The Character Revision Pass
a few areas of focus when I'm polishing a script
I recently completed a pilot script I’m very excited about. It concerns a country singer in Texas. The hook for the show more or less aligns with my “X but also Y concept”: he’s a country singer, but he’s also from a criminal family. His outlaw past gives him authenticity in a sea of bro-country soundalikes, but as he’s dragged back into that criminal past, it also threatens to destroy everything he has.
Going through multiple drafts of the script, I found myself in a not-uncommon dilemma: despite a clear dramatic hook for our lead, a small handful of side characters were the ones who really popped off the page, outshining my lead guy in early drafts. Not ideal.
Finally, a light bulb went off. And as is often the case, my wife pulled the switch. She read a draft and remarked: “I can’t tell if this is a lead character who I’m supposed to want to be or if I’m supposed feel sorry for him.”
Ding. Lightbulb.
I went back through the pilot script and noted the inconsistencies. Sometimes my lead was the toughest outlaw in a scene, other times he seemed in over his head. Sometimes he seemed like a real outlaw, other times he seemed to be playing pretend.
Obviously, this could be true of any human in reality. But dramatically, within the context of being introduced to a character in episode one, it just meant I was sending mixed signals. I was aiming for complexity. But it was resulting in a muddled, undefined lead character.
Was my guy a real outlaw or not? If he was, I needed to lean into that. If he wasn’t, I needed to lean into that. I couldn’t have it both ways.
Finally, I could see the problem clearly. “Half the time he’s like Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, the authentic old school tough guy someone like me wishes he could be more like,” I told my wife. “Half the time he’s like Jason Bateman in the Ozark, the outsider pushover who is in over his head that I’m sometimes afraid I actually am.”
I had to pick a lane. There would be opportunities in later episodes to complicate and further shade this character. But for the pilot, I needed to lodge him with absolute clarity in the reader’s brain. But which version would I pick?
The version of the main character the viewer is supposed to want to be like?
Or the one the viewer is supposed to be sorry or worried for?
I decided to go with option number one and make my character a full-on genuine badass who we can vicariously enjoy.
This was the version of the character that I found most appealing: to not only create a modern day sort of Waylon Jennings or Johnny Cash type of rugged badass country singer, but to also have the vicarious thrill of him being a real life outlaw badass.
Future episodes could get into the complexities and complications. This first episode should be more about getting us hooked on this guy, and his world.
Also, it doesn’t hurt that this badass version is probably the most likely to appeal to a strong lead actor and a country music and/or crime show loving audience.
THE LEAD CHARACTER PASS
I always try to do character passes when revising. That is, reading and revising a script with just one character in mind. To make sure that character is as interesting, consistent, well-motivated, and surprising as I can manage.
But with a lead character, I think it’s also necessary to read with a very strategic question in mind:
How is your reader supposed to feel about your lead character at each step of the story?
I decided that I ultimately wanted my lead character to be a wish fulfillment character in the pilot, embodying old school rugged, masculine traits. Not someone victimized, or ill-prepared, or talking about his trauma or feelings. Upon introduction, he should be the kind of character you could imagine Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood playing in their heyday. He should be more Cliff Booth than Rick Dalton.
Now, that may or may not be the kind of character you want to create (most likely, it isn’t — which is good for me, less competition). That’s not the focus here. The focus is my notion that you should revise with the goal of being in absolute control over how your lead character is perceived.
For my pilot, this led me to constantly asking myself: does every scene help define and establish my lead character’s old school outlaw badass bonafides?
If yes, great. If not, then I needed to rewrite those scenes. Which also meant defining what I mean by “old school outlaw badass” so I could be consistent in presenting him.
So, yes, my lead guy should be the toughest hombre in every scene he has in the pilot. I’m building this guy up as a real throwback country badass. So even though my sensibility is to often undercut genre expectations, I decided to resist that impulse. Instead, in my pilot at least, I’m focused only on putting my guy — in wrestling terms — “over.”
Which also meant making changes to some of my scene-stealing supporting cast. In the pilot, my lead character has recently returned home to Texas to open up a honky tonk with his new wife, who is not from the area. There’s a young local criminal guy who shows up each night, starting fights and scaring the clientele.
In my original version, my lead character and this young criminal — they secretly have a connection — get in a hairy situation later in the pilot, and it’s the young criminal who handles the situation with gunplay, complicating the lead character’s life and pulling him back into a criminal life he thought he’d left behind.
Rereading this with my new framework, I realized I was sending mixed signals. I was presenting my lead as in over his head in a dangerous outlaw situation, but I was also trying to present him as a genuine outlaw.
In a pilot script, I couldn’t do both. So I switched things around in my revision: the young criminal gets them into a life-or-death situation, but it’s our lead who gets them out of it by deadly force. That helped. Now it was my lead guy who is handling things when shit goes down.
Which doesn’t mean my lead’s always the most powerful character. He also encounters a family member who has more power than him, and who has leverage over him. I need that character to be formidable to be a legitimate threat. So I kept that power dynamic, but in my revisions I made sure my lead character was the one who was more active in driving the action forward in their scenes together.
In my earlier drafts, this powerful character tells my lead character to do something, and my lead character passively does as he’s told. In my revision, my lead character reads the situation more quickly and tells the powerful character to get moving to the next stage. The same development happens, but instead of passively accepting that development with resentment, my lead pushes forward.
But revisions didn’t just focus on my lead having the most agency or being the biggest badass. There’s also the question of how do these men carry themselves? In early drafts, the young criminal character was a brash tough talker who then backs it up. This was part of why he popped off the page more.
My lead guy was also a bit of a tough guy talker, too. Part of the muddle was that both of these key characters shared a similar trait, except the supporting guy aced the lead guy in that department.
In my revisions, I decided to amplify the young criminal’s tough talk and braggadocio even more. Really leaned into it. But I also had him crumble a bit when the shit hits the fan. Afterwards, he admits to our lead character that he’s more bark than bite.
On the flip side, in my revisions I started underplaying my lead character’s verbal badassery. Other characters have heard he’s an outlaw, and suspect him of it, but he constantly deflects to the point where these characters suspect he’s actually just pretending.
In doing this, I started dramatizing in my script the very question I was asking myself while writing it: is my lead character the real outlaw badass here or not?
When the shit hits the fan, true colors are put on display: our soft-talking, country crooning lead character is the actual outlaw badass, while the strutting young criminal is the pretender.
After making these changes, I realized: ah, of course. Another Clint Eastwood variation. In early drafts, I had mixed up elements of William Munny (soft-talking badass) and the Schofield Kid (strutting pretender) from Unforgiven between my own characters. Again, aiming for complexity and unexpectedness.
But as a dramatic starting point, it was just a mishmash. I had to define the differences between these two men much more clearly. If there isn’t enough distance between two characters, there isn’t enough room for dramatic conflict or dramatic irony to enter the equation.
ONE TRAIT AT A TIME
One of my screenwriting principles is that any scene can only really dramatize one thing at a time. Other shit may be going on in a scene, but there needs to be one dramatic dilemma at the foreground at any given time.
In a similar way, I suspect that when you’re introducing a major character, you should introduce them by focusing on one dominant trait. Other traits should be latent so that when they’re emphasized on later in the script they’re not coming out of nowhere.
But focusing on one dominant trait is useful. It gives your audience an immediate handle on that character (“Oh, this is the angry guy”). But this sharp definition also provides space for dramatic foreshadowing, dramatic tension, and/or dramatic irony.
For instance: foreshadowing would be introducing a character whose dominant trait is their anger, then having him lose his temper, causing a dramatic complication.
Likewise, you could also introduce that anger-first character to a situation where losing his cool would be catastrophic. His ability to control that dominant trait would be the primary means of ratcheting up dramatic tension in the scene as triggers accumulate that we’ve already seen set off his temper before.
And finally, you could create a moment of irony by having the anger-first character unexpectedly keep his calm in an important moment later in the script, causing a surprising development.
But all of these future developments are only possible if you clearly separate and define this character primarily by his anger first.
When working on spec, I almost always make up my scripts as I go along. Which means it’s only after I’ve written a first draft that I realize what are the dominant traits of characters, or which traits of characters will end up being the most dramatically fruitful. Once I know this, I can then go back and foreground those traits from the beginning to maximize the later developments of the script.
So let’s say a key later scene in my script has a reluctant mother putting herself into harm’s way in order to finally protect her child and embrace her parenting role.
After I write this scene, now I understand how to set it up. I need to go back during revisions and foreground her reluctance to be a parent as a defining trait from the early go. In fact, I’ll probably want to have an early scene where she doesn’t put herself in harm’s way to protect that child.
For me, so much of the revision process is coming to realize what the big scenes are, then going back through and setting them up by foregrounding the traits and situations that are most in play in the drama of those big scenes.
SUPPORTING CHARACTER PASS
During my lead character pass, I’m also looking at my supporting characters to make sure they’re doing just that — supporting the presentation and dramatization of my central character’s drama.
But once I’ve done that, I also need to go through the script with only each of the main supporting characters in mind as the main focus.
Sometimes, I start a new document and cut-and-paste all the scenes featuring whatever key supporting character I’m looking at. This helps clarify a lot: the energy of the supporting character, the psychology and traits of this character. It helps me see if the character is consistently themselves, or if they change scene to scene. It also forces me to make sure this character in and of themselves is interesting.
I think the ideal supporting character does two things:
a) they fill out the lead character’s story by giving that lead character a key relationship, a key conflict, a key temptation, or by providing a key thematic foil.
b) that lead character is interesting enough that the audience would look forward to them carrying their own story line.
A is more important than B, but they’re both really vital.
I try to do a few other things while doing a supporting character revision pass. One key strategy: I try to think of the best possible character actor who could be cast in the role, then I imagine them reading the script and deciding whether or not to sign on.
I’ve discussed before about how I was telling the director James Mangold — an EP on my show Damnation — about the various actresses I had in mind for the role of Amelia Davenport, the #3 role on the call sheet.
He responded by asking me to pick out which scene in the first two episodes I’d written that would make any of those actresses want to sign on. And I realized: that scene wasn’t there. I still had to write it. (And this feedback from Mangold was the impetus to me then discovering some of Amelia’s most interesting traits.)
Likewise, if I have a Harriet Sansom Harris or a Toby Huss in mind for a supporting role, I need to locate the scenes or moments in the script that would jump out to them and make it worth their time. And I have to be specific.
Can I point to the exact scene or moment or even line that will make this pro’s pro hop on a plane and fly to wherever I’m filming? Can I point to the exact moment or scene that offers unexpected depth, or humor, or flamboyance? The main single moment or trait they can sink their thespian teeth into? If not, then I better write it.
First of all, this is all just practically sound: the better your cast, the better your story. But bringing out the actorly appeal of all of these supporting scenes with moments of surprising depth and/or surprise and/or complexity will also accumulate to give your script a deeper, more interesting texture.
Gradually, moment by moment, your story will feel like it’s full of living, interesting people instead of utilitarian supporting cyphers.
GUEST CHARACTER AND/OR OBLIGATORY SCENE PASS
Finally, I also read through my script looking at the one-off day player types of roles, and the obligatory sort of exposition types of scenes.
These are probably the easiest to ignore, simply because they come and go. Usually, these scenes and characters are like referees or linemen in a football game: if you don’t really notice them, that probably means they’re doing their job.
But that means they’re also relatively low-hanging fruit. When someone in the industry asks me to name a recent movie I wish I’d written or directed, I always name Hell or High Water. It does a million different things that I admire: it fuses genre storytelling with modern social realities; its pacing is pretty much perfect; each of the main characters is compelling enough to carry his own movie; it’s heartfelt and resonant without every getting cheesy or preachy.
But another thing I love about it: it’s absolutely packed with fantastic one-off characters. Dale Dickey’s bank teller at the first robbery. The old man at the second bank robbery who’s just found boxes of old coins (“You’re damn right I’ve got a gun.”) The heavyset waitress at the diner who takes an interest in Chris Pine. The West Texas cowboy who rolls into the bank parking lot in his pickup asking Jeff Bridges what’s going on.
And most memorable of all, Margaret Bowman’s waitress at the t-bone diner.
All of these characters could’ve been generic stand-in characters and the plot and story would still function. The bank teller could’ve been anyone, the old man at the second robbery could’ve been anyone, the waitress at the T-Bone diner could’ve just smiled and asked “what’re you boys gonna have today?”
But the movie would be so much less without all of these one-off characters. And even worse, without all of these one-off characters, you wouldn’t have the film’s intoxicating feeling of being a citizen in this specific world, with this specific West Texas mindset. Each of these striking day player types of characters make the main characters feel more real. They make the story itself feel more real.
Likewise, most TV shows and movies have obligatory exposition scenes. These are usually info dumps of some kind, but they should never feel as such. When I was writing on Longmire, one of the tasks I gave myself was to make these scenes at least a little bit interesting for our regular cast. This could be challenge because these kinds of scenes took place in basically every episode and almost always in our standing set of the sheriff’s station where we’d been filming for years.
In these scenes, Walt Longmire’s deputies usually pepper him with either information about the case they’re trying to solve, or with theories about who did it and why. Part of the writer’s dilemma: this information is usually repeating what we’ve already seen, and the deputies’ theories are always wrong. (Walt’s the one who solves the mysteries.) So how do you keep these scenes somewhat interesting?
Before I would send in my episode script to my showrunners, I’d usually revise these scenes last. When I was in New Mexico (where we filmed), I’d try to go to the standing set itself (for each episode we filmed two days on the standing set, five days on location). I’d walk around the sheriff’s station with my laptop, looking for parts of the set that we hadn’t shot in yet, looking at props and set dressing we hadn’t utilized.
I’d walk through the possible blocking of the scene to see if there was something interesting I could do there. I’d sit at the deputies’ desks and go through the drawers and look around from their POVs, always searching for some little character moment for Ferg, Vic, and Branch, who were often tasked with the most expository dialogue.
Then I’d revise until I was convinced each of these scenes had something for the supporting actors to look forward to on the day of filming.
It’s not that my results were breathtaking. But, finding these little details and moments and textures did give the cast and crew something specific to work with. It helped make the information and wrong theories spelled out in these scenes feel a little more like people we know talking and feeling and thinking in real time.
Of course, the above stuff isn’t all that goes into a revision pass. A lot of the process is still a mystery to me — as it should be.
A script should be more than the execution of the writer’s intentions. It should be that, but also more than that. It should feel alive, like it has a life of its own. But that intangible feeling of aliveness that attaches itself to the best of scripts doesn’t come about by accident. It accumulates character by character, scene by scene, moment by moment. Again, look at all of those hyper-specific guest characters in Hell or High Water, or Fargo, or etc.
These last character passes are actually usually my favorite stage of writing. Once I feel like the story fundamentally works, I can’t wait to jump in and try to find the unexpected moments of humor, insight, surprise, depth, and specificity that create the sensation that this story wasn’t written by me at all, but is in fact telling itself.
Once again, this is all gold. Thank you for sharing your insights.
This is a great post. Very helpful. Thank you.