The Ultimate By Alex Stakos
Some kids have make-believe friends. I had
an imaginary studio audience. When something eventful happened, this fictitious audience would applaud or cry or laugh along with me—in my head, of course. I was under no illusion that this audience was real, but I loved it. It made my life (my movie, my sitcom, my game show— whatever it happened to be that day) much more exciting. At a young age I looked at life as a narrative. I understood myself as having the role of the main character or the protagonist. But in front of a wider camera lens—one that captures the bigger picture—am I still the protagonist? It turns out that “believable characters” in movies are made in our image: They’re sinners, too! When God made man, He made him in His image and likeness. In story
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writing, we inevitably make characters in our own image. We might try to create characters that fit our own idea of perfection, but those characters don’t end up seeming real or relatable to us. One time, I was working on a script for a university class and before we had even begun mapping out plot points, we were instructed to develop our main characters. I decided to base one of my main characters around some of my own
personality traits, thinking it would make things easier. After all, I’m a real person. It’s funny that we assume we know everything about ourselves. The truth is that we don’t. We have this warped, subjective view of who we really are. We lie to ourselves daily, justifying and rationalizing our faults. My professor calls this warped view, “our ideal self.” It’s the self that we are when we are at our best—the “superhero version” of who we are. Writing myself into a character turned out to be harder than I thought, especially when I started dealing with the questions about how this character behaves under pressure and what her dramatic need is. A dramatic need is essentially a character flaw. It’s the aspect of a person that changes in a successful dramatic
