Character Writing, Part 2

Okay, so just to recap Part I:

• Plinkett's Test: "Describe the following Star Wars character WITHOUT saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore, or what their profession or role in the movie was. Describe this character to your friends like they ain't never seen Star Wars."
• Extras - Level -1 characters. Exist to fill space.
• Plot-Advancing Robots (PARs) - Level 0 characters. Exist to fulfill a role or a profession and very little else. Fail the Plinkett test.
• More than PARs, but not deeply autonomous - Level 1 characters: Developed enough to pass Plinckett's Test. They have characteristics independent of role/profession, but ultimately, they have an inner life that isn't very meaningful or apropos to anything. There's no change, or growth, or self-actualization as characters there. They have a personality, but that personality isn't potent or meaningful enough transform into tangible actions in the plot. In turn, their character (outside of role/profession) isn't developed enough to be meaningfully effected by the plot.
• More than PARs, rich inner/outer life, deeply autonomous and affected - Level 2 characters: Their human characteristics (i.e. the role/profession-independent things you'd say about them) are powerful enough to act as instruments in and objects of the plot. For example, let's say you have a character who is prideful (say, Walter White). Walt is well-characterized enough as prideful that he can sensibly reject an offer out of pride, and his pride, in turn, can be wounded by a rejection.

Some rambling notes:

• Characters can move up (with character development, emphasis) and down (with new writers, de-emphasis) the scale. Level 2 characters often get simplistic makeovers because their complexity makes further writing on other characters more difficult, and can move down to Level 1 or Level 0 (i.e. ex-girlfriend becomes a mean caricature so protagonist can fall out of love). Level 0 or Level 1 characters can be given backstories and arcs that allow them to turn into Level 2 characters. Characters can earn autonomy with characterizing speeches, actions, and back-stories. Characters can lose autonomy by slipping into the background, by joining established morality without character precedent, by becoming mindlessly adversarial or supportive out of role rather than out of character.
• First of all, yes, you could probably go further define a Level 3 character as being, say, central protagonist to a plot, with rich inner/outer life and the audience learning on a deep level the character's entire arc and being meant to identify with it. But... the gap between Levels 2 and 3 is much more complex and, here's the kicker:

1. It's not clear that there is such a gap to me, as perspective/identification with a character is different from actual depth of characterization.
2. It's not clear that this gap is always a step up (Silent Protagonists from video games as well as "Drive" make a hell of a case that Level 0 characters can make fine protagonists in the right circumstances)... And:
3. I tend to think that if a gap between Levels 2 and 3 does exist, then it's only one of many such gaps, and the gaps can be stacked one after the other. In fact, the gaps spire in so many different ways - hero to epic hero, hero to anti-hero, hero to satirical hero, hero to abstract hero, that you start to talk about weird multidimensional tower of Levels of identification and understanding with the characters that must ensue. After all, there's a big difference between, say, Hal Incandeza of Infinite Jest and Don Draper and Thelma and Louise - not just as characters, but in their relation to the work as a whole and their purpose/perspective. And that big difference is such that I honestly could buy that there are multiple Level 3s and even Level 4s and 5s. Walter White is essentially a Satan-like or Faustian figure. Same with Hamlet. The clockwork universes of Shakespeare, the discussion about what it means to make a character deeper, etc. make delving into this Level 3 problem a sort of Aleph, subsuming all the rest of the discussion in a bottomless pit. I'm writing this to make an accessible explanation of characterization to make my characters more believable, not to invent a new theory of storytelling.

• Ideally you want all your characters to earn Level 2 independently, and you want all your characters to be assumed as potential Level 2s. I'd say a huge part of world-building is in fact creating a set of expectations that every character that will appear will be as deep as possible and have a deep, rich inner life if sufficiently explored. And that character and will be characterized well and interact interestingly with other interesting characters. So in a sense the world-building and character-building impulses may not be so estranged. I found this netw3rk post fascinating (Breaking Bad spoilers) because Breaking Bad is so well-characterized from beginning to end, from hero to villain... that we're disappointed that a relatively minor character is only a Level 1. Meanwhile, the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix Trilogy (by the end) would have been killing for that Level 1 Robert Forster Vacuum Man. Tell me, would you rather have Obi-Wan and Anakin battle against a totally unestablished four-armed General Grievous or against Robert Forster telling you how bad your life is going to be from now on? This isn't defending Breaking Bad (I actually agree with netw3rk's point), but it says something that I'm inclined to agree with netw3rk. Imagine: A Level 1 minor character seems like a minor flaw, when in virtually any other story, Robert Forster's understated personality for 30 minutes on, say, the X-Files? He would have been a gigantic, unimpeachable boon to the show. 
• If you are writing a work where you want the audience to expect most major characters to be a Level 2 (or, less ambitiously, a Level 1)... then the two most crucial, universe-breaking illusions are as follows (sorry for all the parenthetical alternates, by the way):

1. Having any two Level 1 (alt: Level 0) characters talk to each other on a deep level. You can have a Level 2 (Level 1 or 2) talk to a Level 1 (Level 0) character and still maintain the illusion that you'll develop the Level 1 (Level 0) later, that they both have rich inner lives (any character at all) and could potentially affect the endgame of the entire story. But when a Level 1 (Level 0) talks to a Level 1 (Level 0), in the audience you're left wondering - with a Diogenes-like frustration - where the rich inner life (any character at all) actually resides. And when you in the audience realize that there is no rich inner life (any character at all) in either of the characters, it challenges your presumption that the work of art is about people and their rich characters (alt: about people transcending their most superficial characteristics). You come to expect less.
1. There is a fascinating symmetry between this principle and (as my friend Aaron noted) the Bechdel test from feminism. I'd not heard of this Bechdel test before, but it goes like this: In the entire course of a film or TV show, do two named women have a conversation that isn't about men? This is the basic are-we-humanizing-women-in-our-writing threshold in the sense that a large percentage of films (about half recently) fail this test, and a good 10% are automatic DQs, because there aren't even two named women in the whole film! 
2. Anyway, my principle is: Your film is only as humanized as its least-humanized substantive dialogue. But... on the other hand, a substantive dialogue is as humanized as its most-humanized participant. So what you're going for is a kind of purity, where two Level 0 characters never should have a long discussion (barring odd exceptions like intros). You always want to have your deepest possible characters chaperoning less-developed characters whenever possible in dialogues, because you want to avoid stagnant dialogue between unestablished characters that dilutes your film. You know that Tolstoy opening to Anna Karenina, where "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."? Well, unestablished characters are all alike, until they distinguish themselves. So if you don't plan on establishing two characters, then you shouldn't use them in long dialogues because it will certainly run together and won't stick in the memory. Nothing is worse than 5-6 minutes of "The General Who is Only A General Representing Himself As Such" talking to "The Senator Who Is Only A Senator Representing Himself As Such". It dilutes your film to have unestablished characters discourse because that's when you lose engagement in all your characters by creating a precedent for undervaluing engagement. That's when you lose people who don't want so much pure exposition and want instead people with real motives and purpose and ideology. That's when you lose people that don't want social commentary. That's when you lose people that are looking for Level 2.
3. So the key here is... with the Bechdel test you're trying to include women and find a quick way to figure out when women are being fundamentally excluded. With my test, you're trying to figure out if you're being too inclusive for characters you haven't established. The Bechdel test is a challenge to include; my principle is all about demanding that you're including for a valid artistic reason. In short, whether you're shoehorning in a character or whether you're valuing that character, finding a reason for their existence, and trying to make the most of their presence. There's a neat symmetry there, in my opinion.
2. Having characters that are too similar - and too aligned in motivation - speak to one another when you're characterizing them. This is my personal sin. Even on the simplest possible level, where you have two characters that you're struggling to define... and you know they have the same worldviews and the same goals? Then that will be a serious problem. You'll struggle to distinguish them, you'll invent tics and arbitrary backstory to make the existence of two characters and their dialogue "realistic." Instead, there needs to be conflict in methodology, authority, or personality in order for them to really solve their problems together in a way that feels real. If it's truly impossible to distinguish the characters in a dialogue, then perhaps it's well to ask if you should even have two separate characters. And if they're two central characters... then maybe your plot as a whole is flimsier than you'd imagined.

I have much more to say; I probably have at least a part or two left with this premise. But this part is feeling a bit long and rambling despite deceptively few new words. So, until next time, see ya. Thanks.