Creating Unforgettable Characters Read Free Page A

imagine details that you can't find, using everything you have learned so that the period will ring true.
    LOCATION
    Many writers set their stories in familiar locations. If you grew up in New York, many of your stories may take place there. Hollywood has thousands of scripts about people coming to make it in Hollywood. Or writers set scripts in places they've visited or lived in for short periods of time. The more knowledgeable someone is about the location, the less research is necessary. However, writers who know the area often find they need to return for specific research.
    William Kelley had lived in the Lancaster County area of Pennsylvania. He already had a good start on location research for Witness. However, he still returned to the area to look for models for his characters, and to expand his knowledge of the Amish for this specific project.
    James Dearden, writer of Fatal Attraction, is British, but he's spent considerable time in New York City—the setting for his film.
    Two of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, Dr. No and Live and Let Die, and several of his short stories were set in Jamaica, where he maintained an estate, Goldeneye. He visited Tokyo before writing You Only Live Twice, and wrote From Russia with Love after riding the Orient Express.
    Location affects many different aspects of a character. The frenetic rhythm of Philadelphia in Witness is different from the slower-paced life on the Amish farm. The rhythm of the West in Electric Horseman is different from the rhythms of New York in Working Girl. And each will have an effect on the characters.
    If you were writing the story "Rain," by Somerset Maugham (later made into two films), or Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams, or The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, you would want to capture in your characterizations the sense of oppression from the heat and humidity, or the claustrophobic feeling that can come from the constant rain in the tropics.
    If you were writing a book such as In God We Trust, by Jean Shepherd, or the script for Never Cry Wolf, by Curtis Hanson, Sam Hamm, and Richard Kletter, you would want to know how subfreezing temperatures can affect life-style and behavior.
    Dale Wasserman, writer of the play based on Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, had to do location research to understand his characters. "As part of my research, I went to asylums. I went to classy asylums and dreadful asylums. And then I arranged with the psychiatrist in a very large asylum to have myself committed as a patient for a time. Originally I was going to stay for three weeks but ended up staying for ten days. Not because it was scary or uncomfortable, but because of the opposite. It's extremely comfortable. I learned a few things I hadn't expected. Number one: that if you hand over your will and your volition to an institution life becomes very simple and the temptation to just keep on living it in just that way is very strong. I learned about the great range of patients, the articulateness, the various abilities."
    When Kurt Luedtke wrote the screenplay for Out of Africa, he needed to know all about Karen Blixen's world in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s.
    "As a boy, I was interested in Africa, so I'm sure I can look at my bookshelves now and find at least fifty books on East Africa. My research had taught me about the African frontier, that it hadn't even opened in 1892, that people lived on the edge of the known world."
    His books supplied his general research, but Kurt had to do a great deal of specific research, too, to answer the questions that surfaced as he wrote the script.
    "I needed to learn how coffee grows, and how it flowers, and how a plantation operates. I learned that by interviewing a coffee grower.
    "I needed to have some understanding of what the relationships were between the whites, primarily Brits, and the Kenyan blacks. I needed to understand the African tribes, because Blixen is probably not using Kikuyu for the