But What if my Mother Found Out?
For stories with depth, don’t keep your character’s choices within your personal fences.
Dodge the inner censor.
We all have an inner censor—the voice that asks, “But what if my mother found out?” It’s human.
But listening to that voice is a sly way of limiting your characters when you need them to roam freely.
When we strongly identify with our protagonists (or victims), we’re tempted to rescue them or keep them inside our own moral comfort zone by not letting them do anything we wouldn’t do. Or we don’t even see options they’d realistically consider, because our blinkers are on.
Your character has their own life history, incentives, fears, and limits. Those aren’t yours. They don’t see the same risks and opportunities you see, and even if they did, they might still choose differently.
Fiction is the open range.
Give your characters the freedom to be themselves – not just you in a different costume. Give them tough choices to make in tough situations, so you can explore moments that you hopefully never face in real life.
After all, isn’t that the point of fiction – to explore in a safe space?
- · Circumstances you and the audience will never encounter
- · Choices you will never have to make
- · Actions you will never have to take
- · Consequences you will never have to face
Be bold
Put the character in tough circumstances, and make them fight their way out, their way. Let them make mistakes, and deal with them.
Allow their choices and actions demonstrate who they really are, without your arm around their shoulder.
Roll the Dice
More than that, actively look for choices and actions that fall outside your comfort zone.
- · Open your ‘Imagination Book’ and make a list of responses and actions that would horrify your mother.
- · Use randomness as a tool to generate choices and actions. Open a dictionary at random and pick a word.
- · Then work it into your story, and see what happens. Ask yourself: what would push my character to do this?
- · Don’t abandon it until you’ve properly explored how it works.
Then transfer what’s useful into your working script.
