Rethinking Character and Conflict: A Conversation with Jess King, Author of ‘Inclusive Screenwriting for Film and Television’

What if conflict weren’t the only—or even the ideal—way to build your story? What if you imagined your characters not as archetypes, but as real people—with all their contradictions and ambiguities? And how can you incorporate more diversity and inclusivity in your screenplays—without making the mistake of presuming knowledge about others’ identities and experiences.

Writer Jess King, author of Inclusive Screenwriting for Film and Television talks with Script contributor Michele Meek about how to rethink the formulas we’ve been taught so that we can tell more inclusive and unique visual stories.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity. Thanks to Meg Grasberger for transcription and editing assistance.

Michele Meek: So, I love how you pick apart the traditional “how to write a screenplay book” formulas. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as the main problems? What do we need to rethink?

Jess King: For me, the big picture problem is that the screenwriting paradigms as they exist are from the cis, straight, able-bodied, white male affluent point of view. The norms and the paradigms themselves support that subjectivity very well. To me, that means that when you're trying to tell the story of a queer person, or a non-binary person or trans person, or a Black person, or an Indigenous person, or a disabled person, or any intersectional combination, your characters get assimilated into an experience that is not theirs. Then, storytelling isn't situated in the grounded contextual experience of different people with different lives.

Meek: I found your critique of our fixation on conflict as the driver of narrative storytelling fascinating. I've often thought about how problematic the idea of the character who wants something and meets obstacles can be in romantic stories since often the love interest is simultaneously the desired object and the obstacle. But I think that as writers, we often lean on conflict believing that if there's no conflict, there's no story. How can we get beyond thinking about conflict as the only way into an interesting story?

King: What I ultimately distill in the book that I think is so important is that what conflict does is it generates tension, and tension is actually the generator of narrative momentum, not conflict per se. And the problem with conflict is, as you said in your example, about conquering and domination. Like in a romcom, usually the male protagonist is trying to conquer their own love interest, which is also deeply destructive and misogynistic.

So, like a big example I use in the book is Portrait of a Lady on Fire for the way that Sciamma uses desire to generate tension, but in a narrative way where she creates this kind of radical equality inside so that no one's jockeying for position, no one's bargaining, no one's trying to dominate. It's really a narrative of the discovery of desire. And there is tension around that because there's curiosity and there's anxiety and there's all these other human feelings and behaviors that we don't try to use to create narrative tension. I think it is only going to open up the possibilities for storytelling if we think of other ways to generate that narrative tension.

Meek: Another example you use in the book, Nomadland, is interesting too. The journey that Fern’s on is definitely one of tension and trying to figure out where she belongs.

King: I like that you use the word “belonging” to talk about it because I do think she's trying to find belonging in the absence of her love, right? She loses her partner and now where does she go? Where does she belong? And I like too that it's not a hard quest, if that makes sense. She's not on a specific journey of trying to find something. She is wandering around. And in that wandering, time feels different (the temporality of the film feels different) and there's room for her to exist, to find places she belongs. And again, it's not this driving, linear plot that’s moving us forward.

It's watching her cope, grieve, search and communicate to find pockets of belonging. There's something really lovely about that, and to me, that's much more like a healing style journey that allows grace for people. This is both in our narratives as well as in the larger culture, right? We're always supposed to be identifying our flaws and finding a solution immediately so that we can be transformed into these ideal, perfect versions of ourselves at every given moment. So many of our film narratives support that kind of trajectory, and that's not real. And I think it feels bad to constantly be fed these narratives of these triumphs, and then you look at yourself and think, “What's wrong with me? Why have I not triumphed over my grief?”

Meek: I’m remembering a comment you made in the book about how you were less interested in how someone conquered a situation like domestic violence, and more intrigued by the strategies they employed for living within domestic violence for 20 years.

King: I didn't always frame it this way in the book, but what I've been thinking about more recently is—what can a story do? Obviously, a story can entertain, and I think that's what a lot of them are designed to do. But can a story heal? Can a story provide the tools that we need to understand? And so, I think with that example of stories of domestic violence, we always see the last straw moment of OK, I can't take it anymore, and so I'm going to go learn martial arts and I'm going to dominate my abuser now. But that's not the real story. I mean, how many women or non-binary people have had that story? The real story is more like, what did you do to survive? What gave you comfort? What allowed you to cope? How did you go on every day? And those kinds of stories I think, could offer so much to people watching to not feel alone or to maybe see a new strategy.

Meek: You mention in your book how the goal is not simply to insert positive depictions of minoritized characters—can you talk a little bit about why that can be equally problematic?

King: So, the biggest thing about positive representation almost always is a version of respectability politics, where you have the respectable middle to upper-class Black family that is in many ways indistinguishable from their white, television family counterparts. Or you have the good gay characters who basically, aside from their same-sex attraction, act exactly like straight couples. 

So ultimately, whether it's characters of color or queer characters or women or disabled people, if you just put them into these typical narratives without honoring their cultural specificity, without honoring their lived material reality, experience, context, you're just assimilating them to the norms that already exist, and so I think it's important to recognize that people with marginalized identities have very different lives that impact them in very different ways and manifest in all different kinds of behaviors and stories—some good, some bad. But this idea of only showing this sort of good representation means then that it assimilates those characters to what's already dominant.

Meek: If you go on and look at any script, there's often the presumption of whiteness in characters, right? Like if there's no race specified, apparently we're supposed to read that the character is white. I’m curious what you think we should be specifying—should we be leaving it open (like saying a character could be a character of different ethnicities)? When do we clarify what an ethnicity a character should be, and when don't we?

King: I am a big fan of always identifying and being really specific with all of your characters, because every person based on their race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, etc. is situated in the world in a very particular way. For example, looking at a person of color—someone of Korean descent versus someone of Latinx descent—we know they're different. They have different life experiences. They're treated differently in the world. And so, if the role isn't specific, then we're back to that universal neutral, which is really just a veil for whiteness, masculinity, straightness, etc.

Meek: So that gets me to a question I have about the idea of understanding our own unique subjectivities and identities. On the one hand, I have only my limited personal experience, and when I'm writing stories, I might be engaging with identities and subjectivities outside of my own. It always feels a bit awkward—for example, as a director and writer of youth stories, I’m not an adolescent anymore. So we want to write stories that are engaging with different identities and ideas and subjectivities, but we also can't be all these different kinds of people at the same time. How do we contend with that?

King: I think this is hardest for white people to navigate because whiteness has always operated as this transcendent, universal ethnicity, race, whatever you want to call it. And so, I think it tends to really upset a lot of white writers to think, “But wait, I don't have access to everything always?” And I don't think we do, and I say that for myself as well. What comes to mind is this beautiful question that Claudia Rankine, a Black feminist poetess, asks in “Whiteness and The Racial Imagination.” She asks for writers or artists to think about what is it about the charisma of the other that I'm drawn to that I even want to put them in my story and really thinking about what is it that you're trying to capture? I think that can be a really lovely question.

I obviously do think that you should populate your story worlds with people who reflect the world that we live in. I think the main issue–in terms of writing outside of your demographic– is when it's about the central character. Especially if your main characters have no connection to your identity and you are someone with a dominant subjectivity—whether you're white or you're male, or you're straight or you're cis and you're writing someone who is much, much more marginalized than you. You don’t know how this is going to be received and so I think if you're going to do that, you really should be collaborating.

Meek: When you teach, how do you balance the need for structure and formulas for beginning screenwriters alongside the tenets that your work embodies?

King: When I teach undergraduates at the beginning stages, I do teach them the paradigms. But as I do it, I critique them, but not too much. Screenwriting is a discipline, and the discipline has disciplinary boundaries. And I do think it's important to teach the students those things, because most of them want traditional jobs in Hollywood. Depending on the stories students want to tell, I can talk with them about how the paradigms might not be best serving their particular story. And then I can work with them to find an alternate structure or adapt the structure or rethink a character.

Meek: I often tell students you need to know the traditional way of doing something before you can break the mold. So how do we create character? One of the books I use when teaching short screenwriting is Linda Cowgill’s Writing Short Films, and she details the formula of a protagonist who wants something, who takes action, who meets resistance, which causes conflict leading to a climax and ultimately a resolution. This is such a neat and comforting pattern.

King: What I take issue with is that conflict is not only considered the primary narrative engine, it's also a tool to whittle a character down to some fundamental essence. A character's supposed to have a want—an external goal and a need, which represents the internal emotional something they are after. The external goal is really just a ruse in the pursuit of the internal goal, and it's going to lead the character to this internal discovery that they need to make. And the conflict is the thing that allows this to happen.

So basically, in screenwriting, conflict is a tool to generate self-knowledge, and I take issue with that, particularly because as someone with a marginalized identity, conflict has not been the place where I find self-knowledge. Conflict is the place where I have to engage all kinds of self-protection mechanisms, for example, and disguise myself in the world so that I don't get hurt, and I am not alone in that – that is many marginalized people's stories. 

And so I think we need to rethink character design and rethink what it is that reveals who they are. Even if the point is to reveal some fundamental essence—after all, I don't know about you, but I contain multitudes, right? So again, what could it look like if instead of chiseling down our characters and whittling them into some fundamental, pure essence, what if we allowed them to blossom and show different parts of themselves, right? That's totally different, it's like an inversion.

Meek: It can be hard to remember but instead of making a character more generic or an archetype, you want to open them up to be more like real people. That leaves room for more ambiguities…

King: And complexity. And the thing is, so many people say, character is the center, right? It’s all about character. Well, OK, let's really do that.

Inclusive Screenwriting for Film and Television (Routledge) is available today.