The therka method

Every screenwriter knows this, so I won't labour it. What the character says, what they want, and what they're hiding are three separate layers. When they coincide, the exchange goes flat: it delivers information, not drama. When they don't, the audience feels the layer that was never spoken.

The same goes for change. A character's development doesn't show because they announce how much they've changed. It shows because they talk about the same thing differently. The same question at the start of the film and at the end — and the answer covers something else.

None of that is new. What follows from it is something almost nobody confronts:

The third layer is written nowhere. By definition it can't reach the page — it's precisely what the character doesn't say. So it exists only in your head.

And what exists only in your head, you can't check against the page.

Hundreds of writing schools, handbooks and question lists deal with it. If you've ever done it, you know what I'm describing.

One thing is common to every version of it, though: the character answers whatever you invent for them. Which means the technique adds — it produces new material that wasn't there before. What it can't tell you is how much of that ever reached the page.

In a large Stanford study, more than a hundred researchers reviewed ideas blind — and rated the AI's ideas as more novel than the humans'.¹ For a logline, a starting point, a "what if", AI is good company.

The same study measured something else, and it gets quoted far less: out of 4,000 generated ideas, only about 200 were genuinely distinct. The longer the model went on, the more it repeated itself.¹ In another study, professional writers' work was judged more creative than that of language models.²

A writer's work, though, isn't the first idea. It's the hundredth. That's why AI isn't a threat — and why it disappoints anyone who wants it to do the writing. therka doesn't try to write at all. It does something else.

It's the rule above. It doesn't fill the gaps with imagination. It doesn't guess, and it doesn't flatter. Where the text is silent, the character is silent too — or asks you a question back.

From that single constraint, two different things follow, depending on where you're coming from.

If you know a lot about your character, they'll come out thinner in conversation than the picture in your head. They'll deflect where the text is silent. They'll contradict themselves where the text is inconsistent. They'll show you what never made it out.

If you know very little, they have nothing to answer from, so they ask you. And you — as you always did in your head — invent the answer. The difference is that this time it's kept, and next time the character speaks from that too.

The character can't tell the two cases apart. You don't have to explain which it is: you know.

That's what turns a century-old technique into an instrument. Not by being cleverer than you — by knowing less than you, by exactly the amount that's missing from the page.

"Who did you base me on? Why did you write me like this?" It isn't analysis, it's a rehearsal room — where you aren't explaining the character, they're confronting you with what you haven't thought through.

And what you answer isn't lost. The character speaks from it next time — the more you tell them, the more precisely they ask.

In therka, every reply from the character comes with an inner voice: one sentence about what they're thinking and not saying.

Once it's out, it becomes checkable: you can see whether what you know about the character is actually there in the text.

Where they speak and where they go quiet. Who they share a scene with, and who they never do. Where they vanish for twenty pages without your noticing. Who they share the most scenes with while neither of them says a word.

Simple facts — and yet hardly any tool hands them back to the writer. Because they aren't about the quality of the writing. They're about the distribution of attention.