder in “Justified.” These characters often show up and are so compelling they eclipse everything around them.

It is these characters that we remember far more than the thin story lines of what we read and see at the movies. So why is it that aspiring writers are so hung up on story line that they fail to give equal developmental footage to their Characters? I see the importance of both but for heavens sakes if you want to be remembered as a writer it will be by your characters.