Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Developing Characters: Part 1
Lesson time 11:46 min
Aaron shares some of the decisions he made to develop some of his most unforgettable characters—like The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg and The West Wing's Toby and Leo.
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Topics include: Mark Zuckerberg case study • Starting with intention and obstacle • Toby and Leo in The West Wing
Teaches Screenwriting
Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.
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I don't have characters in my head. It's not like that. The character is born from the intention and obstacle. They're born from the intention and obstacle. And then the tactics that the character uses to overcome that obstacle, that's what the character is going to be. With "The Social Network" what I had was Mark Zuckerberg's blog post from the Tuesday night when he was a sophomore at Harvard, from the Tuesday night that he invented what they called Facemash. And it's a very angry blog post. He's very angry at a woman. I changed her name in the movie. I called her Erica. So he's very angry at Erica because he's just, in his opinion, been treated badly on a date. He's kind of been broken up with, or blown off, or something like that. And he writes a blog post where he narrates the rest of the night. He narrates that he's drinking and that he's drinking to get drunk. He narrates that he needs some kind of act of revenge to rid himself of this anger that he feels toward this girl. So he's just had a great idea. I'm going to create a website that compares women to farm animals. You get to vote who is hotter, this woman or this farm animal. That morphed into, wait a second, we'll put actual two women up there, two Harvard undergrads, and you get to vote who's hotter. One is only slightly less misogynistic than the other. I'm not even sure which though. But so I had that whole blog post. I wanted to start the movie by imagining the scene that came before that blog post. And in that scene we see what Mark wants, OK. And it's something we can all identify with. He wants to be one of the cool kids. OK, he wants to be socially accepted. He wants to date girls. And he wants to get into the exclusive clubs as a way of doing all that. So his sort of macro intention, his I want is I want to be accepted. I want a social life. What he ended up doing was building a virtual one, an artificial one that he was sort of the mayor of this world. The obstacles to doing that, there are a lot. What's the obstacle toward building the most successful website in the world? There are a ton of them. Toby gets around obstacles. For Toby if the obstacle is the president, Toby is a lot more direct with the president than most of the other characters, if not all of the other characters, save his wife, Stockard Channing. Toby is the one very early on, it's in the episodes The Crackpots and These Women, which I think was episode four or five of the series, Toby is the one who basically said-- Well, actually, now that I think about it, it's in a number of episodes, where Toby says you are not fulfilling your potential. You don't pretend to be dumber than you are to pander to all of the dumb people in America. You are the smartest person in the room. Be the smartest person in the room. Toby dresses down the president, whi...
About the Instructor
Aaron Sorkin wrote his first movie on cocktail napkins. Those napkins turned into A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson. Now, the Academy Award-winning writer of The West Wing and The Social Network is teaching screenwriting. In this class, you’ll learn his rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell. By the end, you’ll write screenplays that capture your audience’s attention.
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Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.
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