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Character Revisited
In Act One, your reader meets your main character. They form an opinion of who that characters is. Watching your character make decisions, face obstacles and takes actions — no matter how small and seemingly insignificant — enables your reader to hone and refine that first impression.
Then what?
How do you keep your reader invested in your character? How do you continue to deepen the reader’s relationship with a character?
Here are four things you can do to keep your reader’s interest:
Get the Reader Behind Your Character
It is essential that your reader roots for your main character. In order to root for your main character, your reader must know what they want.
It is essential that at the end of Act One, your character has a clearly defined goal. This is your main character’s “Clear Want.” It is your plot. It is the dramatic engine that drives the rest of your script.
It needs to be made crystal clear stated in your script by the main character or someone else. Do not be coy. Don’t leave it up to your reader to infer what this might be. State it clearly and unequivocally.
To make sure that you, the writer, know what that goal is, write out this sentence:
