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From Little Miss Sunshine to Dead Poets Society: Writing a script with more than one main character.

by Jacob Krueger

 

This week, we’re going to be talking about a whole bunch of movies, but they all have one thing in common. They all have more than one main character.

 

There’s a lot of debate about the question of whether new screenwriters should write scripts with only one main character, or whether it’s okay for them to write scripts with multiple main characters.

 

There are even some famous gurus who say that “multiplot” structures are just plain bad and that nobody should ever write them.

 

It’s a good thing nobody ever gave Robert Altman that advice, (or at least if they did that he never took it) or we would have missed out on a whole chapter of film history!

 

We’d also have missed out on a lot of other hugely successful movies, The Squid & The Whale, Little Miss Sunshine, Crash, The Shawshank Redemption, The Usual Suspects, The Godfather, Dead Poets Society, American Beauty, True Detective and the entire library of Quentin Tarantino.

 

And at the same time, there are genuine risks when we break point-of-view and start telling a story from the point-of-view of multiple main characters.

 

So what do you need to know about writing a script with more than one main character?

 

In general, if you stay with your main character, very little bad can happen to you.

 

If you stay with one character, very little bad can happen to you because you just have to focus on creating the journey of that character. Which is a far more intuitive process for most writers-- it feels more like our lives.

 

In my life, for example, I don’t know what my wonderful TV Writing teacher, Merridith, does when she goes home. I only know what she does here in front of me at the Studio. Unless I literally follow Merridith home, that part of her life will always be hidden from my view.

 

In my life, my experience of my relationship with Merridith happens only through my eyes. Only in what I get to see.

 

And so, when we follow only one character, what happens is it allows us to feel like we are watching the movie through their eyes. And this is natural for us structurally, in that we’re used to experiencing the story of our own lives in this way.

 

The other thing is that we end up with 95-105 pages that we get to dedicate only to one really specific journey. And that just allows us to dig deeper in one place, rather than digging shallowly in many places.

 

When we start following multiple main characters, our point-of-view starts to shift.

 

In narrative, they call it “omniscient point-of-view,” when suddenly we are sitting in the place of G-d, rather than sitting in the place of any single human being.

 

And this is not the way we’re used to experiencing our lives.

 

That doesn’t mean it can’t be a compelling experience. It can, especially if it connects to the theme of what you’re trying to write.

 

But if it’s happening for superficial reasons, rather than organic ones, there’s a good chance you’re going to run into trouble.

 

So, the real question is not if you should pull your audience, and yourself, out of the point-of-view of the main character, it’s why you are choosing to do so.

 

In less successful screenplays, we often get pulled out of the main storyline to follow another character so that the audience can learn a little bit of exposition.

 

In these cases, it’s often a manipulative technique by a writer who has not yet developed the craft to weave that exposition into the structure of her story.

 

If you’ve watched crappy action movies, you’ve seen this all the time. You’re following the main character, and then you suddenly pop out and follow the bad guy.

And the bad guy isn’t doing anything interesting,