The deeper I get into my screenwriting career, the more I value characters with unique voices and motivations. To really nail someone who stands out with a personality, you have to put a ton of effort into ideation and really building out the psyche and motivation of who this person is in your story and what they're doing.
Now, if you write a lot of specs, like me, you can get burnt out creating these people over and over again. And if you're doing that at a professional level, like great screenwriter John August, you can burn out, too.
That's why he and his intrepid creative team behind the Writer Emergency Packs created a new deck of cards designed to help writers overcome creative blocks and build more dynamic characters.
Today, I'm excited to tell you all about The Character Creator Kit.
It's a deck of cards I got last night and have played with for the last twenty-four hours that helps you avoid flat characters. It immediately helped me unlock some people in my spec script I have been struggling over for the last few weeks, and I am excited to sing its praises to all of you.
Here is a breakdown of what the kit includes, how it works, and why it might be the exact spark your character development process needs.
Let's dive in.
Overview of the Character Creator Kit
Now, I want to say up front, we're not paid to sell these things. But I have been looking for anything and everything that can help our readers through hard times.
I met with my writers' group the other night, and we talked about how hard it is to create characters that pop, and how much time we spend making sure even people we meet in a single scene come off the screen and make an actor want to portray them.
This deck is a great way to push you out of your comfort zone and force you to face options and archetypes you have never considered before.
I found it to be trope-defying in the best ways. It helped me engage with my scenes and decide what I really needed from them to advance not only the plot, but also the arcs of the people within it.
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What’s Inside the Box?
The Character Creator Kit includes a deck of 110 archetype cards designed to help writers build nuanced, multidimensional characters.
The cards have names like the Realist, Grandmaster, and Skeptic, along with brief descriptions of what those roles mean in storytelling.
They serve as your spark as you try to start your own fire.
You can deal yourself a couple of cards, then start molding them into one character who will be the star of your movie, TV show, or just the scene.
When you get in a pickle, reach for the cards on your desk, deal yourself a hand, and see what you can do with these unique people and ideas.
Former Scriptnotes intern Sam Shapson developed the card idea alongside Daniel Sauvé-Rogan, with editorial guidance from John August.
Funded Fast
So right now, the only way to get the cards is to donate to the Kickstarter. But don't worry, they have already reached their funding limit, which means you aren't donating to get them made, but rather pre-buying the deck for yourself now.
In fact, these cards struck an immediate chord with the filmmaking and screenwriting community and met their funding goal in under 7 hours.
The Character Creator KitCredit: Quote-Unquote
Shuffling for Screenwriting
If you're on the fence about whether you would use these cards, let me take you on a journey through how I use them. And you can see if they're right for you.
The Character Creator Kit is basically a low-fi prompt generator that shakes loose unexpected pairings in your brain and pushes you to consider outside-the-box ideas.
Each card has two halves: light and dark.
The Light describes how the archetype shows up in good ways, while the dark half shows how the archetype can cause trouble.
You also have card categories like "creativity, wisdom, love, etc." that give you a column for how you can use these traits. The idea is to pick cards from different colored traits to add variety.
The Character Creator KitCredit: Quote-Unquote
I don't know about you, but I tend to default to the same people in my stories; I stick to comfortable archetypes and don't always venture out. But that venturing is what makes a story pop and what can make your voice shine.
So I found the cards to be a partial challenge in getting a much more exciting group of people on the page.
- Layering Archetypes: So, you draw multiple cards and combine them into one person. The theory here is that this forces you to see a single character through overlapping lenses of who that can be. They're not one rigid thing like a leader; they're many facets that make up a personality. And when you get contradictions, you find the friction that you can use to bring out drama in your story.
- Busting Tropes: One thing that drives me nuts is reading characters who fit into neat boxes or have no outside motivation at all. These make for predictable turns, arcs, and a lack of creativity. Mixing cards forces you to ask why a character behaves a certain way. That can create exciting backstories and character ghosts in your work.
- Tactile Ideation: So many people want to show me an app or some sort of AI generator ad, and I think that's lame. Physically laying cards out takes me away from the computer for a little. It lets my mind race as I hold the cards and lets me re-deal in a way that also provides movement that might jar my brain out of a block or stasis. There's real pleasure in rearranging cards through the outline, or even mid-draft, when the people aren't working.
The Character Creator KitCredit: Quote-Unquote
Part of a Growing Screenwriting Ecosystem
The Character Creator Kit expands on the Writer Emergency Pack XL, which we wrote about when it came out and which still lives on my desk for my pesky screenwriting hurdles.
The key difference is that the Writer Emergency Pack focuses on story mechanics and scene problems, while the Character Creator Kit zeroes in on human behavior, interpersonal dynamics, and psychology.
If you're still on the fence, I suggest listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, where John August and co-host Craig Mazin (Chornobyl, The Last of Us) explored drawing from the deck live to show how mixing distinct archetypes instantly generates internal conflict and narrative tension.
That episode is what got me to reach out and to grab a pack so I could try it for myself.
Summing It All Up
Screenwriting is hard! I'll take any tip or trick that promises to knock me out of my writer's block and motivate me to tackle a scene in a new way.
Now, let's take a moment for some common sense: Tools like the Character Creator Kit don't do the heavy lifting of writing the pages for you, but they give you a tactile way to build characters that feel alive.
The rest is up to you and your voice. We want to hear it on the silver screen.
For those interested, the Character Creator Kit is currently available through its official Kickstarter campaign and is preparing to ship before the holidays.
The cost is $25 right now.
