I was going to say "A Lackluster Main Character...," but really any lackluster character hurts your story, because people invariably feel the deficit of attention to detail and they focus on it. I got to page 16 of my script and hit a wall. I thought this was because I was rusty, then I thought it's because I'm a terrible writer (oh, woe is meeeee). Now I know: my main character is a bore.
For some reason I thought that a mopey, slightly depressed and perpetually stepped on individual would be stimulating. The idea was that through the whole alien incident she would find her backbone and arise a self aware, empowered woman. Good, right? No. Boring. I'm putting the audience through 45-60 minutes of pathetic pouting and downcast eyes in an alien movie! This does not work.
So here's the new idea: we replace this powerless and putrid HR drone with a poised and powerful analyst, hired by the company to basically fire people. On the outside, she is in control. On the inside, she's pregnant by a much younger, much stupider man/child, her parents are splitting up and she is now faced with a crazy scientist-type who is convinced there's an alien invasion going on. Her structured turns to chaos, chaos forces change and from that a new structure.
The idea of a seemingly confident woman being stripped of her control only to find a higher sense of all she pretended to be is infinitely more interesting than taking a puny, wet blanket and forcing her to be confident. It's just better.
I think it's better.
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