On Character Development & Arc with Screenwriter Jeff Howard

Welcome to “Ask the Coach.” As a writing coach, I answer questions from writers about making the work of writing happen, tackling craft, business, and personal questions along the way. (Have a question you’d like answered? Check the details at the end of the article about how to submit one.)

Today I’m addressing — with help from a guest expert — two similar but separate questions from readers about character arc and character development:

Let’s check out what he has to say on the subjects of character arc and development.

With developing character arcs, Jeff compares it to songwriting: “Some people write the lyrics first and then write the music. Some people write the music first and then they write the lyrics.”

In story terms, “You're either the type of writer who establishes the big pillars of your story and then does all your character work inside those frameworks. Or you’re the kind of writer who lets your characters dictate the plot and their movements through the plot, and it's much more free form.”

Jeff’s approach is to focus on story first.

He says, “I like to have the big pillars to think within when I'm working on character. I don't want to just roam anywhere because I might generate a lot I'm not going to need. So I lay down the basic beats of a story first, and then go back over it and lay the character arcs, the character journey, and every piece of information about those characters right on top of the story bits. Because for me, that way, they're never lost.”

In order to develop an arc that’s consistent with the story, Jeff advises writers to design plot and character together from the beginning by asking some key questions. For example, ask yourself, “What kind of character story do I want to tell and how do I best merge that to a story, to a plot?”

He cautions against “mixing and matching,” like saying, “‘Hey, here's a character I've always wanted to explore: the inner life of a musician slowly going deaf, and then there's this plot that I have about an invasion of drones from Eastern Europe. And I'm going to put those together and make this thing.’”

He says, “Don't just make up your characters and make up your story. They should be so of one piece that you cannot separate them in any way, shape, or form. And that only starts — that only happens — if you do it at the very beginning.”

He adds, “One of the first questions I ask myself is who's the right person for this journey? Or if you have a person, what's the right journey for this person? If you mix and match them, you end up with one of those kids books, like fuzzy orange monster at the bottom, lizard man face, dad body, which is my next year's Halloween costume.” (We got a good laugh out of that costume idea!)

Regardless of whether you focus on character or action first, make sure you thoroughly and intrinsically intertwine them — and early — to protect against what Jeff calls “dead zones” later in your script where you’re “only servicing character or only servicing story.”

Here’s why: Jeff says, “Audiences will put up with that for the first third or so of a story, or even the first half. But when you get into the second half of any story, they don't want to take breaks away from either. They want both hitting simultaneously.”

He adds, “Own very early on: ‘I’m going to reveal character within the action of the story. I'm going to develop character within the action of the story, and I'm going to see the character progress through the action of the story…’ Then when you get to that third act you're not cutting away from the thrust of your main action coming to a close to deal with character. They're smacked right there together, and they have been since the very beginning.”

This is how you develop your character throughout the story.

While Jeff isn’t someone who believes you have to have seen everything under the sun, he says, “Older movies offer us thousands of free lessons about how to handle things like developing our characters throughout the story. If you watch a movie that would be considered old, like Romancing the Stone, and see how Joan Wilder’s character progression through the story is tied to all the actions that happen to her. She’s a mousy, lives-in-her-imagination-writer who flourishes into a full-fledged living-in-the-moment real-life person, while going through the journey of trying to find her kidnapped sister and recover a giant gemstone for some corrupt people who have taken her, alongside this untrustworthy and almost-scary kind of guy. They’re just right there.”

What about the oft-heard advice to identify a protagonist’s core wound? Jeff advises against focusing on that only, saying, “I don't think Joan Wilder had a core wound of any kind. Joan Wilder was a happy and successful novelist who was living in a nice apartment and living out her dreams. And then something happened externally to her with her sister getting wrapped up in something and kidnapped that dragged her into it.”

He adds, “If Joan Wilder had a core wound, it would be the events of Romancing the Stone. That's her trauma — and that's the birth of her. And that's true of so many characters.”

Ultimately, he says, “The idea we're going to box ourselves into one kind of characterization like that just boggles my mind, because intellectually, we're all also viewers and we know it ain't like that… we could name 17 things off the top of our heads that don't do that.”

Something that’s landed powerfully for me through taking Jeff’s classes is connecting with my characters as real human beings.

He says, “A lot of beautiful, fragile, wonderful things can be undone by thinking about it too much. But what I tell people is you’ve got a real human being in this story, not a person who's aware that they live inside a three act structure.”

Which means “they're always trying to win. They never think, ‘I’ll just make my way through the second half of the second act, because in the third act I'll get my big shot.’ They're always trying to win. They're always in play. But sometimes we treat them like people stuck within a construct and that's when they don't become real anymore. And that's when we lose touch with caring about them. They don't know the form of entertainment they're in. So tell yourself they're real people.”

Jeff also cautions that writers sometimes mistake the idea of “character” to mean someone making major life changes in a story, like, “I now grow to care about my uncle Lenny and I'll donate him my kidney” or “I just came to understand that we're all born the same.”

To him, that’s not character.

He says instead, “Character is living in the eyes of someone through their experiences and seeing how they do it. It's the core of people watching. Why do we stare at people out in the world? Partially because they're good-looking, partially because we want to see what they do and how they react to things and how they handle things. That's what we're doing with our characters.”

“To me, good character work is living within the moment of what's happening — the actual moments of the story — not laying some construct of life-changing stuff on top of your story.”

He gives as an example of good character work Robert De Niro’s character Neil in the movie Heat, where we “go through those scenes experientially through those eyes, living in the decisions, and every little micro-moment of a person doing that job. We get lost in watching that because we're living in the minutia of actual experience.”

Last but not least, Jeff reminds us that thinking of story and character separately is ultimately a false dichotomy.

He says, “Are action and character the same thing? They have to be. Otherwise, it doesn't gel together. It's not a real movie. Everything we could ever list that we get engaged in, they're welded together perfectly. Everything that we could talk about that is flawed, I bet you that's one of the reasons why we'd find out it was flawed.”

Many thanks to Jeff for making time to help us out today. I highly recommend Jeff’s classes for newer screenwriters and for experienced screenwriters looking to up their game. Jeff offers live classes on Zoom and also has on-demand recordings available ranging from structure and outlining to pitching.

You can find Jeff online on YouTube, where he hosts live streams and shares terrific content (including a great one about pitching and another about selling your script), and on Twitter and Bluesky. I encourage you to reach out to his assistant (and screenwriter) Marsha to ask for his current class schedule. You can reach her at info@jhsessions.com.

Jeff Howard around the web:

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Find me on Twitter @JennaAvery and Bluesky @jennaavery.bsky.social.