Finding your Character’s Voice: Angela Street's Role-Play Exercise

Last week at the Salisbury Playhouse, I went to the first summer term class of playwright and mentor Angela Street’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop, which aims to nurture new writers and provide a platform to discuss opportunities, successes and how to overcome physical writing problems. We looked at how to avoid on the nose dialogue and how to find and write the unique voice of characters by using an interactive role-play task.

It’s important to have each of your characters speak differently. A limp and an eye-patch as Blake Snyder liked to say. What you certainly don’t want is every character to sound like you. They are individuals, and you need to express their unique attributes on the page.

To get inside the head of our characters, Angela had us write a few pages of their interior monologue, then write a few interesting facts about them and what they’re afraid of.

The role-play needed two people to have a conversation, answering and speaking as their characters as if they were stuck in a lift together. We weren’t allowed to tell each other about our characters, everything had to come out of the dialogue. This presented a few problems, mainly gender and race; all the observable qualities of character. My role-play partner took a while to figure out my character, Fran, was a girl, and that changed the tone of dialogue considerably. It was interesting though, as my character is a bit of a tom-boy, so perhaps this is something that could happen to her, like Arya in Game of Thrones.

I did have a few surprises. The character in the lift with me was a drunken defeatist, and Fran told him off for swearing and drinking. When the lift started to smoke (an action given by Angela who was supervising the exercise) Fran sprang to life and tried to figure out a way to get them out the lift. So I learnt she’s morally strict, resourceful, and a natural leader.

Doing this exercise can show you how well you know your characters and indicate if you need to do more development. I found it hard to think of what to say, and most of the dialogue was simple hellos and Fran commenting on things going on around her. I think it showed I didn’t know her very well, which isn’t surprising as she’s a new character.

I think next time I would specify the setting a bit more. As the lift was just a random lift with no indication of the type of building, city, town, country. I found it hard to think of how she would react to things around her. It was hard also not really knowing why she was in the building in the first place, so perhaps a few useful things, such as, it’s a gratified lift in an apartment block, or it’s an immaculate shinny lift with a sofa, each indicating the type of building and person she might meet, enhancing dialogue with values, and possibly conflict.

It’s important to understand your characters personality if you want to capture their unique voice. This role-play can help you imagine what they’re like, what they value, what they desire and what they’re afraid of. I’ve never taken much stock in writing a character bio with every detail including favourite type of cereal and TV show (if they even like cereal or TV), but I suppose it is useful to try and think of more than the bare bones of story and spend a bit of time hanging-out with characters, learning as we do with a new friend what it is that makes them who they are.

The next Emerging Writer’s Workshop takes place on the 15th June, where Angela will be looking at a sample of our dialogue to give us useful tips. You can find more details on Angela Street and her upcoming courses (including a summer residential in Salisbury) on her website.

Do You Know the Story of Each of Your Characters? See the Benefits in Nordost

"On Wednesday October 23, at 9:05PM, 42 Chechens attacked a theatre in Moscow. They interrupted a performance of the musical Nord-Ost and took the entire audience hostage."

A piece of paper handed me by one of the young actors set the stage for this hugely gripping Company of Angels and Salisbury Playhouse theatre play, but despite its blockbuster feature film sound, it’s told on a static set through three monologues. It shows how inventive theatre can be, but more interesting, from a scriptwriting perspective, shows how knowing the journey of each of your main characters, and considering fresh perspectives, can help you write a better story.

Nordost follows the attempt of a Chechen leader to use young women who lost their husbands in the struggle, known as black widows, to hold hostage a theatre until Russian troops pull out of Chechnya. The three monologues are from the point of view of Olga, a lady who treats her husband and nine year-old daughter to the family musical, Tamara, a doctor whose daughter is in the theatre with a friend, and Zura, one of the black widows.

It gets off to a choppy start as each character introduces life before the event, but when it becomes clear that each is heading towards the theatre, the monologues rapidly cross-cut to a spectacular midpoint where the terrorists take over, and things go from bad to worse.

Although it’s dramatic to see victims endure their ordeal, it’s Zura who really brings Nordost together. It’s her story and follows her change from loving death to loving life. She’s less driven by revenge for her husband than she is her desire for the terrorist leader, who takes a liking to her when he asks her to remove her Burka so he can take a look at her skin. She’s thrown into a dilemma when her nerves take over before the event, and gradually starts to question the raid when she befriends Olga and admires her courage with which she protects her family and others, and gradually, after a betrayal from the leader during the final siege, she manages to escape. It’s tragic as we know she’ll be on the run forever, but she wants to repent for her sins and embrace life, and there's hope she’ll find peace in the future.

The end was once again choppy as we followed the resolution for each character, but there was something interesting in the depth of knowing the ins and outs of each journey. I felt empathetic and didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them, creating real moral grey areas, making the play more about inherent evil in the world, and the impact of war on individuals and how it can drive them to extremes.

Even more impressive was the choice to tell the story of one of the black widows. It could easily have been told from the point of view of Russian forces and their attempt to save the hostages, making the terrorists cardboard cut-out evil. Instead, it made Zura the protagonist and showed us how she was lured into this by another, misguided and misled, grappling with loss, anger, her place in her community, and its moral and psychological implications.

When writing a story, don’t just know your characters, like favourite hair products and breakfast cereals, know their stories. Tell us how they change. Even Olga changes from bubbly to vengeful and bitter, a great mirror to how Zura starts the story. Think also about whose point of view it would be more interesting to follow. What would happen if we focused on the criminals rather than the heroes? The victimiser than the victim?

Check out Nordost until Saturday 27th at Salisbury Playhouse, 7-8 May at the Egg in Bath, and 14-15 may at North Wall, Oxford. Nordost is written by Torsten Buchsteiner.