Boredom is the worse possible audience response. On the other hand, if an audience hates your show, at least you garnered a strong reaction.
How do you attract and keep the audience's attention? There are many ways, including surprise, humor, concern, and twists. Keeping an audience interested enough to want to know what happens next is a basic necessity for a script to be successful.
So many of today's new Hollywood movies and Broadway plays are not "new" at all, but rather reworked or revived materials. Meanwhile, thousands of writers are creating original materials every week, but they're not getting produced. Although many of the major production companies seem to put out tired and predictable shows, there is still interest in new materials, new scripts, and new approaches.
The goal, then, is to create scripts that will attract the attention of the various levels of audiences that the scriptwriter will encounter, starting with the entry-level reader where you submit your script. Last week's article looked at basic themes and situations, and how to explore variations in order to create fresh approaches and avoid stale clichés. Moving forward, we will look at the characters and dialogue.
Characters
For years, we have all heard the clinical discussions about characters: the protagonist, the antagonist, the mentor, the love interest. These are the archetypes for characters, but not characters in the sense that they are not multi-dimensional nor have complex attributes. Adding in phrases such as the hero or villain gives only a glimpse of what the character's potential is.
Suppose we create a macho, loner, two-fisted, divorced detective who defies authority and can only perform at his best after he's been relieved of duty. This begins to become a real human, as evidenced by the many Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and similar characters. And it is an outgrowth of the anti-hero phase that followed the Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney sort of heroes.
But these are still stereotypes, albeit somewhat recent ones. Fresh and innovative approaches to characters can be found in some of the works put out by the USA Network, such as Monk, the obsessive/compulsive detective afraid of germs, or House, the doctor with no bedside manner, no patience for patients, and all the tact of an anvil.
It is worth noting how the writers of these shows have taken what began as stock medical or detective characters, and crafted complex characters strong enough to drive a series. That's innovative and fresh writing, regardless of the medium.
