The Inner Character.

As some of you may or may not know, my eventual goal is to become a writer, and I chose to study multimedia because I am not yet sure which media I would like to use to convey the stories I wish to tell.

Beyond the decisions that have to be made based on the strengths and limitations of the various media, the core of what makes a story strong is always the same. That core is character, and for a while I've known that character was one of my weak points.

My screenwriting professor at one point told me that I had mastered the art of visual storytelling, but that my characters were too shallow and that the only reason my script was good was that I was able to tell it so well.

Since that time I have continued with an independent writing project of mine that I have been working on since freshman year. Since I began the project, I've been constantly refining and tweaking it whenever the inspiration hit me, but every time I did so, no matter how deep I was able to delve into the world I was shaping, something would always pulled me back, and because of that my story has already gone through three drastically different stages, all of which, in hindsight, appear to have failed for more or less the same reasons.

When I was taking scriptwriting last semester, one of the major things my professor taught us is about character design, and how the story had to revolve around 3-dimensional characters who are flawed and have a problem. While I understood that on an intelectual level, I was never really able to grasp how that was done well.

Recently, I feel like I might have found what I was missing. It's not enough that a character has to be flawed and has to have a problem that is the focus of the story.

Recently, I took a look at stories that I particularly enjoyed, the ones that call out to me, the ones that I can enjoy again the second, third, or even the fourth time through. There is one thing I noticed. For one thing, its never just one thing that drives a character in these stories. In all these stories, there is more than just one flaw, more than just one drive. Characters have to fight not just through a series of artificial obstacles set in place by the author, but through deeper obstacles that may never be explicitly stated, but only hinted at.

And it's not just the central cast either. All the characters involved are just as deep, if not deeper, than the main characters, such that even though the story revolves around a particular problem of a particular character, it's clear that all the characters have stories to be told that can be just as interesting as the main plot.

One example of this, I feel, stands out above all others I can think of at this moment. If you have ever read the book "Ender's Game" By Orson Scoot Card, you may remember a character called Bean, a diminutive boy who, once Ender had earned his respect, was one of his most trusted friends and allies later in the book.

What you may not know is that Card wrote another book called Enders Shadow. This book is parallel to Ender's Game and takes Bean's point of view instead of Ender's. Now that I am rereading it, I feel that Ender's Shadow, in ways, may be superior to the book that spawned it.

Here's my point: Enders Shadow is, at its heart, Ender's Game told from a different perspective. Enders Shadow takes a supporting character from the original story and tells the whole thing over again from his perspective, and it tells the story just as well, if not better, than the original did.

This proves one point about Enders Game: if Bean in Ender's Game were not such a rich character, he never would have been the one chosen to have his own story told, and the fact that this character had enough in him to support his own story speaks volumes about what made Ender's Game great; the fact that it was not just Ender who had a story worth telling.

Perhaps this was what my scriptwriting professor had been trying to teach me. Looking back, I myself wonder why I didn't see it sooner. But now that I have seen it, I can look forward to my next attempt, which will probably be after this semester is over, as I barely have the time end energy to deal with all my classes. Now that I have seen this, I hope that I can finally write a character capable and worthy of supporting the storys I wish to tell.

Every writer hopes that their stories are heard, no matter what medium they choose to convey it, and even though I have not yet chosen my final medium, I wonder if what I have recently discovered for myself is truly what I was missing, and if this understanding is what I need to be able to move forward with my writing. If so, my next challenge will be to learn to convey that character to my audience, but that is a challenge for another day.