Plot Development, Characters and their Monikers for "The Disruptors"

I worked on the plot and characters for "The Disruptors" this week. I've developed a bit of a process to organize this part of the writing.

My plan had been to focus on "Bright Freedom", but this week I got side tracked into "The Disruptors". I feel bad that I put off a project, but I felt moved to work on the other project.

Plot

I started to prepare an outline for the story. It is something of a formula. I want to have 16 chapters, so I decided that I need to have 16 "cliff hangers" to end each chapter. I came up with the 16, but some of them are quite weak. As I continue to work on the project I feel I can come up with some better ones. One of the things I've learned about creativity is that you need to come up with many more ideas than you use in the end. If you want 16 good ideas, you need a lot more than 16 ideas.

Characters

I started to develop characters for the story. I came up with a group of good guys and a group of bad guys. I identified what kind of role each of them will play in the story. Some of them don't have much of a role to play, so maybe I can use that to generate more ideas for plot elements.

I have some vague physical descriptions for three of the characters, but haven't given much thought to the other characters. I want to come up with more description of  what kind of people they are and how they behave. I find that helps me with dialogue.

Names

I gave each of the characters names. So far I just did first names. In my mind I see the names as code names, so I'm not sure if I need to have family names.

I developed the process I have to create names a little more. Because I've heard of film makers running into problems with legal issues over uncommon names, I want to use common names. I also want to avoid the names of people I know, unless I ask them first.

I found a list of the frequencies of male, female and family names reported in the U.S. Census. I used this to prepare a short list of the most common names. In the past I just went through the top names and picked ones I wanted to use. I want to avoid similar sounding names, so I try to avoid names that start with the same letter.

I've refine my process this time. To start, I created a list of the five most common names for each first letter. That was a problem for some of the letters, like Q, which have only a few names. Then I used a random number generator to pick one name from for each initial. I picked names from that list.

Theme

Much of my effort so far has been formula driven. I haven't given too much thought to the underlying themes of the story. I'm not too concerned about it though. The theme is inherent in the nature of the story. My past experience has been that the theme comes across, even I don't make a conscious effort to put it in.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Active and Passive Heroes

All that I’ve read about the heroes you create for your stories say they have to be proactive. That is, they need to push the story forward. The problem I’ve had with my heroes is that I want to focus on people who are unsure of themselves. While they may not be overtly in conflict, my preferred heroes are in internal conflict. I feel that this is a more realistic portrayal of people.

How can I deal with the kind of characters I want to work with, and still make them the kind of characters that people will want to read about. I do think it is possible.

I think the main problem I have is I find it difficult to portray internal conflict. Often people comment that my characters are just lumps that do nothing. In my mind there is a lot that happens with these characters, but no one else can see that. This is obviously a skill I need to develop. In writing I can always fall back to he/she thought descriptions, but since my ultimate goal is to make a film that is not an option.

In some of my recent stories I experimented with heroes whose conflicts are external. On one hand this has made me more comfortable with a different kind of character. On the other hand, I feel that they are too superficial.

Another approach I’ve thought about is to create external metaphors for the internal conflict. It is a very common approach, but one I have not really pursued. I guess part of the problem is that my inclination is to make everything literal. That is good for technical writing, where most of my experience is, but for the creative writing I do now, it just doesn’t work.

In the future I will try to create metaphors in my stories to express the character’s inner conflicts.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A movie about an honour killing

Recently there were several reports in the news about Honour killings, where a woman is killed by her family for dishonouring the family in some way. While thinking about the reports, I developed an outline for a movie, but I need to research the subject more before I can finish it.

I would like to hear from people who are familiar with cultures where honour killing happens to tell me if the plot of the story is plausible.

A young woman and her brother are very close to each other. Then he comes to her one day to say that he has been asked to kill her to satisfy the honour of the family. He doesn’t want to do it, but if she doesn’t, he must. She escapes to Canada, leaving a suicide note.

About 15 to 20 years later, she has a new identity and is a successful lawyer. One day she sees her brother and he seems to be following her. She is worried that he will now kill her, but hopes that he no longer bound by the obligation. She would like to be close to him again.

She finds out that her brother, his wife and her mother are living in Canada. She approaches first her mother, then her sister-in-law trying to find out what he knows and what he intends to do. They don’t recognize her at first; having believed that she was dead. They are not sure if he knows she is alive or has plans to kill her. Her brother keeps his feelings and thoughts to himself.

Finally he contacts her and asks for a meeting at a secluded spot and she agrees. He does not seem to recognize her and it turns out that he wants her help as a lawyer.

There will be other subplots in the final script.