§ PODCAST / EPISODES
Character Motivations
2 episodes · Jan 2019 – Mar 2019
DZ-55: Character Motivations 1
What to do when a reader says "I don't buy that he/she would do that"?
Chas & Stu look at examples of good character motivation. We’ve all watched movies where we don’t believe the motivation of a character or characters. We may have even written scripts where readers don’t buy the character’s choices. And that’s often a real problem because most of these choices coincide with key structural moments — e.g. the moments where the characters decide to do something “out of character” in order to progress to the next part of the story. To help us solve the problem of how to improve our character motivations, in this episode we explore great examples of character motivation and how they have helped the audience believe a character’s decision… →
Listen if you're writing a scene where your character does something 'out of character' and your readers to buy it.
DZ-56: Character Motivations 2
Workshopping ways to fix character motivations.
In this second part of their exploration of character motivations, Chas and Stu dive into what makes “BAD” screenplays NOT work. They examine at moments where they (and maybe you, dear listeners) did not believe a key decision being made by a character and so were taken out of the movie. In a departure from the Draft Zero format, they apply the tools they developed in Part 1 to workshop potential fixes to these beats… →
Listen if you want to understand how character decisions can break a screenplay and how to fix them