Detective Story Week Five: Developing Character

I finished revising the character descriptions. I had to change some of the characters because of what I had learned about them while doing the outline. Late in the week, I got back to expanding the outline.

I added some pieces to the story that I think will make my main character, Lucas Martin, easier for the audience to empathise with. One of the mistakes I felt I made with “The Anger Trap” was that the main character was hard to identify with.

I changed the name of one character, William Williams, to Billy Clark. He is a suspect in the case. I decided that the name was too cute. I have been using photos of actors to help me visualize the characters. I changed three of the photos this week. Mostly it was because the actors were too old for the parts.

I am starting to expand the outline by providing more detail on what happens in each scene. I went back and reread parts of my outline for “The Anger Trap” to remind me how I did it last time. I’m finding that my scenes seem to be shorter, with less happening. While doing the revisions I added two new scenes for a total of 58.

I moved one scene to a different location. That may have created a little problem for the following scene, but I think it will work out OK. What I felt good about was that it was a scene where I had a loose end that I was able to tie up. In it, the detectives find a clue, but I had no clue what the clue would be. I have similar problems in other scenes later in the script and I have been worried about coming up with good solutions. Finding a solution for this one gives me more confidence.

This was my most productive week so far. I added 3,569 words to my character descriptions and 2,116 words to the outline. That brings the outline to just about the same length as the outline for “The Anger Trap”. I do need to do some house cleaning on the outline since I have a lot of duplication. That would make it shorter. I am about a third of the way through the revisions to the outline. I should be able to get that done next week. I want to do another run through both the outline and character descriptions before I start on the script.