Convenient Characters

A quick side bar while we're waiting for developments and/or another damn draft from Slow-Poke Charlie.

Can a character be too convenient?

Good characters are hard to come by. For a long time, I had real trouble coming up with names, until I discovered the joy of naming characters after baseball players (don't tell Charlie, but Siege is littered with minor characters named after members of the 2005 Chicago White Sox).

A lot of writers simply pluck from their own lives. Nothing wrong with that, but there comes a point where the idea that "well it's a real person I know" doesn't cut it for the screen.

For example.

My wife once worked with a woman (come to think of it, Charlie worked with her, too) who was named... I'm not making this up... Candy Ho.

That was her honest-to-goodness name. Her parents, last name Ho, came over from China when she was a child and she got to pick her own name. Since she didn't quite grasp the connotations at her young age, she chose "Candy" because she thought that was a nice, normal, American name.

You think I could get away with naming a character Candy Ho in a movie and be taken seriously? Even though it's a real person, a real nice person, good friend, one Charlie and my wife worked with daily for over a year?

Not unless I'm writing the next Austin Powers movie.

So names can be an issue.

But characters themselves can be tricky. I'm currently working on a horror script of my own (don't tell Charlie, I don't want him to think I'm moonlighting or anything) based on a trip I took over the summer. I'm creating characters based on the people I met, some great people, great characters. One woman had this very rare disorder that caused her to have total night blindness. Think a character with total night blindness wouldn't be cool to have in a horror movie?

But would that be too convenient? Even though I met her, we became friends for the week, her condition is real (she always needed one of the other girls to escort her to the bathroom at night, because if her flashlight went out, she was in total blackness and completely helpless) how "Oh, come on!" is it to have a character like that in a horror movie? It just seems like something pulled out of the writer's ass when he needed an easy scare.

It's a fine balance. There's another character from my trip, a young guy who is the spitting image of the traditional look of Jesus. Tall, lanky, long hair, beard, all spiritual talking and very calm. It was like spending the week with Jesus. Again, a great character to put in a script, but believable? Even though he was real?

The old adage that "Truth is stranger than fiction" is more true than most people know. Just because there are two brothers (as written about in the book, Freakonomics) named Winner and Loser, doesn't mean I can put them in a script and expect my audience to take them seriously.

Which is why I'll keep using the names of baseball players.

Though I doubt I'll ever use Cleveland outfielder Coco Crisp.