3-2-1 | Screenwriting Thursday - Unlikeable Characters
Let’s look at some tips on building unlikeable characters that we still somehow manage to care about. This can be particularly difficult to do well. If the audience doesn’t care, why would they keep reading?
Personal Note: After working all weekend to get scalable onboarding ready for NoonWriters ads launch, it would seem I’ve come down with a little sinus infection. Oof. That’s what I get for not taking the appropriate time to rest.
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On with the show - here are some tips to keep your audience hooked even then they hate these characters.
3 TIPS FROM ME
I.
Give Them Magnetic Traits (Without Redeeming Them)
People will follow an unlikeable character if they’re charismatic, clever, or brutally honest in ways we can’t look away from.
Example: Fleabag, Succession, Gone Girl; we may dislike the morality, but we’re fascinated by the sharpness, wit, or fearlessness.
II.
Show a Clear Inner Logic
Even the worst characters need understandable motives.
If the audience “gets” why they’re doing it (even if they hate it), they’ll stick around to see the outcome.
III.
Give Us a Surrogate
Introduce a secondary character who reacts the way we would (through shock, sarcasm, or horror) so we have someone to identify with amid the chaos.
This person doesn’t have to survive the whole story, but they act as our anchor.
2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS
I.
Winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature, John Steinbeck, from his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”
“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
II.
Françoise Gilot, a French painter, showcased throughout the world. Her painting Paloma à la Guitare (a 1965 portrait of her daughter) sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby's in London. She is also known for her romantic life with Pablo Picasso:
“We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything...Everything there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it.”
