From Writer Unboxed:
Finding ways to deepen characterization
Over the holidays and now into the dark days of winter, I’ve been re-watching The Sopranos. A lot of former favorites don’t hold up, but Tony Soprano is a masterpiece, a combination of great writing with the perfect actor, and I’ve been enthralled. Really, the detail work in the show is remarkable and worth studying. (The New York Times published a guide to rewatching here.)
As I studied the writing, in this and a few other things over the break, I have been working on a theory of character rooted in two things, the wound and the contradiction.
The wound is the simple truth that every being carries with them a wound, a defining pain. The contradiction is that thing that sticks out in their personality or actions that is contrary to every other thing. Together, these two things will do a lot of heavy lifting to elevate your characters and make them memorable.
First, the wound. This is that thing that shapes them, a scar or mark or a memory they carry like a bag of rocks. It’s the think they can’t get over even (or especially) if it seems they’ve put it to bed. My grandmother’s father died when she was eleven, orphaning her and sending her through a long series of homes with relatives until she was old enough to make her own home.
I’m sure it’s not difficult for you to pick out a wound for yourself, maybe lots of them. The one we want for a character is the big one, the hard mark. A loss, probably, something that spun life in new directions.
Tony has been one of my favorite characters to teach for a long time, and I found even more to love this time around. He’s relatable and conflicted and piercingly human, but he’s also this tragic archetype that will never escape his fate.
We can relate to Tony Soprano because despite his status as a mob boss, he is everyman, a guy with a lot of responsibilities and a high-pressure job. He suffers panic attacks. He loves his children. He really listens when people talk to him. He’s a toucher, he puts his hands on people in gentle ways. By the standards of his world, he has absolute integrity. He rules his kingdom and his world with fairness and honor. He tries to prevent wars and unnecessary killing. He rewards loyalty. And he has an absolutely horrible mother he still wants to please.
Tony’s wound is his mother. She is a cruel and distant woman who is never satisfied, but somehow, Tony keeps trying. He can never be the fully realized man he wants to be because a big part of him is still that deeply wounded little boy who loved the mother who was cruel to him.
In the also remarkable television show This Is Us, all of the family members suffer from the same wound—the untimely death of the father of the clan, Jack. Each of them has suffered in a particular way, each not-coping with the wound in ways that profoundly affect their lives moving forward. One is a famous actor with addiction and insecurity issues, another a seemingly high-functioning professional with anxiety that can lay him out, and a chronic binge eater who cannot let go of the father she adored. Paradise lost, never to be regained.
Notice, none of these wounds are particularly original. There are only so many ways humans are wrecked, and most of them are rooted in not getting needs met in childhood, some way or another.
The wound gives us the material to build a character of great depth and width. If you know this wound, you will be able to build in relatability in a dozen different ways. Study trauma and the ways it manifests in personality and you will discover an encyclopedia of personality traits. Tony copes with his loss by serial womanizing. He blunts the pain by reaching for the arms of women, but he also suffers because he dreams of a family that can’t exist. Kate from This Is Us blunts her feelings with food, her twin brother with alcohol.
That leads us to the second half of the idea, which is the contradiction.
Robert McKee in his book Story talks about plotting from a quadrant of values. The lowest point is what he calls “the negation of the negation,” which is a complex idea of reversal which in plotting is the farthest place you can go from where you want to be. In character, that’s often the opposite of the main thing. If he wants love, for example, he doesn’t experience hate, he experiences hate masquerading as love. The main contradiction in terms of character is much the same. It will be something out of alignment with the top layer of character, a quality that almost always holds the seeds of possible destruction.
Tony Soprano’s main contradiction is that he’s a mob boss who suffers panic attacks so severe he has to see a therapist. Since secrecy is one of columns upholding the mafioso life, that presents a really big problem. The anxiety stems from his wound, his inability to make peace with his brutal mother, but at the heart of it, he’s a king archetype who doesn’t want the job. The anxiety, the wound, the panic attacks all hide the fact that he doesn’t want to be a mob boss. The way his wound manifests hold the seeds of his destruction: a mob boss can’t tell secrets, can’t have anxiety attacks, can’t fall apart.
But he does.
Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed