An excerpt from my script review for Triple 9 which will be available 8/25/14:
3.) Quality of Characters
If your story has a large list of characters, remember to serve them to your reader in digestible chunks.
For instance…
Page 2. Introduction of Irina, Feldman, and Shabot.
These are secondary bad guys at best. Why interrupt the bank heist with your main characters to introduce them?
Not only is it information overload, we’re not deep enough into the story yet to know the importance of these characters. (Especially when WHAT they’re doing has no direct relation to the main action, in this case the bank heist.)
This information is something you introduce/show later in your story.
Want to show us Feldman and Shabot are nasty guys? Having them shut up the container with people in the trunk of a car (we don’t need to see them) then loaded on a boat is a pretty evil thing to do.
Same with later interactions with Irina. We’ll get that she’s a long-winded bitch.
Similar can be said for the early scene of Chris and Michelle.
We don’t need to see him enter the police station, and showing his finger twitching in bed can be established later once we know he’s a war vet.
Start off presenting the characters who are going to be central to the main story, and don’t break up a potentially intense scene with a lame sightseeing tour of people we’ll meet later.
Minor Stuff
Jeffrey Allen was a fun prick.
Chris was decent, and I didn’t want him to die, until he shoots a guy and talks about how he more or less gets off on shooting people. After that, I was fine with Atwood pulling the trigger, since he had loose interpretations on what makes a “bad guy”.
Happy Super Tuesday!
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