Create Great Characters - Game of Thrones II

What your characters do is ten times more important than what they say. As a program executive, I read character bibles for proposed sitcoms. They would include each character's backstory, which is their history before the show starts. Backstories often include the character's feelings about the other people in the show. That's standard. However, a great proposal -- one that would move along in the development process -- always included information about the actions the character would take, based on their feelings. There's a reason they call it Acting, not Feeling. To act is to do. Hamlet, one of the most famous "indecisive" characters in English literature,in fact does a great many things during the course of the play. He goes to the top of the battlements to confront the ghost. He feigns madness. He hires actors to play the play and writes an additional scene for them, while also delivering some of the most lucid instructions to actors in the English language ("speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue"). Hamlet kills Polonius, sends Ophelia to a nunnery and gets in a big fight with Ophelia's brother over her grave. The one thing he doesn't do until the end is kill his uncle, Claudius -- but that's because he wants to be sure, not because he's afraid to act. A character's behavior is what makes them memorable. Tirion Lanaster, played by Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones, certainly looks different from the regular-sized characters in the show. But it's not how he looks, it's what he does -- saving Lady Stark from Barbarians, weaving a web of spies around his sister, the Queen Regent, slapping the boy king, hiding his mistress in plain sight -- that makes us root for him. You're a creator, but you're also an audience. When you're creating behavior for your characters think about what you find compelling about characters you like to watch. Are your characters as interesting? If not, it might be time to do some revisions.