Female characters are not just pieces of sushi

My fundraising drive is over, and although I still have a few scripts in my queue, I'm almost done giving notes for charity. Thanks to the contributions from so many writers, I was able to raise $2,570 for Angel City Pit Bulls, for which I am extremely grateful. I will do this again next year for sure.

I have given notes on a total of 31 scripts so far for 29 writers, and I think I have five left. If you are one of those five, fear not. I'm behind, but I should finish up next week.

Of those 29 writers, 26 of them were great about receiving their notes, which were from 4-6 pages in paragraph form and a bit blunt. I let everybody know I was going to be harsh because I am NOT a professional script reader and this is for charity, not my livelihood.

Writing really nice, polite notes takes time. It's much easier to just write down all the issues that jump out as I see them, and occasionally comment if something is really working and I want to see more of it. I always found something good to comment on, but I tended to get a little impatient and sarcastic whenever I saw the same problem crop up over and over. I thought people were gonna be all mad about that.

Instead, most writers laughed at my pointing out their consistent issues. Many of them said thank you and that I gave them lots to think about. Some followed up with questions, which I answered as best I could. Two writers enjoyed my notes so much they came back for more, which pleased me greatly.

One felt disappointed. I don't think I gave her exactly what she was looking for, which I regret, but what can you do? Two did not take kindly to my tone and argued the notes almost line by line.

So it was an interesting experience, and I learned a few things. Some of these scripts were quite good. One was so well written that I resorted to pointing out typos just so the writer would get something out of me. Some were terrible. Like, really really terrible. But not a single one was without promise.

There was one thing I noticed over and over that started as a mild annoyance, but was so common that I now consider it a full blown pet peeve:

EMPTY FEMALE CHARACTER INTRODUCTIONS.

 What does that mean, you may ask? Well, I am here to help, so I will demonstrate.

[scrippet]BOB ANDREWS, 42, is an old soul. His facial hair is peppered with white, and he stopped grooming it long ago. His cowboy boots never come off in public, and he only pulls a cigarette out of his mouth when he needs to make a point. Right now, he's making a good one.[/scrippet]

So the above is an example of the kind of description I commonly see for male characters. Vivid, detailed - maybe a bit TOO detailed - but interesting and filled with character.

In the same script, this is the kind of description I would frequently see for the female lead:

[scrippet]VIVIAN JAMES, 22, is stunningly beautiful.[/scrippet]

In other words, the male character gets all kinds of nifty details. The female character gets some version of good looking. Sometimes writers will say "gorgeous" or "pretty" and sometimes they'll even mention her hair color. They very rarely mention anything else about her.

This didn't happen one or two or three times. If I had to guess, out of 31 scripts I think I saw this happen about 20 times. And it wasn't just restricted to male writers; female writers did it too.

I'm not saying you can't describe your female lead as attractive. But look at the description of Bob Andrews again. You're picturing Josh Brolin, aren't you? Now look at Vivian's description. Who do you picture?  Victoria's Secret model? Megan Fox? Mila Kunis? Zoe Saldana? A fairy princess? Your little sister?

She's empty. With Bob up there - I never even mentioned how good he looks. If he's the lead and he fits the description, the casting agent will find you a good looking dude. And Vivian - if she's the female lead, the casting director will find you a good looking woman. So what else do we need to know? Is she all business? Is she a fashion plate? Is she wide-eyed and innocent? Does she have bad posture? Scary muscles? Is she lactating? Wobbling on her high heels? There are so many more interesting things you can do to give us a picture of this girl other than to tell us she looks good.

I know most of these writers did not do this on purpose, but it drives me batty nonetheless.

So I want everyone to go to your current script and check. How often do your female characters get introduced by nothing more than their looks? Remove the words "gorgeous" "pretty" "beautiful" and "stunning" from your intros unless her looks are actually plot relevant. Like, if your lead is a super model or a sex robot, or if she uses her looks to get what she wants, then it's okay. But if not, try to yank out that word. Instead, think of what else you can say about her. How can we picture her in our minds as more than just a pretty face?

Do it, or I will come after you with my angry sarcasm.

In defense of Logan Echolls

This post is chock full of spoilers for Veronica Mars, so if you haven't seen the show, know that it is a mystery show, and that I am about to ruin a few major things for you. And go watch the show because it was awesome.

As you know by now, Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas has started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a Veronica Mars movie. I am not here to talk about the morality of that issue. I donated because I want to see a movie. That's as complicated as it gets for me. I'll let everybody else sort out whether or not the world is going to end now.

But - and I imagine many others did the same - when I saw that video of the actors together again, I went back to my DVDs and rewatched the first two seasons.

I loved that show when it was on the air. I hung onto every clue to figure out who killed Lily Kane. I rewound and rewatched that first kiss with Logan a hundred times and swooned. When Veronica opened the door at the last frame of season 1 and we didn't see who was at the door, I was so mad. I spent all summer hoping against hope that it was Logan. Of course, in all that thinking, I failed to ponder the fact that everyone would now know that Logan's dad killed his girlfriend, so he probably wasn't feeling too lovey-dovey at this point.

Logan has many haters, although all the ones I have thus encountered are male. I've yet to find a female fan of the show who doesn't think he's dreamy. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't encountered them.

Logan is a type of character we often see in television - The Reformed Bad Boy. Angel and Spike are both reformed bad boys. The only difference with those two is that Angel had already reformed by the time we met him. The reformed bad boy starts off as a complete asshole, and through getting to know him and the love of a good badass chick who sees through his bullshit and is completely amazing, he changes into a sexy protective lover who learns to be a better man.

He's not a fantasy. Guys like this do exist. The thing is, not every girl can be the one to reform the guy, even though most girls want to be.

So let's go back to Logan and see how we develop the reformed bad boy.

Logan was a spoiled rich boy who blamed Veronica and her dad for the way Lily's death was handled. He took it out on our girl every day at school, bullying her and being generally unpleasant all the time. But just as we decided he was as shitty as he could get, we discovered that his father, adored by millions as a hot successful movie star, beat him. So now we know there's a reason he lashes out at someone like Veronica. He's deflecting his own pain.

Don't forget that on top of this, the love of his life cheated on him throughout their relationship and then wound up murdered. That'll affect you one way or the other.

Then his mom kills herself. So now he's lost his girlfriend and his mother, and all he has is a father who plays her death for sympathy and a sister who doesn't really give a shit about anyone but herself.

So now we sympathize with Logan. Or at least, we should. Assholes are rarely just assholes. Most of the time, something makes them that way, and Logan has plenty of reasons. It would be a bit of a miracle if he didn't turn out damaged in some way. Some people turn to drugs. Some people turn to sarcasm and bum fights.

Then, of course, Logan finds out who killed his girlfriend. Then he's arrested for a murder he didn't commit - again - on the same night. Then he spends the summer getting shot at. It's understandable that a guy like Logan doesn't know how to direct his angst. He's had a shitty year.

Veronica is the kind of chick who could spar with Logan. She gets him, and her wit is just as quick, but she also helps him even though he's been horrible to her. And when Logan sees that, it changes him ever so slightly. Veronica is the kind of girl who could change a man.  He now has a reason to be violent - he must protect Veronica because he loves her. And although he respects her moxie, he also knows that she does indeed need protecting from all the bad guys she pisses off. A girl like Veronica is crack to a guy like him.

Not every girl can do it. In season 2, Logan dates a girl named Hannah. Hannah is very sweet and a complete sucker. She falls for Logan's act hook line and sinker. Even after he admits he was using her to get to her dad, she still wants to sleep with him just because he gives her THAT LOOK. Her dad - asshole that he may have been - did the right thing in getting her the hell away from Logan.

Unless you are a little bit asshole yourself, you'll never be able to keep up with that guy enough to fix him. Don't even try it, Hannah.

Logan used Hannah to get to her dad. Veronica used Officer Leo several times to get access to police information. Veronica really liked Leo. Logan really liked Hannah. But make no mistake - they were both doing the same thing. The only difference is, one is our perky blond heroine. One is our spoiled little rich boy.

I'm always going to have a soft spot for the Reformed Bad Boy. On the Firefly cast, I always found Jayne the hottest, so I went out and I found Jayne and I married him. There's a reason I call my husband The Beefcake.

The reason girls love that Reformed Bad Boy is pretty simple. If he's willing to hurt people, but he'll never hurt you - that's the best kind of guy to have around. Imagine an apocalyptic scenario, where it's every person for him or herself, and you may have to mug some jerk and take his canned food to survive. Is the nice guy gonna do that? No. Probably not. While he's pondering the ethical dilemma, the Reformed Bay Boy is hitting him in the head with a crowbar and handing the supplies to his own girlfriend.

Character Development

This week I was sick and grades were due, so I vacillated between sneezing half my brain out and reading some pretty depressing essays.

I took a sick day yesterday and spent all day in bed watching Game of Thrones. I could probably write a pretty cool paper on feminism in that show. But anyway....

In between the sneezing and the murder plots and the essays, I took some time to start plotting out my new spec.

Even if you've got a really fantastic, high concept plot, you MUST know your characters if you want your script to be any good. I used to get a lot of notes about how the characters didn't seem like real people, or how their decisions didn't really make sense. That was because I didn't spend the necessary time developing those characters.

Now I sit with my characters - not just for ten minutes while I crap out a brief bio and shove it in a file - but for days, weeks even, while I figure out what their life has been like to get them here.

So let's say my story is about a fast food employee who foils a robbery. I want him to be a marketable age, an age that's easily casted with a star. So he's 28. Why would a 28-year-old, good-looking (because he will have to be good looking if you expect an attachment) guy work in fast food?

-Maybe he's dumb and could never get through high school, which means he'll have some extra challenges to face when he goes up against bad guys who are clearly smarter than he is.

-Maybe he's a recovered drug addict and he's trying to get his life together. Maybe he's the inside man on the robbery, and he has second thoughts at the last minute because he really likes his boss.

-Maybe he's lazy. So now it's a slacker movie. He foils the robbery by accident, and now he's a hero to the whole restaurant. He doesn't want to be a hero. He just wants to eat burgers and pick up a paycheck.

Each of these choices about this guy's past leads to a whole different type of story. If I just said "I dunno, he's just some guy who works there" I'm missing a whole host of opportunities to make nifty choices with the story. Each of these 28-year-old guys is a different person and would do different things in the same situation. I have to know which person I am dealing with if I want to know where my story goes.

So that's what I'm doing now. Character building. I'm thinking about my two leads, figuring out who they are, imagining conversations they have together that they may not end up having in the script, but that help me figure out their natural dynamic.

Take the time to create the characters before you rush into the script. It will save you time and energy in the long run, and it will make your story that much better.

Minor characters and Die Hard

Die Hard is indeed one of the finest action films ever made.

Script Shadow wrote an excellent post this week about what made it so fantastic and the lessons we can learn from it about how to write action films. I encourage everyone to read it.

One of the other reasons I love Die Hard that he didn't really bring up is how each individual character gets his own backstory. The terrorists argue with each other about petty shit. That Asian dude wants a candy bar in the middle of a gun fight. The black dude is one cocky son of a bitch - probably made enemies of everyone he went to high school with. And that one Johnson really annoys the shit out of the other Johnson.

Each of these people gets a small amount of screen time but I know something about them besides that they are terrorists or FBI agents. It's usually the part they cut out of the movie when they show it on FX, but it's the very thing I love most about the film. Everybody gets their moment.

Thanks to that film, I always remember to have my "I was in junior high, dickhead!" moment. You know, the scene where the Johnsons are in the helicopter and the older Johnson is all excited and shouts about how it's just like Saigon and the younger Johnsons says "I was in junior high, dickhead!" and right then, right before the unfortunate explosion that pounded them both into bits of dust, you know these guys.

So as I'm working a screenplay, I always try to keep that scene in the back of my head. How can I give this minor character his moment in the helicopter? He's got five seconds; what can he do in that time that will demonstrate his true personality?

I don't know if anybody really cares whether my henchman is a coffee nut or not, but it makes me happy when I give him that little bit of extra love.

Kids say the most nonsensical things

There is a student in my tenth grade class who speaks a different language. He knows how to speak English, but in the interests of keeping up his street rep he chooses to speak in some kind of bizarre slang I've never before heard.

For example, to "murk" is to kill. "Getting swole up" means to put on weight and get buff. These are new to me. So like the suburban white child of two suburban white people that I am, I have started a list of interesting things this boy says next to their definitions. Every time he says something I don't understand I ask him to define it, then add it to my list. The whole class loves this and he is proud of his unique contribution to my creative endeavors.

I figure I have a choice: pretend to understand and seem cool and probably fail, or admit to my extreme white suburbanness and treat it like a foreign language that I find fascinating.

One day I'll be in dire need of a really interesting character, and there he will be, a whole list of slang terms I can use to make him feel as real as the real kid he's based on.

How to love your asshole protag

Remember the last season of The Shield? I recorded the whole thing on my DVR and never watched it. It's been sitting there for about a year. Well next week I'll be mailing my DVR back to Dishnetwork so I can move to North Hollywood, so I decided that now was the time to plough through the last season. I think the reason I didn't before is that I knew I was gonna need to concentrate, and it was gonna be depressing.

But watching the show again after all this time has made me think about the deeply flawed protagonist - when he works, and when he doesn't. I don't want to say unlikeable protagonist because Vic is likeable as hell. He's also hateable as hell. That's what makes him so great.

As Vic descends further and further into the chaos he created, you know he won't climb out. There's only one end to this man, but somehow you still hope he'll get away with it. Unless you think about Terry Crowly, the cop Vic shot in the first episode. The minute he did that, you knew this was all headed in one direction.

So it's not like you think Vic is a good man, but you still understand his motivation. You see how the first few bad decisions were made with the right intentions, and everything just spiraled out of control. You want him desperately to stop before it's too late. And then the Armenian money train thing happened, and, well, too late. Now we just watch the fallout.

It reminds me of Sweeny Todd. You spend the whole film knowing he's not going to stop killing people, but you kind of wish he would. You feel his pain and somehow that makes him sympathetic instead of hated.

Then you get House. I've started to dislike House lately because he ever since he got off his meds he seems even meaner than before. I think the problem has become that before, you could see every time he popped a pill that he was trying to avoid the pain of being him, but ever since he stopped the medication he has no excuse. Or maybe I don't like him because this last episode (SPOILER WARNING) Cameron gave up on him. Cameron is so nice she has always believed in him, so if she doesn't, I don't. Maybe it's a combination of events, but really I think it just boils down to the fact that House has stopped having any redeeming qualities. He seems to be less concerned with the medicine and more concerned with fucking with people.

See, I think as long as Vic Mackie is nice to somebody - his wife, his fellow strike team members, his hooker contacts - you see that he is still not a horrible person, but the second you make him hateful to every single person, which is what House seems to be doing, you lose the love of the audience.

I almost don't want to watch House anymore because I can't stand watching how mean he is to everyone, but I'm glad I went back to those Shield episodes because Vic stays intriguing all the way through. You love him then you hate him then you love him again. But you definitely want to keep watching.

Montana has people in it.

It's good to get out of your comfort zone every now and then. Here in Montana I was supposed to relax and read and enjoy the quiet, but everybody's helping our hosts renovate their house so I feel bad just sitting around. Plus I obviously cannot stay away from my computer. In the 28 hours I went without Internet I broke into a cold sweat and developed the shakes.

I don't really want to apply primer, so I opted to help by fixing the hosts' computer. It's six years old and it has NEVER been defragged. I know, right? You should have seen that before and after picture. It was a thing of beauty. And since nobody else in the house knows how to do this, I feel proud that I have contributed without having to get paint on my shirt.

But that's not what I meant about getting out of your comfort zone. You see, here in Montana there ain't a whole lot going on. There are about five neighbors within as many miles. There are no trees. There is a strip club a few miles away and a small casino and you have to drive ten miles to get the mail. It's over an hour to the nearest real grocery store. As a result, I think Montana people tend to have some strange hobbies.

At a gas station in Butte, a man had parked his gigantic pickup truck right in front of the door, left his keys, and apparently wandered off to run some errands, leaving a fat man to watch his beautifully washed megatruck. Fat Man stood in front of this truck and talked about it with a dude in a red shirt for ten minutes. Then he talked about it with an old lady for ten minutes. Then he went inside, talked about it with some people in there, came back outside with a cashier and they looked at it. Then he went back inside and came back out with the same cashier and they looked at it some more. He was still at it when we left.

"What are you doing today, Buck?"
"I'm going to the AM/PM to stare at Jim Bob's truck."

Later that evening I met a man with a strange hobby. This hobby is so foreign to me I am completely fucking baffled by it. He's a nice man and I liked him very much, but he could have easily said to me, "Hey, you know what's fun? Standing on one leg and reciting the Lord's Prayer in Portuguese! Do you recite the Lord's Prayer one-legged in any languages?"

To which I of course said no, and created an awkward hole in the conversation. I think it was as foreign to him that I wouldn't enjoy his hobby as it was to me that anyone would enjoy it. He spends massive amounts of money on it each year and I am just completely flummoxed as to why.

There's only so many times I can write about high school students. It's good to go visiting and meet people I would otherwise never encounter. Someday I will throw this man in a script. Perhaps I will make him the driver of a giant truck.