Sitting in the Dark
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Five of us meet every week to read scripts and give each other feedback on our material. Sometimes I don’t construct the arc properly. Sometimes I muddy up the throughline. Sometimes I get too tricky with a device, or two. Tell me what’s not working. But don’t mess with my people.

Characters need voices in order to share their stories. A woman strikes a match in my head. She then invites another character with a lantern. Then perhaps another. Eventually a story is illuminated. At times characters have a lot to say about a brief event, and at other times they are hesitant to glue together the bits and pieces of a much longer journey. These characters bring the work; their stories are always true. The cowardly lion, the tin man and the scarecrow are all real, and they each have a familiar story. And it’s because these characters ring true that they seem so real to us.

Trilby Jeeves (@tjbuffoonery twitter id) so beautifully described the need for empathetic characters in her blog this week.
"As we write, or give life to characters already written, as the twitter conversation implied, we must put our own tears where we want the audience to feel tears, we must feel our own joy in order to pass on the same emotion, and be in our own excitement in order to take others there."
I work very hard to listen to the characters’ stories and to release them from the page. I believe these imagined people resonate with our audiences because, at some level, the characters are an extension of each person sitting out there in the dark. Like them or not, we fear their fears, we want what they want, and we’re willing to follow them.

Of course my work needs to be challenged. I need to add punctuation to a speech to clarify that this man is trying to avoid the subject. Good. That’s great. I can do that. But, don’t tell me this man isn’t anxious at that moment, because he is. He told me so. And I believe him. I believe him because he reminds me of myself, of people I know – and of people sitting out there in the dark.