I don't even make multiplayer games much, so dealing with multiple characters is something new for me - or, rather, something I've had to recall from my days as a roleplaying adventure designer where the party was everything!
The producers felt that 24 would be good for the audience, to really get to know who these 12 and 12 are.
When you're writing a team book where every character already has his or her own series, you don't have dominion over them as individuals - but what you can exploit is their relationships with one another.
I never wanted to do a regular sitcom, because I'd be incredibly bored doing the same character week in, week out. But the beauty of 'The Simpsons' is that it's 15, 16, 17 characters. It's the variety that keeps it interesting. And hey, they're all my children.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!
I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.
Movies are about people; there're not about ideas. It's like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There's never been a great novel about ideas.
It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.
'Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.
You don't go around thinking about how characters in a movie, in the stories you make up, relate to people in general.
Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.
You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.
I don't know if likeable, pleasant characters have enough conflict for me to want to do them. I admire those people, but I've never been that kind of screen presence who can do nothing. I need to do something.
Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.
I really enjoy 'Mad Men,' but I'm hugely into 'Homeland.' The characters are very well drawn and complex.
You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.
When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?
Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.
You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.
For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.
Over the years, if you look at the films of people like Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, their supporting characters, even if it's a doorman with two lines, always seem three-dimensional. To me, that's a sign of good storytelling.
They turned to Angel. "We will call you Little One," the leader said, obviously deciding to dispense with the whole confusing name thing. "Okay," said Angel agreeably. "I'll call you Guy in a White Lab Coat." He frowned. "That can be his Indian name," I suggested.
We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.
The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.
