Brian’s Journey
Jensen Ackles in an episode of Supernatural where he gets pulled back to 1944 always reminds me of Brian.
This week I’m working at the Canadian Film Centre with some truly awesome screenwriters – Ellen Vanstone @ellenvanstone, Noelle Carbone @noelcarbs and Tara Armstrong.
One of the things that has come up at this stage of this pilot script is character layers. Now thankfully, everyone agrees that Portia has a lot of layers and a lot going on both on the page and hopefully, someday on the screen. We even agreed that Annie’s backstory with her twin brothers, travelling father, fighting for a foothold in the London press provided a strongly layered character.
The character that seemed to have less going on, literally, was Brian Dawes.
Brian is just the prototypical nice guy in my books. He doesn’t have a lot of conflict and he doesn’t change much between book one and book three. He supports Portia (because it’s right), he does his job well (because he’s good) and he loves his parents (because you should). I remember when I was writing him that I wanted there to be one character who was totally normal, but I think he might be TOO normal. Like, uninterestingly so.
So, I’m going to spend the rest of January thinking about Brian’s layers and the journey he should make over the course of the books/series:
What motivates him?
What stymies him?
What is his ultimate goal?
What scares him?
Where does he see himself in 10 years? 20 years?
My next blog post will answer some of those questions and more and hopefully, feed into this script!