skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-01-story-generation/cat-char-4.md

# Character Design — Part 4

Category `char`, continued. Parts 1, 2 and 3 are in `cat-char.md`, `cat-char-2.md` and `cat-char-3.md` — read them first; their 119 cards cover entrances, desire, wound and lie, contradiction, body and habit, backstory, status and ensemble, antagonist construction, whose story it is, belief, work and money, the character under pressure, change and its absence, short and serial forms, culture and place, cast economics, voice and idiolect, bodies and constraint, desire for another person, groups, non-human characters, doubles, heritage naming, bibles and casting, and development tools. Nothing here repeats them.

**Part 4 of 4.** 10 cards across four sections: Written to Be Spoken by Someone Who Cannot Act (2), Class as What You Do Not Have to Think About (3), People Who Cannot Speak Only for Themselves (3), Language and Memory (2).

These cards close gaps the database reported about itself: each was named as missing by an agent that needed it and could not cite it — two of them by `cat-char-3.md`'s own Coverage section, which named them rather than padding them into existence.

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## Contents

- [Written to Be Spoken by Someone Who Cannot Act](#written-to-be-spoken-by-someone-who-cannot-act)
- [Class as What You Do Not Have to Think About](#class-as-what-you-do-not-have-to-think-about)
- [People Who Cannot Speak Only for Themselves](#people-who-cannot-speak-only-for-themselves)
- [Language and Memory](#language-and-memory)
- [Coverage](#coverage)
- [Sources](#sources)

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## Written to Be Spoken by Someone Who Cannot Act

### The Part Written to Be Sayable

**Also called:** writing for a non-actor, the first-timer's part, casting from life, the Bresson model, writing for the face you found
**What it is:** A part constructed so that a person with no training can deliver it — built from statable facts, physical tasks and short declarative lines, with every effect located in the situation rather than in the performance.
**Effect on the audience:** A specific and very valuable texture: the sense that the person on screen is not pretending. It is the reason heritage drama, documentary reconstruction and a great deal of the best social realism cast from life at all, and it survives only if the writing does not ask for something the person cannot give.
**Used for and where it works best:** Heritage and documentary drama, reconstruction inserts, community and diaspora films, children, and any project cast from a place rather than from a room. `char.write_for_known_actor` is the opposite problem and its rules do not transfer. **What you may not write, and this is the whole card.** No subtext that requires a performance — a non-actor can *say* a line and cannot *hold* a second meaning underneath it, so the second meaning has to be in the situation or in another character's face. No line whose sense depends on which word is stressed; write the emphasis as word order instead. No interiority that needs a reaction shot: a trained actor can think visibly, and a first-timer looks like someone waiting. **What works instead.** Give them a task — hands occupied, something being made, carried, counted — because doing is the one thing a non-actor does better than a professional (`char.hands_test`). Write in their own register and ideally from their own words (`char.idiolect_sheet`); a line they would never say arrives as recitation. Keep every speech under three sentences. Put the difficult beat on a character played by a professional and let the non-actor answer it in four words. And **never write a lie for them to tell**, because performing a false surface is precisely the skill they do not have. Verify by having them read it aloud once, cold: the lines they smooth out on their own are the ones to keep.
**Best in:** formats: Feature Film, Short Film, Heritage Documentary, Documentary, Limited Series, Web Series | genres: Heritage, Social Drama, Migration, Historical, Faith, Testimony
**Avoid when:** The role carries the story's deception, its reversal, or a change of mind that must be legible in one take. Those need a trained actor, and the honest move is to restructure so the non-actor holds the part of the story that is true and present. The other failure is writing the whole cast this way out of loyalty to the style, which produces a film where nobody can escalate.
**Example:**
> **Needs a performance — cut it:** "Of course I remember him. *(beat)* Everybody remembers him." — the meaning lives entirely in the beat and in which of the two sentences is warm.
> **Sayable — keep it:** "He had the room above the bakery. Nine years." *(He goes on stacking the crates. He does not stop and he does not look up. The professional opposite him is the one who has to react.)*

**Yields to:** `char.write_for_known_actor` — The role carries the deception or the reversal.  
`char.written_for_a_non_actor`

### The Real Person Given the Film's Line

**Also called:** coached authenticity, the cast-from-life spokesman, the borrowed face, the authentic extra with a thesis
**This is a named failure, not a recommendation.**
**What it is:** Casting a real person from a community for the authority their presence carries, and then writing them the sentence the film needs said — so the authenticity the casting bought is spent on a line the person would never have produced.
**Effect on the audience:** Precisely the reverse of what was intended. Viewers from that community hear the seam instantly, because they know what the register should be and the line is one register up; everyone else registers a performance that has gone slightly wooden and cannot say why. The film has borrowed a person's face to endorse its own argument.
**Used for and where it works best:** As a diagnosis, and the test is quick: take every line a non-professional or community cast member speaks and ask who wrote it — if the sentence is doing a job in the *film's* argument rather than in the character's afternoon, it is this. It is `char.mouthpiece` with a real person's authority attached, which is what makes it worse rather than milder. The repair is not to cut the person; it is to cut the sentence and give them an action that makes the same point. Where a thesis genuinely has to be stated, give it to a character the audience is free to disbelieve.
**Best in:** formats: — | genres: — (most damaging in Heritage Documentary and Heritage drama, where the community is the first audience and will recognise it before anyone else does)
**Avoid when:** — the one honest neighbour is a person speaking their own words, gathered in advance and given back to them verbatim, which is a different technique with a different name (`scene.transcript_built`). If you wrote the sentence, it is not that.
**Example:**
> **The failure:** the ninety-year-old weaver, cast for her hands and her face, says: "They took our language, but they could not take what we carry in here."
> **The repair:** she is asked what the word for the loom's cross-beam is. She says it in Syriac, then says: "There is no other word. I don't know it in Arabic." Then she goes back to work. The film has made its point and she has said only what she would have said.

**Yields to:** `scene.transcript_built` — for the one honest neighbour: a person speaking their own words, gathered in advance and given back verbatim. If you wrote the sentence, it is not that.  
`char.coached_authenticity`

---

## Class as What You Do Not Have to Think About

### Inherited Ease Against Earned Ease

**Also called:** the unexamined price, old money and new, the person who has never asked what something costs, born inside it
**What it is:** Building a privileged character out of the questions they never have to ask, rather than out of what they own — and distinguishing the person born to it from the person who arrived, since the two behave in opposite directions under identical circumstances.
**Effect on the audience:** Instant, unstated class placement, and an unusually reliable kind of irritation or sympathy. Readers who have had to ask a price recognise the person who has not within two lines, and the recognition is far stronger than any description of wealth.
**Used for and where it works best:** Any story with more than one class in it, which is most of them. `char.cannot_afford` and `char.money_specifics` hold poverty's arithmetic; this is the arithmetic that is never performed. **The tell is absence.** Write the calculation the character does not do: they do not check the price before ordering, do not convert the currency, do not ask what the appointment will cost, do not count the days to the payment date. One omitted calculation in a scene where another character performs it is worth a page of description. **Then split inherited from earned, because they move oppositely.** Inherited ease is *incurious* — it does not know what things cost because the question has never arrived, it undervalues what it has, it is often shabby on purpose, and it is generous carelessly. Earned ease is *vigilant* — it knows every price exactly, it overvalues what it has, it is correct rather than shabby, and it is generous in ways that can be seen. Put them in one room and the inherited one will be rude to a waiter without noticing and the earned one will be gracious to the waiter and watch whether it registered. **Third rule: give the inherited character one thing they do count,** because a person with no anxiety at all is not a character — and it is never money. Adjacent: `char.status_transaction` for the exchange itself, `char.deserving_setting` for what a setting rewards, `char.occupational_perception` for what work teaches the eye.
**Best in:** formats: Feature Film, Novel, Limited Series, One-Hour Drama, Stage Play, Short Story | genres: Social Drama, Family Drama, Satire, Literary, Drama, Migration
**Avoid when:** The story has only one class in it and there is nobody to measure against. The omitted calculation is a comparative instrument; with no one in the scene performing the calculation, the absence is invisible. And avoid making ease equal cruelty — the more accurate and more damning version is that it simply does not notice, which is also harder for the audience to dismiss.
**Example:**
> "Get a taxi, it's pouring."
> "It's four stops."
> "It's *raining*." *He has already stepped into the road with his arm up. He has not asked what it costs and will not look at the meter.*
> *Later, the earned version of the same man, at the same kerb:* "Take a taxi. It's eleven pounds to the station, twelve if he goes round by the bridge, and I'd rather you were dry." *He knows. He always knows. That is the difference, and neither of them can hear it.*

**Yields to:** `char.deserving_setting` — Only one class in the story; no calculation to measure against.  
`char.inherited_ease`

### The Tell That Survives the Money

**Also called:** the class residue, what does not change, the accent under the accent, the persistent habit, first-class ticket and a packed lunch
**What it is:** The specific behaviours that do not change when a character's circumstances do — formed before the money arrived or after it left, and therefore the most reliable evidence of where a person actually came from.
**Effect on the audience:** Depth without backstory. A single persistent habit tells a reader more about a character's history than a flashback, and it does the job in a line of action rather than a scene.
**Used for and where it works best:** Any character whose position has moved — the emigrant who succeeded, the family that lost everything, the scholarship child at forty, the returning diaspora relative. The craft rule is that **the residue lives in three places and almost nowhere else.** *Food and waste*: what they will not throw away, what they take from a hotel breakfast, whether they finish the plate, whether they can leave wine in a glass. *Institutions*: how they speak to a doctor, a police officer, a bank — deference and aggression are both learned early and neither is unlearned. *Contingency*: what they keep in case, what they will not do without a written appointment, whether they arrive at an airport two hours early or forty minutes. Pick **one** and repeat it three times across the piece, unremarked. The second rule is directional honesty: **class movement is asymmetric.** Acquired ease is a skill and can be performed well; the early habits are not skills and cannot be suppressed under stress — so write the acquired register as the surface and let the residue surface at exactly the moments the character has stopped monitoring themselves. Pairs with `char.stress_tell` for the mechanism and `char.normal_baseline` for what to establish first.
**Best in:** formats: Novel, Feature Film, Limited Series, One-Hour Drama, Short Story, Stage Play | genres: Social Drama, Migration, Family Drama, Literary, Heritage, Coming of Age
**Avoid when:** The character's class origin is not in play anywhere in the story. An unused residue is a quirk, and a quirk is `char.trait_not_character`. Also avoid more than one tell per character: two is a portrait of a class, three is a sketch show.
**Example:**
> She has the corner office and the right coat. At the restaurant she orders confidently and sends back the wine.
> Then the bread basket is cleared and she says, before she can stop herself, "We haven't finished with that."
> Nobody at the table notices. It is the third time in the novel, and the only three sentences the reader needs about the first eleven years of her life.

`char.class_tell_survives_money`

### Wealth Written as Objects

**Also called:** the watch inventory, brand-name characterisation, the luxury list, shorthand affluence
**This is a named failure, not a recommendation.**
**What it is:** Establishing a character's wealth by naming what they own — the watch, the car, the marque of the kitchen, the label in the coat — instead of by writing the decisions the money removes from their day.
**Effect on the audience:** Nothing, and then a mild contempt. The list reads as the writer's research rather than the character's life; readers who know those objects notice the errors, and readers who do not are being handed a price tag and asked to be impressed, which they resent.
**Used for and where it works best:** As a diagnosis. Delete every proper noun of a brand from the character's scenes and see whether anything about their position survives. If nothing does, the wealth was never written — the objects were. Two repairs. **Write the omitted calculation instead** (`char.inherited_ease`): the price not asked, the date not counted, the form not filled. **And where an object genuinely must do the work, choose the ordinary one and let its condition carry the class** — not the watch but the fact that the shoes have been resoled twice by someone who does that, not the car but the second set of keys that nobody has ever lost. The exceptions where naming is correct are narrow and real: satire, where the brand is the joke; advertising and lifestyle work, where the object is the subject; and a character whose whole personality is the performance of having, in which case the list belongs in *their* mouth, not the narration's.
**Best in:** formats: — | genres: — (most damaging in Social Drama and Literary fiction, where the reader came for observation and is being given a catalogue)
**Avoid when:** — see the three exceptions above; outside them there is no legitimate version, and the tell that you are inside one of the exceptions is that some character in the scene is *impressed*. If nobody in the scene is counting the objects, the narration should not be either.
**Example:**
> **The failure:** *A Patek on his wrist, the Range Rover idling outside, and the kitchen — all Gaggenau — worth more than her flat.*
> **The repair:** *He asked the waiter to bring the whole bottle rather than the glass, and did not look at the list to do it. Later she worked out that this had cost the same as her half of the electricity, and that he had not worked out anything at all.*

**Yields to:** `char.inherited_ease` — Wealth named as objects instead of omitted calculations.  
`char.wealth_as_objects`

---

## People Who Cannot Speak Only for Themselves

### The Person Who Cannot Speak Only for Themselves

**Also called:** the community veto as a character, collective consent, speaking for the family, the one who has to ask, the delegated voice
**What it is:** A character whose testimony is not theirs alone to give — because the story they hold belongs to a family, a village, a congregation or a people — written as a person carrying an obligation rather than as a procedure to be observed.
**Effect on the audience:** It reframes an entire kind of scene. An audience trained on individual consent watches a person refuse to answer and reads fear or evasion; written properly, they see instead that the answer is not in this person's gift, and that recognition is the most useful thing a heritage or testimony piece can produce.
**Used for and where it works best:** Diaspora and heritage work, oral history, archive and repatriation stories, and any film where a community controls its own record — the position the CARE principles call authority to control, written as a person rather than as a protocol. `char.community_built` builds the character whose *decisions* are governed by obligation; this is the narrower and harder case, where the thing being withheld is **an account of the past**, and the craft is different. **Write who has to be asked, by name and relation, and write what asking costs.** The obligation is never abstract: it is a specific uncle, a specific priest, a woman in Chicago who has not spoken to them since 2009. **Give the character their own opinion and make it differ from the community's,** because a person who simply relays a collective position is `char.mouthpiece` with better manners — the drama is a person who wants to tell you and may not. **Write the withdrawal as well as the grant:** collective consent is revocable in a way individual consent is not, because the community that gave it can change its mind through people who were not in the room, and a character who knows this is watchful in a way that reads on the page. **And let the refusal be reasoned, not mystical.** A character who says *that is not for outsiders* and can explain exactly who was harmed the last time it was told is a person; one who says it and cannot is decoration. The two failure modes sit on either side: a community written as unanimous (`char.inside_outside_culture` names this precisely), and a community written only as a cage the character must escape.
**Best in:** formats: Documentary, Heritage Documentary, Documentary Interview, Feature Film, Novel, Immersive | genres: Heritage, Testimony, Migration, Faith, Social Drama, Journalism
**Avoid when:** The piece has no room to show the asking. If the obligation can only appear as a line of dialogue explaining that the character must consult their elders, cut it and write a different constraint — a named obligation with no visible cost is exoticism, and it is the version outsiders write. For the consent design problem in work with no fixed final version, `inter.consent_without_a_cut`; for the conversation itself, `scene.reconsent_scene`.
**Example:**
> "I'll tell you what happened at the church. I won't tell you the names."
> "The names are in the register. I already have them."
> "Then you don't need me." *A pause; she is not finished.* "My mother's cousin is still there. Eighty-one. If the names are in your film she hears it from her neighbours, and I will hear about that from four people by Sunday. Put them in if you like. But you're not going to be able to say I gave them to you, because I can't give you them. They're not mine."
> *She wants him to use them. That is the scene.*

**Yields to:** `scene.reconsent_scene` — where the piece has no room to show the asking. A named obligation with no visible cost is exoticism, and it is the version outsiders write.  
`char.speaks_for_others`

### The Subject Who Will Read It

**Also called:** writing a living person, the relative in the audience, the named source, the person at the launch
**What it is:** Writing a character based on a specific living, identifiable person who will certainly read or watch the finished work — and building the portrait so it can survive that reading without being softened into nothing.
**Effect on the audience:** Invisible to them and decisive for the work. A portrait written under this pressure and handled badly goes flat in a way readers feel as evasion without being able to locate it; handled well, it is the most convincing character in the piece, because the writer could not generalise.
**Used for and where it works best:** Memoir, family history, heritage drama, reportage, the biopic, and every diaspora project where the subjects are relatives. `char.real_person_composite` holds the merging and the annotation discipline; this card is the narrower problem of the single, unmergeable, living, named person. **Three working rules.** *Write only what you can source.* Negative characterisation you can produce evidence for is defensible and, more usefully, it is also better writing: *he was forty minutes late to his mother's funeral* is specific, checkable and damning; *he was a selfish man* is neither. *Give them their own case, at its strongest.* The test is whether the subject would recognise their reasoning even while disputing your conclusion — a person who can say "that is not why I did it, but that is what I did" cannot say you were unfair. *Decide in advance what you will not cut,* and decide it before you speak to them, because the conversation is not the place to discover your own limit. On telling them beforehand: it buys the relationship and costs you the element of your own nerve, and there is no general answer — but if you do tell them, tell them what the piece *says*, not that you hope they will be pleased. Where the brief itself raises legal exposure, note it in the handoff; it is not a step in this pipeline.
**Best in:** formats: Memoir, Long-Form Non-Fiction, Feature Film, Limited Series, Reportage, Heritage Documentary | genres: Biography, Heritage, Family Drama, Journalism, Historical, Social Drama
**Avoid when:** The portrait is the only reason the piece exists and the subject has no public dimension at all. Writing a private individual as a character because you are angry with them is a use of the form that the form does not survive, and it is also the version most likely to be actionable. Change the story's target or write fiction and change enough that it is fiction.
**Example:**
> **Softened, and therefore worthless:** *My uncle was a complicated man who did his best in difficult times.*
> **Sourced, with his case in it:** *He signed the transfer on 4 March. He has always said he signed it to keep the workshop in the family, and the workshop is in the family, and my father has not spoken to him since. All three of those are true and I have never been able to write a sentence that holds them together.*

**Yields to:** `char.real_person_composite` — where the portrait is the only reason the piece exists and the subject has no public dimension. Change the story's target, or write fiction and change enough that it is fiction.  
`char.living_subject_reader`

### Softened for the Reader Who Will Read It

**Also called:** anticipatory flinching, the pre-forgiven portrait, writing with them in the room, the relative-proofed draft
**This is a named failure, not a recommendation.**
**What it is:** Writing a living subject as though they were already reading over your shoulder — hedging every judgement, supplying every excuse in advance, and arriving at a portrait with no edges, produced not by fairness but by fear of the conversation afterwards.
**Effect on the audience:** They feel a withheld thing without being able to name it. The prose goes abstract at exactly the moments it should go specific, which is the visible symptom, and the reader's trust drops without their knowing why — the same failure the reportage routers describe when a piece goes vague precisely where the sourcing is thinnest.
**Used for and where it works best:** As a diagnosis, and it has one clean test. **Find every sentence about the subject that contains a concessive clause** — *though of course*, *to be fair*, *in his defence*, *it was a different time* — and count them. A live portrait carries one or two, placed deliberately; a flinching one carries eight, and they cluster around the same incident, which is the incident the writer does not want to have to defend. Second test: hand the passage to someone who does not know the person and ask what the subject did. If they cannot say, you have written your own anxiety. The repair is not to become harsher. It is to replace each concession with the evidence for it, which either survives — and then it belonged there — or does not, and then you have found the sentence you were avoiding. Distinguish this from `char.real_person_composite`'s other failure, fidelity so exact that the character has no want: that one comes from reverence for the record, this one from fear of a phone call, and they need different repairs.
**Best in:** formats: — | genres: — (most damaging in Memoir and Heritage Documentary, where the subject is usually family and the phone call is guaranteed)
**Avoid when:** — the genuine exception is a duty of care rather than a fear: a contributor who is vulnerable, a child, a person who would be endangered by the detail. That is a decision to withhold, and the honest form of it is to withhold the material and say in the text that you have, rather than to keep the material and blunt it.
**Example:**
> **Flinching:** *My father, who had of course grown up with very little himself, and who was under enormous pressure at that time, did not always find it easy to be present in the way one might have wished, though I have no doubt he loved us.*
> **Repaired:** *My father missed four of my six birthdays between 1988 and 1993. He was working double shifts for three of them. I have never found out about the fourth and I have stopped asking.*

**Yields to:** `char.living_subject_reader` — Hedged portrait; write only what you can source.  
`char.softened_for_the_reader`

---

## Language and Memory

### The Character Who Is Smaller in This Language

**Also called:** the reduced speaker, intelligence lost in translation, the articulate person in a second language, the off-screen fluency
**What it is:** A character whose full range — wit, authority, precision, cruelty — exists in a language the audience does not have, so that everything the audience sees of them is a reduction, and the writer's job is to make the reduction legible as a reduction rather than as the person.
**Effect on the audience:** The correction of a default and a very powerful one. Audiences read halting speech as limited intelligence; a piece that shows the same person at full size, once, permanently changes how every subsequent scene is read.
**Used for and where it works best:** Migration and diaspora drama, war, occupation, refugee and asylum stories, workplaces with a foreign-trained professional in them, and the parent-and-child interpreting relationship. `char.diaspora_character` builds the two-place condition and `voice.second_language_voice` and `dial.second_language_rhythm` build the speech; this card is about *size*, and it has one structural requirement. **Show them at full size at least once, early,** in their own language and untranslated or fully subtitled — one scene where they are the fastest person in the room. Everything after that is read against it. Then: **never write their second-language speech as comic**, and never as broken grammar transcribed for texture; write it as *slow and correct*, because adult second-language speakers are usually precise and short rather than mangled, and the vocabulary they reach for is a level formal. **Write what they cannot say, not what they say wrong** — the joke abandoned mid-sentence, the correction they choose not to make, the exact word they know exists and do not have. And give their reduction a witness who knows: a child, a colleague, anyone who has heard the full-size version, because their embarrassment carries what the scene cannot state. For withholding a translation deliberately, `scene.untranslated_line`; for the scene conducted in the second language, `scene.second_language_scene`.
**Best in:** formats: Feature Film, Limited Series, Novel, Short Film, Stage Play, One-Hour Drama | genres: Migration, Social Drama, War, Family Drama, Heritage, Coming of Age
**Avoid when:** The piece has no space for the full-size scene. Without it the technique inverts: you have simply written a character who is less than everyone around them, which is the stereotype the card exists to defeat. If the runtime cannot hold that scene, give the reduction to a character the audience already knows well from elsewhere in the story.
**Example:**
> **Full size, scene 4, in Syriac, subtitled:** "You told the committee the roof was sound in April. I have the letter. Either you did not read it or you did, and I would rather you had not read it."
> **Scene 19, the same man, in English, to the housing officer:** "In April. There is a letter." *He stops. He knows the word for what she did and he is not going to reach for it in front of his son.* "You have it. I think you have it."

**Yields to:** `char.diaspora_character` — No space for the full-size scene.  
`char.smaller_in_this_language`

### The Returning Minor Character

**Also called:** the half-remembered face, the late callback, the character we met in chapter three, the re-entry, the payoff character
**What it is:** A minor character reintroduced long after their first appearance, constructed so the audience recovers them on their own rather than being told who they are — and so the recovery itself is part of the effect.
**Effect on the audience:** One of the largest returns available for the smallest investment. A reader who retrieves a name unaided feels competent and feels the world is coherent; the same reader, handed a reminder, feels managed and the return lands as plot machinery.
**Used for and where it works best:** Long novels, limited series, late seasons, ensemble films, and any story whose argument depends on consequences arriving late. The design happens at the **first** appearance, not the return. **Plant one retrievable hook, not three,** and make it doable rather than descriptive — the man who counted the crates twice, the woman who would not sit down. Physical description is not retrievable; behaviour is. **Return them performing the same hook, before they are named.** The audience should recognise the behaviour a beat before they recover the name, and that half-beat gap is the whole pleasure. **Change exactly one thing** about them and let it carry the elapsed time; a returning character who is identical is a prop, and one who is unrecognisable is a new character with an old name (`char.behavioural_continuity`). **And give the return a reason in the plot, not only in the structure** — an audience forgives a coincidence of place far more readily than a coincidence of timing. Do not use `expo.recap_sequence` or a reminder line to prop this up: if the character needs reintroducing in dialogue, the hook failed, and the fix belongs at the first appearance.
**Best in:** formats: Novel, Limited Series, Series, Feature Film, Serialised Fiction, Comics | genres: Crime, Family Drama, Heritage, Mystery, Historical, Ensemble
**Avoid when:** The audience genuinely cannot be expected to hold the plant — short form, a very large cast, or a gap of more than a season in a weekly show. Then use `info.recap_without_recap` to reinstall them through a third party rather than pretending the memory is there. The commonest failure is the reverse: a writer who remembers the character vividly because they wrote them, and who over-estimates a reader who met them once, four hundred pages ago, in a crowd.
**Example:**
> **Chapter 3, seven words of plant:** *The clerk counted the crates, then counted them again.*
> **Chapter 31, the return, name withheld for two lines:** *A man at the barrier was counting the lorries. He reached eleven, stopped, and started again from one.* Only then: *Hormuz. Older, and still not trusting himself.*
> **What the reminder version would have cost:** *"You remember Hormuz — the clerk from the depot?"* — and the reader is told what they were about to earn.

**Yields to:** `info.recap_without_recap` — where the audience genuinely cannot be expected to hold the plant: short form, a very large cast, or a gap of more than a season. Reinstall them through a third party rather than pretending the memory is there.  
`char.half_remembered_return`

---

## Coverage

**What I changed from the brief, and why.** Two of the ten were replaced, because the technique named already has a home and the one-home rule forbids a second.

- **The character with a community behind them** — a person whose decisions are not theirs alone — is `char.community_built`, already written and written well: it replaces *what do they want* with *what do they owe, to whom, and who will hear about it*, specifies the absent judge, and names the community-as-cage failure. There was nothing left to add. The slot went to **`char.softened_for_the_reader`**, the named failure that shadows `char.living_subject_reader` and that the prose-page material, which is not carried in this package describes from the other direction when it notes that non-fiction prose goes abstract at exactly the point the sourcing is thin.
- **The character who is a composite** is `char.real_person_composite` in `cat-char.md`, which holds the merging rule, the documented-negative rule, the line-by-line fact/composite/invented annotation and the identifiability warning. `char.living_subject_reader` is written as the narrower case it explicitly does not cover — the single living person who cannot be merged with anyone — and cites it rather than restating it. That slot went to **`char.coached_authenticity`**.
- **The tenth card**, left open in the brief, is **`char.wealth_as_objects`** — the brand-name inventory. It is the named failure that `char.inherited_ease` and `char.class_tell_survives_money` both point at, and the reason those two cards were reported missing in the first place: with nothing covering privilege, the only available move was the object list.

**Already living elsewhere, cited rather than duplicated:**

- **The character built by obligation rather than psychology** — `char.community_built`. `char.speaks_for_others` is the narrower case where what is withheld is an account of the past, and cites it.
- **Merging real people into one** — `char.real_person_composite`.
- **The community written as unanimous** — named inside `char.inside_outside_culture`, which is where it belongs; `char.speaks_for_others` routes there rather than repeating it.
- **Two languages as a continuous condition** — `char.diaspora_character`; the speech itself, `voice.second_language_voice` and `dial.second_language_rhythm`; the withheld translation, `scene.untranslated_line`; the scene conducted in the second language, `scene.second_language_scene`. `char.smaller_in_this_language` holds only the question of *size* and the full-size scene requirement, which none of them state.
- **Writing for a known actor** — `char.write_for_known_actor`, whose rules are the inverse and do not transfer.
- **The author's opinion in a character's mouth** — `char.mouthpiece`. `char.coached_authenticity` is that failure with a real person's authority attached, and says so.
- **Continuity of behaviour across a long run, and recasting** — `char.behavioural_continuity` and `char.recasting`.
- **Reinstalling a forgotten character in dialogue** — `expo.recap_sequence` and `info.recap_without_recap`, which `char.half_remembered_return` routes to as the fallback when the plant cannot be relied on.

**Anything the brief did not anticipate:** the non-actor card and the community-veto card both turned out to be *prohibition* cards — their useful content is what may not be written — which is unusual for this category and is why both carry an explicit list rather than a single craft rule. That shape is worth noting for anyone writing more of them.

Named failures in this file: `char.coached_authenticity`, `char.wealth_as_objects`, `char.softened_for_the_reader`.

Cards carrying a review date: none. All ten are durable craft; the one place a date would have been tempting — the legal exposure around living subjects in `char.living_subject_reader` — is handled by stating no law at all: the card is craft, and any legal question the brief raises is a note in the handoff.

*Build notes from when this file was drafted — targets, running totals and what remained to be written — are kept verbatim in the [coverage history](../tools/history/coverage-history.md). They were true of the draft, not of the file, so they no longer sit here as if they were measurements.*

## Sources

Verified 17 September 2026.

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- [Robert Bresson — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bresson)
- [Reality Stars: "The Non-Actor" Surveys Amateur Performance in the Movies — The Village Voice](https://www.villagevoice.com/reality-stars-the-non-actor-surveys-amateur-performance-in-the-movies/)
- [Directing Non-Actors: Capturing Genuine Performances — Peek at This](https://peekatthis.com/working-non-actors-capturing-genuine-performances/)
- [CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Global Indigenous Data Alliance](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5d79c383e904c741c9e9cd86/1568260995760/CARE+Principles+for+Indigenous+Data+Governance_FINAL_Sept+06+2019.pdf)
- [The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Data Science Journal](https://datascience.codata.org/articles/dsj-2020-043)
- [Guidelines for Social Justice Oral History Work — Oral History Association](https://oralhistory.org/guidelines-for-social-justice-oral-history-work/)
- [OHA Principles and Best Practices — Oral History Association](https://oralhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/OHA-Principles-and-Best-Practice-Print-Version-Updated-2022.pdf)
- [Position Statement on the Right of Reply to Indigenous Knowledges Held in Archives — Indigenous Archives Collective](https://indigenousarchives.net/indigenous-archives-collective-position-statement-on-the-right-of-reply-to-indigenous-knowledges-and-information-held-in-archives/)
- [Writing About Real People: Libel, Defamation, Rights of Privacy and Publicity — The Authors Guild](https://authorsguild.org/resource/writing-about-real-people-libel-defamation-rights-of-privacy-and-publicity/)
- [Authors Alliance Releases New Legal Guide to Writing About Real People — Authors Alliance](https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/12/05/authors-alliance-releases-new-legal-guide-to-writing-about-real-people/)
- [A Writer's Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy — Writer's Digest](https://www.writersdigest.com/publishing-faqs/defamation-and-invasion)
- [The Legal Risks of Writing Memoirs — Sidebar Saturdays](https://www.sidebarsaturdays.com/2018/03/31/https-wp-me-p7vddb-ao/)
- [Examining the Role of Television Programmes in Legitimising Inherited Wealth and Privilege — Social Semiotics](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10350330.2023.2235285)
- [Taste Is a Class System: Culture Decides Who Belongs — Most Powerful](https://mostpowerful.org/culture/taste-is-a-class-system/)
- [Social Marker — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_marker)
- [Class, Privilege and Meritocracy: The Illusion of Opportunity in the Literary World — The Performative Reader](https://performativereader.substack.com/p/class-privilege-and-meritocracy-the)