As mentioned in the previous post, the series will centre around six principal characters; 3 guys and 3 gals. Being a gal myself, I gravitated toward writing the gals. And being a frustrated writer, I gravitated toward writing a gal who's a frustrated writer. I've got some ideas for 3 gals, but one is much more developed than the others. And yes, I know their names are sort of standard, but everything's subject to change, yeah?
Ok, so the strongest character I've developed so far is Samantha, the frustrated writer. Can't explain why, but she's always been Sam to me. I suppose she'll need a surname eventually...
Samantha
Samantha, so far, is 25. I haven't decided yet if she's employed or not. I'm thinking that if she is, then it's something casual. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a major in English, but she never stood out as being a particularly remarkable writer.
Sam is the eldest in her family, with a younger sister named Lauren. Sam has a complicated relationship to her family. She's ten years older than Lauren, meaning they're almost a generation apart, so they've never had much in common. It's not that they don't get along, it's more that they don't have much in common, apart from a yearning for a typical upbringing. Their parents are not so much strict or bad as they are indifferent and practical. They were so realistic that they subtly crush your dreams without making you feel like you want to rebel.
Her biggest act of rebellion so far has been her dream to become a science-fiction writer. However, because of her upbringing and her own nature, she seems to lack the capacity to imagine alternate worlds or futures. She's quite good at writing realist fiction, obviously, and yet she has no interest in it - she's sick of her life and her upbringing and her own nature, but she feels like she can't. She's working on a novel about time-travel, but she can't write anything takes place in the future, and she keeps wanting it to be like an M. Night Shyamalan film with the twist being that it's not the future at all, which she knows is stupid.
I see her as the female protagonist, because she's the clearest character in my mind, and probably because she's an extension of myself, I guess.
She has her source in a few television characters, but the two main characters that have influenced or inspired Samantha are the following:
Lindsay Weir - Freaks and Geeks
We were talking about how the show should have a centre, but characters we could move away from and follow other storylines without feeling like the show's strongest characters were missing. Freaks and Geeks was mentioned immediately, because the show does exactly that. You can see that Lindsay is the show's protagonist, because her desire to rebel at school is what starts the series and prompts her discovery of the 'cool' kids, and her decision affects several different groups within the show; her brother and his friends, Daniel, Kim and the others and her old friends. And she's such an interesting character because while it's her actions that make her the show's protagonist, she's also the kind of person that things happen to, around her - she attracts people for odd reasons, and it is just as unclear to her as to why this happens.
Daisy Steiner - Spaced
Spaced is such a profound influence on my life, and this show (we basically want to make a modern, Australian version of it.
As the female protagonist and Tim's soulmate, Daisy is the female version of Tim in a lot of ways and in others, she's his opposite. They're essentially two sides of the same coin. Like Tim, she's a frustrated artist who feels like they're not where they should be in their career or their life. They've both experienced a break-up and don't know how to form a more healthy relationship. They're torn between their youth and the feeling that they have to start growing up.
Unlike Tim, though, Daisy is much more willing to experiment and try new things. She's more creative when she's trying to avoid work, whereas he likes his job and is constantly working on his graphic novels, but suffers from a crippling fear of rejection.
I think Sam will be a perfect complementary character for our male protagonist, too. Just like Daisy, her avoidance of issues will be more creative at times than her actual artistic pursuits, and that feeling that she's meandering through her 20s without doing anything important. She needs to distract herself from actually taking the time to question her choices and to keep those awful questions of inadequacy and talent at bay. I just saw the first two episodes of Bored To Death and thought it was brilliant - yet another inspiration, and I feel that Sam is a lot like Jonathan Ames as well. Writers can be the perfect expression of frustration and anxiety for a writer, but some advice I got from my screenwriting tutor George Merryman was that writing about writing can be really boring. But hello, Wonder Boys? Adaptation? And he didn't like Ned and Stacey...but possibly wrote on it? Thomas Haden-Church should be a national fucking treasure by now, thanks muchly, MERRYMAN.
My other characters aren't really that developed. We're writing about people roughly our own age, or people in our position in life, and whether you're working or unemployed, or you're still doing your 'I'm just doing this to earn cash while I go to Uni' job a year after you graduate, you're probably experiencing post-Uni blues - that time when you feel like you're standing still while everyone else is moving along and growing up. And chances are a lot of the people working in their chosen career so suddenly after Uni are so overwhelmed at being thrown into the real world before they feel ready that they are probably feeling exactly the same anxiety. So I'm thinking we should have someone who has what Samantha thinks she wants.
Rebecca
I sort of conceived Rebecca as the opposite side of my character, along with Samantha. The frustrated artist who feels like they're floundering, versus the grown-up, full time worker feeling overwhelmed by the fact that my undergraduate career is well and truly over. I feel that now she should be even more like the ideal that Samantha thinks she's striving for, the thing that all of us think we want.
The phrase 'the job's not what I thought it was' sort of rings in your head, and this is certainly true for Rebecca. Where Uni was stimulating because you were learning practical things and also more interesting theories and concepts, and got to participate in debates over the new direction your industry was heading in, you just do admin, get the manager a coffee and get excluded from anything interesting.
She consoles herself with online shopping and pretends she's happy with her uni friends, but she tends to take things out on her housemates in strange ways. I suppose her office is the perfect place to poke fun at office politics, Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant style, too.
The main influence for her character is definitely more Tim Canterbury than the chick in The Devil Wears Prada.
The Freudian textbook fight inspired me to write about someone who was still a student - sort of like Marsha's daughter Amber in Spaced in the Housewarming party episode. She's still the idealistic uni student they used to be, only slightly smarter, cooler, prettier, and more social. And has the perfect name to be a psychologist quoted in fashion magazines.
Cleo
All I have so far is that Cleo is a Psychology student, and at the moment she was a vehicle for the argument between students about Freud, and this idea reminded me of a writer that one of my favourite lecturers, Kelli Fuery, mentioned in one of her classes, about the transitional object which allows children to develop and discover that they're not attached to the mother and that they won't have instant gratification anymore. I feel like if there's any basis for that theory, then we spend our whole lives trying to go back to that state and enjoy instant gratification and that things like iPhones and iPods and laptops and wireless internet is our new transitional object. Could this perhaps begin the argument? Because whenever technology moves forward it's blamed for some crisis in society that's happened before the technology was invented. It's always funny listening to other uni students arguing stuff and just regurgitating what they've heard in a lecture without a hint of irony, because you inevitably do exactly the same thing. No one actually reads the books put out by the theorists they study - we all just read someone else's analysis or the lecturer's notes.
I would like Cleo to be something of a cliche, someone representative of some of the things we want to poke fun at, but I want her to have an endearing quality as well. Otherwise, why would the others like her?
If you're going to write something character-driven, you have to know exactly who they are, what they want, what they think about, their entire life up until the events of the show, even if none of it is ever explored in the series or film. So we still need to figure out stuff like this:
Samantha:
Does she work?
Is she from a small town or is she from a city?
Is she just writing novels?
Rebecca:
What is her job?
If she hates her job, what does she really want to do?
And if she doesn't know, how will this affect her character?
Cleo
Is she a housemate?
If not, what's her relationship to the housemates?
If she is, how did she come to live in the house?
I'm sure I'll have more than that. I hope I'll have more than that.
Until then, watch this
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