Wounds. Flaws. Obsession.

Your characters, human or otherwise, must exhibit human nature. They must have flaws, baggage, and emotional wounds. However, which comes first? The flaw or the wound? Does one always create the other?

"Great movie, but how did Dory learn to read in the first place?"

Take Finding Nemo, to start. Marlin's a good fellow, but he's overprotective to such an extreme that he ends up, ironically, endangering the very son he seeks to protect. Of course, within the first five minutes of the film, we witness that losing 400 family members in a matter of moments is enough to make anyone a bit overprotective of the one family member they have left. Still, the wound occurs: Marlin loses his family, with the exception of little Nemo. Marlin then develops his flaw: an obsessive, overprotective tendency. The wound generates the flaw.

Next, let's take a look at The Social Network. Similar to Nemo, the wound and flaw appear within the first several minutes. However, it's Mark Zuckerberg's flaw that creates the wound: status-obsessed, he shoves his girlfriend away, and he spends the rest of the film trying to win her back in the only way he knows how, which is the very way that drove her away.

So how do you set up your own characters? Do we see the wound first or the flaw? In both examples, one is tied the other.

The answer is that you can go about this either way (the following are original examples):

1. A young man, whose long-term girlfriend dumped him, develops womanizing tendencies and uses women to make him feel better for having been, in his point of view, mistreated. The wound generates the flaw.

2. A lazy farmer resists the urge to join the resistance movement against a corrupt and tyrannical regime. Then, the regime sends soldiers to his town and kills or abducts everyone he holds dear, and he is unready to rescue them. The flaw generates the wound.

Start with a flaw, or start with a wound. Either way. However, you must be ready to not only justify why they start with whichever wound/flaw they have, but we must also see the action that demonstrates how one leads to the other:

1. In Nemo, Marlin's inability to protect those dearest to him leads to tragedy (the wound). He therefore develops an overprotective lifestyle (the flaw) around his single remaining offspring.

2. In Network, Mark's obsession with Final Clubs and status (the flaw) is too much for Erica Albright to bear, and she leaves him with the check at The Thirsty Scholar (the wound).

In both cases, the common denominator is obsession. This is key. Mark starts obsessed, which leads to the central conflict of The Social Network. Marlin does not start out obsessed, but in short order, the wound creates his obsession. So think of it like this:

The wound creates the want/plot goal/obsession.
The flaw creates the need/theme/intangible lesson.

In both examples, the catastrophe that befalls both protagonists leads to them spending the rest of the respective films going after the tangible element that they believe lost. Their wound, they believe, is what needs to be put right. However, it is their flaw that becomes the theme of the film (what Tim Albaugh of UCLA and Hollins University calls, "What the film is really about"). The flaw is what really needs to be fixed.

Of course, Marlin wants to find Nemo. What he needs to learn is to let his son go.

Mark Zuckerberg wants his girlfriend back. What he needs is to stop being a status-obsessed asshole.

Wound is to flaw as want is to need. In pursuit of correcting the wound, your character learns how to heal from the wound and correct their flaw.

To close with another Pixar example, Up's Carl Frederickson feels guilt over never taking his late wife, Ellie, to Paradise Falls. His flaw is that he's unable to let go, which is what Ellie always wanted for him.

Jump In

Write an outline. Write a treatment. Plan ahead. Know what you're doing.

Sound advice, especially with regards to the weighty act II (what UCLA screenwriting professor Hal Ackerman calls "the place where good films go to die"). But have you ever found yourself with:

1. A killer idea ("To save her naughty dog, Toto, selfish Dorothy runs away from home, only to be whisked away to a land where she seems unable to ever return, even if she wanted to.").

2. A killer ending ("She had the power to make it home the whole time, by employing selflessness and a nice set of ruby slippers.").

3. No idea what to put for the 60-70 pages in between?

What happens if you click your heels four times.

Such a pitch might go something like, "A young farm boy dreams of adventure, battles adversaries, and becomes the savior of the galaxy" or "A doting father, who happens to be a fish, must swim the ocean and find his abducted son."

"Battles adversaries." "Must swim the ocean." So few words to stand for so many pages! The very heart and soul of your story, the battles that change your protagonist. The best way to attack this, the meat 'n potatoes of your screenplay, is to write a careful outline and adhere to it, yes?

Well, maybe not.

Writing an outline, a treatment, a synopsis, these are good tools, and I don't mean to disparage them. I always write one up before starting a script. What I want to draw your attention to is that usually by page 30, I've already heavily modified (or jettisoned) the original outline, and the script usually hasn't suffered for it. Don't know what you're going to do next? Don't know how your character will act and react in a given set of circumstances, when pushed to the edge? Afraid of painting yourself into a corner? Terrified that you'll put your character into such a dire predicament that not even you, the writer, knows how she'll escape?

Good. Neither will your audience.

The best piece of pertinent structural advice I can give is related to something I'll paraphrase of Hal Ackerman's. He related that when starting act II, the most important thing you absolutely must know is how it's going to end. What happens on page 90? What is the absolute worst set of circumstances to which your protagonist can be exposed? How does he lose everything? Things are at their darkest, and you must know what happens. Anything else in act II can go willy-nilly, out of control, in control, adhering to your careful outline, or departing completely askew. But you must know how he'll lose it all.

I'd go a step further and say that you need to know how all three acts end. How does your protagonist initiate the journey? What's the worst possible circumstance that she can face? How does he solve his internal and external problems into a satisfying conclusion?

A good writing exercise to try is to write a short story, or script, and put your protagonist into a situation that is so dire, so bleak, so awful, that not even you can figure a way out of it. The old "Can God build a rock so big that not even God could lift it?" adage comes in very handy here. Make a rock so big, a situation so dire, that your character can't possibly escape it.

Then, lift that rock. Break that character out of it. But there are rules: this time, at least, don't use an ally. Your character has to make it out on his own. Also avoid deus ex machina. The rock cannot simply disappear. Your character must lift the rock himself. He must somehow figure out, on his own, how to escape the firing squad, the sinking ship, the front lines of battle. Some fundamental aspect of who your character needs to be is that which will free them. They can be freed only by circumventing the part of themselves that brought them into that trouble in the first place, their flaw.

Love or hate Fox's 24 (I'm in the former camp), its strength lay in such moments. "How will Jack Bauer ever make it out of this situation? It's impossible!" And yet every week, he broke out from one frying pan, only to escape into another fire that would only be resolved in next week's episode.

If you don't have everything figured out when you jump into writing your story, I think that's okay. Know what you're building towards, and if you paint yourself into a corner, make sure that your protagonist has some paint thinner handy. Don't necessarily just go and start with a new room.