Last week I experienced the power of mother nature when attempting to fly to Dallas for a connecting flight to Miami. Long story short, the three hour flight ended up taking nine hours due to poor weather, grounded flights, and holding patterns (a fancy name for flying in circles 40,000 feet mid-air, and K and I ended up spending the night at the Dallas airport.

It wasn’t all horrible though — I created a new short story idea, worked on a script I plan to shoot, and noticed something that inspired this post.

A lot of people are stuck in their golden era.

That is, a lot of people stopped adjusting to the changing trends and to this day remain fashionable to their beloved era — usually the 70’s, 80’s, and less obvious 90’s.

I thought back through all the scripts and books I read over the years and realized it’s pretty uncommon for a writer to create a character of the sort.

But why?

Uncle Rico proved it to be effective on screen in Napoleon Dynamite, so why aren’t we creating more characters in their own golden era?

One theory: It’s an unnecessary challenge when creating character

Creating a character stuck between a rock and the 80s is a lot harder than creating one of current day, because it requires research and consistency.

The Character Genre

Creating characters can be easy for some and difficult for others, but it all depends on the type of character you’re working with — it reflects the difficulty scale working with story genre; while fantasy might be easy for one writer, it might be the bane of another’s existence.

Creating a Character Stuck in a Golden Era

To create a character stuck in a golden era, consider these 6 steps when developing your story …

1. Ask yourself one question – when creating a character stuck in the past, consider asking yourself whether or not the character is necessary, and why they’re stuck. Like all things involved with storytelling, it should add something to the story.

2. Research – learn about the era and what it meant to music, people, clothes, politics, etc. Wikipedia would work wonders here for starters. Learn about the music, culture, people, and politics — all of these will help you define the character.

3. Character Sub-Genre – once you’ve learned a bit about the genre of your character, you’ll most likely have discovered a few sub-genres within the era — that is, major movements, music, technology, and other historical bookmarks. If you’re like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, you’re probably a pretty neutral 80s character with a passion for their old football star days.

4. Outline the Character – just as if you were creating any other character, you need to actually create your character, laying out the details (Uncle Rico’s longs for his high school football days). If you usually discover your characters as you write, you’ll experience this step as you write, but if you’re like most aspiring screenwriters, you’ll want to nail down these details before you start writing.

5. Become the Character – As you write your story, and if you’ve done your proper research, you’ll probably be able to switch to autopilot and let the character take over the keyboard — this is what we as writers hope for anyway.

6. Fine tune – This step is crucial — one you’re finished, you’ll need to go back through your script and re-read your character with an eye for anything on the nose. If you’re character isn’t supposed to draw comedic attention, chances are you’ll need to revise what you’ve written so they don’t seem out of place … even though that’s kind of the point.

Creating a character stuck in an era might be a great way to add that extra layer to your character you’re looking for — why did they stop evolving with the trends of popular culture? What made them latch on and never let go? These questions might be host to some very revealing answers crucial to your story.

Our nature is peculiar … see for yourself next time you’re sleeping at the airport.