6. Make Every Character Count
I was initially excited to see what the writers had planned for Maya Hansen, creator of the Extremis virus and a character we learn had a brief romantic fling with Tony in the movie's opening 1999 flashback. It turned out... well, that they didn't have much planned for Miss Hansen at all, which only ever feels like something of a cosmic shame. Maya is an interesting character on the surface, of course, and one with the potential to feel like a rightful part of the story. Sadly, it never pays off. For one reason or another, this character was underwritten and served primarily as a tool for exposition and to drive the plot in ways that didn't feel unique to her. Anybody could have done the things that she did. And if she had been taken out of the story entirely? Well, nothing much would have changed. Why does she come to Tony's house in the beginning, exactly? Is it just an opportunity for us to understand that she is going to feature in the story? There's no real point, and by the time Maya is killed, her death isn't really felt: she didn't do
anything. Your goal as a screenwriter is to ensure that your story feels natural. The Maya Hansen character hinders this point, by introducing her and then not really knowing where to use her. Sure, she works with Killian, and she slept with Tony once, but these things don't have much to do with the bigger picture. Pepper Potts even isn't jealous of Maya, despite the fact that she knows Tony and her have been intimate once. That might've been one angle to explore as a result of her appearance, but it's not, so what's the point of having her in the first place? The whole "switching between sides" thing carries no weight, either, because we don't know Maya very well. That's to say, when writing your own screenplay, make sure that every one of your characters exists for a reason: don't conveniently conjure up somebody because you need a way to connect A to B, or you're struggling for something to bridge the gap between a couple of pages. When you create a character, you're playing God: you're creating an entire person, with feelings, their own personality, and history. When screenwriters just factor in a character to boringly connect the dots, audiences will pick up on it.