Brandon has been reading the book Character by Robert McKee and is sharing some of the lessons he learned from one of the true masters of storytelling.
Robert McKee
He comments, “It’s a great book on this subject, it really takes a deep dive into what characters are how they work within your story. It gives a lot of tips, practical advice on how to build characters… today I want to talk about something that is taught toward the end of the book and it’s something that often gets overlooked within various writing circles and it’s the subject of how a character’s experience relates to the audience’s experience.”
Brandon goes on to explain, “Now what I mean by this is that characters experience a story as if it were their life. they just go moment by moment going through the story. They don’t have any special knowledge outside of the story world or any special knowledge about future events that may happen. Now, on the other hand, the audience…. They may be experiencing events right alongside the character as they happen moment to moment, however audiences may have knowledge that the characters don’t or audiences may be lacking knowledge that some characters do have and that’s where things can get interesting. And that’s where you can incorporate different storytelling techniques like suspense mystery and dramatic irony.”
“Suspense is when both the characters and the audience are in the same moment. Immediate events impact both and both know the past and present, but the future is uncertain. Because of this, the audience is wondering how are things going to turn out? What’s going to happen next? Is this person going to die? Is this person going to succeed, and so on and so on?
What is mystery?
“Now, mystery is different from suspense because you have a character or characters who are ahead of the audience in some way. They know a secret that the audience wants to know. If you think about a traditional mystery story, right at the beginning we find a dead body and the audience is wondering, ‘Okay, well who’s the killer? How did the killer carry out the murder? What was the murder weapon?'”
“You have a reader following events trying to learn what happened, who did something, or how it was done. They’re trying to learn what some other character or characters already knows.”
What is dramatic irony?
“…The third type of strategy is dramatic irony and this is when the audience is ahead of the characters in some way. Oftentimes, the audience will know future events before the characters do. If you think about the movie Casino. It opens up with Robert de Niro’s character getting into his car. He starts the ignition and a bomb goes off and then the rest of the movie goes back in time… We learn how Robert de Niro’s character got to this point and that’s the key thing about dramatic irony it pushes the question, “How and why did a character get to this point, or how and why did a character do what I already know they did…”
“In some types of stories it works automatically. For instance, in historical fiction if you think about the movie Titanic, we know that the ship is going to sink. We know that the characters on this ship are doomed and because of that we’re more invested because we know that they’re living the final hours of their lives.”
He also goes on to say that dramatic irony works when you have prequels. Watch the video to learn more.
He also gives a number of other examples to illustrate these different concepts.
