The Defining Event

My wonderful student Debbie had a story published at More.com. It\’s a touching story about overcoming illness and how it affects the patient and their family but more importantly it\’s about experiencing your defining event.

One aspect of developing characters that I focus on when developing characters is asking writers to find a \”defining event\” for their main characters. In my book, How To Write A Screenplay In 10 Weeks, this question, \”what is a defining event for your character ?\” is used to find the character\’s motivation in an organic way. Clearly, there are always several choices, but every life-changing experience, whether \”good\” or \’bad\” causes big changes, and understanding what happened and how it changed your character is a powerful way of learning the key to how your character operates.