changing a character’s approach

May 16, 2005

An interesting thing I learned at the DUG last week - that regardless of who your Change character is (whether it’s the Main Character or the Impact Character), part of that change includes a change to their Approach. So if the Main Character was a Do-er and Changes, his Approach at the Climax of the story would change to a Be-er. If he was a Be-er, at the end of the story he would be a Do-er. Now I know the Impact Character’s Approach is not something you can choose in the program, but it is always opposite of the Main Character. So in the first example above, the IC would be a Steadfast Be-er and would remain that way for the entire story. The same holds true for a Change IC. If you have a Steadfast MC Do-er, then the IC would start out as a Be-er and then through the course of the story change to a Do-er, just like the MC. This happened in “Mr. Roberts,” where the title character (Henry Fonda) was a Steadfast Do-er whose resoluteness caused the Be-er IC (Jack Lemon) to Change into a Do-er - shown onscreen by his tossing of the palm tree overboard.