Reflection on Writing Stories/Screenplays

            Reflecting on our week of Storytelling and the material we covered, I can think of several applications in the classes I teach.  In my English classes, I always teach a unit called “Elements of Fiction,” in which we discuss plot, setting, character, and theme, along with other common literary devices.  With character, especially, students would benefit from transcribing prose description of a character into a screenplay to get a better sense of how this character would appear should they meet him or her in real life.  When I teach character and characterization, we discuss different ways that writers reveal the personalities of their characters: through direct characterization (for example, “Mr. Anderson was an angry man”), or indirect characterization (which could be a description of their appearance, speech, thoughts, actions, or others’ reactions).  While all of these apply to a written text, one would be hard pressed to read a character’s thoughts in a visual text. 

            Knowing how to understand a character/person in any medium without any type of omniscient narrator is important because of its real-life applications.  Real people do not reveal their character through direct characterization (“Hi, I’m Bill.  I am a gossip and backstabber”), nor can we ever know their thoughts.  Knowing how to interpret appearances, words, actions, and others’ reactions is a form of inference- making and a valuable social skill. 

            Practicing characterization through writing a screenplay allows for reflection on human behavior.  As I wrote my screenplay assignment, I constantly had to ask myself, is this how people really talk?  Is this action something people could see, and does it reflect what is going on internally in the character?  It’s difficult to write some of these actions without feeling too reliant on clichés; for example, I don’t think someone who’s planning on doing something devious will really have shifty eyes (at least someone who plans on succeeding in their plans).  How can that characteristic be represented then?  The pre-production processes we discussed—treatments, screenplays, storyboarding, shooting scripts, etc.—all seem to come down to representation.  When telling our own stories in a visual medium, we may realize just how subjective our memories are, given that what we’re describing is limited to the actions one would see and not what we were thinking during the event (this is not accounting, of course, of a more POV-centric film).  When dealing with another text, our increased consciousness of something like characterization will help us think more critically about what we see.  Characters—real or fictional—are constantly presented to us with apparent attributes; knowing more about the way they are constructed can help us see through the cracks just a little bit.