As I said in my last post, the six essential questions did more than just give me a blue print of where the characters were at the start of the story, and where they were going during it. It also allowed me to figure out who they were prior to the events taking place – how they found themselves in their situation at the start of the script.
I’ve referred to two secondary characters that had been fleshed out with the six essential questions: one who was destitute because of the reputation they had, another who had been infused with a revenge plot toward one of the main characters. I’ll provide an example of a secondary character who wasn’t fleshed out particularly during the asking of the six essential questions, but whose answers helped lay the foundation for their starting point in the story.
The character Clara is introduced as a call girl in brothel. She was originally conceived to be someone the protagonist would visit whenever they came into enough money to indulge their temptations. That alone didn’t make her stand out much, and it wasn’t until I put her under the six essential questions that I was able to determine how she came to work in the brothel.
She’d been young and foolish, coming West with her lover at the time, only they had run out of money before making it all the way to the coast. The plan had been for the lover to find work until they could make it the rest of the way, but he died, and desperate for cash, she swallowed her morals and took the highest paid job being offered.
It would be implied in the script, not just that the main character has a history with her and that there are gaps in his visits, but in the dialogue of her and others in the brothel that she’s been at this too long. This detail was great because it allowed me to add something to the scenes she was in — if she’s been at it too long, it implied there were younger women working there now, which could breathe a little conflict between her and the other girls.
I found it could also give her a goal to work towards, getting out of that line of work, and that this could add another conflict to her scenes. While the protagonist was looking to her for another night of companionship, she would be angling for a way out with one of the other patrons, someone not only with more money, but a steady supply of it so she would never have to do this sort of thing again to survive.
The questions made me think about how her backstory brought her to the story’s beginning, and that ended up shaping the character and giving her her motivations throughout her story arc. And she wasn’t the only one I was able to do this for. After answering the essential questions for each of the characters, I used those answers to develop unique backstories for all of them to show how they entered into the central plot of the script.