Writing the Pilot by Rabkin William

Author:Rabkin, William [Rabkin, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: EDUCATION / Teaching Methods & Materials / Arts &
Publisher: moon & sun & whiskey inc.
Published: 2011-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Creating The Supporting Characters

Because we had figured out Ella Clah's central conflict, we were almost ready to start plotting out our pilot story. Almost.

The problem was that Ella's conflict was a completely internal one – she was torn between two cultures. And while an internal conflict is fine if you happen to be writing a novel or short story, it's death in a filmed medium. We can't capture our character's internal thoughts and feelings, we can't explore their mixed feelings. We can't dive into their innermost thinking, we can only show what they say and what they do.

(This is a mistake commonly made both by beginning screenwriters and independent filmmakers, who seem to believe that showing a character sitting on the edge of a bed and staring out the window will express anything other than the writer's complete lack of inspiration…)

This is not to say that film and television are shallow mediums, incapable of conveying a complex character, merely that if we choose to explore our protagonist's internal conflict, we must first find a way to make it external.

We knew how we would do that for Ella. Each of her cases would force her to choose between doing things the FBI way and using traditional Navajo methods, and that would be great for showing how she is managing to reconcile the two sides. But we also wanted to understand her thought processes as she reached each decision, and to feel the struggle that was going on inside her at all times. We needed to find a way to dramatize each side of each choice so that we understand what she's deciding between.

To do that, we knew we had to introduce a set of supporting characters, each one of whom would stand for one aspect of the struggle.

We started with the simplest part of the equation – Ella's ambition within the FBI. Inside of Ella, this is actually quite a complex set of desires, since it represents not only success in her chosen career, but the complete abnegation of her own culture. The Bureau has no room for personal expression.

But whoever represents her FBI ambition doesn't need to reflect that complexity, because we're going to have other characters to dramatize the issue. We need someone purely aspirational. If Ella had never left Chicago, we could have created another agent, possibly a white woman with the right background on the fast track to the top, and let Ella compete against her. But one of the reasons Ella hates being back in New Mexico is because a field office like this is such a dead end for an agent. The woman we're imagining here would never set foot in Albuquerque. So she's not going to work for us.

There are probably a couple of different ways we could go with this, but because of the simplicity of the character's role in Ella's conflicts, the simplest is probably the best. We'll give Ella a boss who is FBI all the way. We don't know yet

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