Excerpt from Chapter 7
Insider Secrets to Get Past the Gatekeeper
adapted from Creating Characters: Let Them Whisper Their Secrets. by Marisa D'Vari
© 2005 All Rights Reserved

In the past six chapters, you've learned how to develop and even manifest characters using a variety of innovative methods.

Your notebook should be brimming with bits of dialogue, dreams, and observations about your character.

Once you work this material into a script or novel, it will likely be read by a reader, story analyst, junior editor, or intern (for convenience, we will refer to them as "gatekeepers") at a studio, production company, agency, or publishing house.

From your desk, it may be difficult to imagine how your material would be read. What are they looking for? What turns gatekeepers on - and off? Who are these people, anyway, and what can you do to inspire them to recommend your material to their boss?

Step 1: Seducing The Gatekeeper

Gatekeepers come in a variety of age ranges and levels of experience. With the possible exception of staff studio analysts (who are unionized, well paid, and often make the job a career position) one can make the assumption that most gatekeepers are young.

Therefore, they were born in the MTV generation and have short attention spans.

Another assumption we can make is that story analysis is a highly individual activity, and what appeals to one gatekeeper in terms of your writing style may not appeal to another.

Beyond that, some gatekeepers may read your submission with rapt interest despite spelling errors and sloppy formatting, while another gatekeeper would consider it grounds for an immediate pass.

Bottom line?

It's important to read through your material with the eye of a young, possibly impatient, time-pressed, overworked gatekeeper.

Take notes as you go through your material, making sure the pace moves briskly, any exposition or description is clear, visual, and necessary, and most important, that the gatekeeper develops an emotional relationship with your key characters.

Professional speakers know that in order for an audience to internalize their message they must make that all-important emotional connection.

If you have ever spoken in a public arena, you are keenly aware when your audience begins to lose interest with you and your material.

Loss of interest can be as mild as people scrolling their Blackberries for messages or reading a magazine, to outright heckling or simply getting up and leaving the room.

Yet when they first assembled in the room to hear you speak, they were willing to give you an hour of their time to hear what you had to say.

When you submit your script to a gatekeeper, it is a similar situation. The gatekeeper is perfectly willing to give your material an hour or more of their time, and hopes to be dazzled and transported from their office, reading typewritten words, to the vividly colorful world of your character.

Therefore, your character must engage and seduce the gatekeeper as well as the most dynamic motivational speakers, who create an emotional bond using eye contact, movement, vivid, emotionally charged language, and face, vocal, and hand gestures to enhance the clarity of their message.

So, what are the elements that would motivate gatekeepers to become obsessed with characters? As a starting point, here are some ideas.

1. Universal characters
Bridget Jones (heroine of the book/film Bridget Jones Diary) touched the hearts of millions of women across the world who could relate to her dieting, self-confidence issues, and romantic hopes and dreams

A dozen years earlier, women related to Melanie Griffith's character in Working Girl because she represented the collective desire to jump off the track of a dead-end job, relationship, and life and hitch one's engine to a more fulfilling life, job, and romance.

And via Julia Robert's character in Pretty Woman, females felt encouraged that whatever their current circumstance, a Prince Charming is around the corner to sweep them off to fairyland.

A successful universal character must be just like us, but "us" in the most idyllic light. Author Kate Flora believes there are two sets of qualities which make characters universal.

"The first are those characters who are "larger than life" who can do all the things we've dreamed of or longed to do. Readers long for heroes (and anti-heroes, such as Hannibal Lecter) who are compelling and fascinating.

The other type of character who becomes universal is a character who is deeply ordinary, or 'like us' who faces life's difficulties and survives them a wiser, or changed, person."

2. Extreme likeability

There was a time in the late eighties when virtually every script had a few opening pages in which two buddy characters engaged in witty repartee before the third page, when they were suddenly called off to rescue a speeding bus or otherwise save the world.

The humor on these opening pages was self-deprecating, and subliminally served to showcase the dynamics of the buddy relationship, especially the character who is the "top gun."

Likeability does not need to be formulaic, but you should give careful thought to establishing why an audience would find your protagonist sympathetic and likeable.

To that end, your character should connect with the gatekeeper in the first page, in "love at first sight fashion."

To make your character likeable, ask yourself why you have responded positively and immediately to a new acquaintance over the years.

Usually, it's because that person has the traits we wish we could possess, or because (in the sense of a love interest) they have the qualities we personally admire and find highly attractive.

Chances are, the stranger you encountered didn't have to tell you the story of his life in order to get you to sympathize with him. Instead, he proved himself by a simple action you found admirable.

Let your character charm the gatekeeper in a similar fashion with actions, not words.

Actions that render a character likeable can also be simple. Consider Sandra Bullock's character in the film Speed. All she basically did was exchange a pleasant hello with the bus driver in an opening scene, and the audience bonded with her instantly.

In director Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, (novel by Daphne Du Maurier) the future second wife of Maxim de Winter first endears herself to her audience as a young, inexperienced girl caught up in a wealthy, sophisticated world. Why do we empathize with her?

Because most of us have been young and inexperienced and in an unfamiliar situation and can relate to her situation. The contrast between the girl's innocent freshness and the jaded audacity of her employer also motivates an audience to be protective of her...