Question of the Day

UPDATE: THIS POST INADVERTENTLY CONTAINS A SPOILER ABOUT SEASON FOUR OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. PLEASE AVOID IF YOU CARE ABOUT SUCH THINGS, WITH APOLOGIES TO KRISTEN PALMER!!

Should character serve story or should story serve character?

(I know I know, the answer is usually depends on the project, but just for fun we'll disallow that).

The root of this actually goes to a promo doc I saw last night on Battlestar Galactica, believe it or not, where Ron Moore was discussing how much trouble he had writing the finale until he went "Duh! It's not about the story, it's about the characters!" And Anne and I turned to each other and both went "Uh oh." And then I remembered David Simon saying that character on The Wire always served story, period. And then thinking "yeah, that's awesome but ultimately in Season 5 that might've been a mistake".  So, count me as conflicted. And I like using questions I don't have answers for as QoDs. So there we go. Fire away!

(BTW, if you want to understand why so much of the final season of BSG doesn't work, watch that promo doc.  Ronald Moore seems to come up with every reason other than the story they're trying to tell to make writing choices.  Ex: Why was Ellen Tigh the final cylon?  A: because no one expected it,  B: because they think the Tigh marriage is one of the hearts of the show and C: they really liked working with Kate Verdon.  That's three bad reasons to make that choice.  In particular, the meta-reason of points A and C are  deeply bad reasons to do anything in that it has nothing to do with the actual show or the world they've created. Point B just shows that creators don't always understand their own work; I know literally zero viewers who think that the Tigh marriage is one of the show's strenghts/hearts/etc.)

Comments

[Scott Walters]

I tend to lean toward Aristotle and the Greeks: it is all about action; character is revealed by action, by choices, not by intentions. I got in a fight with a St. Paul playwright about this when I was working at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (makers of Oregon Trail) and they wanted to create a playwriting computer program for young authors -- I argued it should be set up to help students create a plot, he argued that it should be set up to create interesting characters. The project never got done, which is maybe for the best. Anyway, what is character except the choices a character makes?

[Ken]

It's all about characters for me. They are what interest me, they make me want to write the play in the first place. Thinking of stuff for them to do, and to be done to them, is more of a chore. Plot always seems arbitrary to me---either this can happen or that can happen, it doesn't seem to make much difference. But a character can only be who they must be, and who they are goes a long way into determining what they do. I've probably got it all ass-backwards, but that's how I roll.

[Kristen Palmer]

argh! I needed a spoiler alert!