Character Arrested Development

I still occasionally get emails from my old college improv troupe, and I'm always excited to read ones where they're discussing improv theory; I love it primarily for nostalgia, but also because I like reading how the philosophies of people I trained and performed with have evolved. For a lot of college troupes in the hinterlands, each group is its own little microcosm of improv exploration, and as a result, they're generally limited to things they learn through books on the subject.
 

My favorite pops up like clockwork once a semester: the "character development" email. It goes like this: "we had a rough show, we need to work on fundamentals, so next week we're going to go over character development." But why do we pick character development over things like scenework, being "in-the-moment", or a bajillion other skills? It's the improv scapegoat. Had a bad show? It was probably bad character development. Why? Because I have no idea what it means, so I probably don't have it. It's a term that falls into the same category of "process development", "synergy", and "paradigm shift" of abstract things that sound great on paper, but have no real definition. I don't even remember how the term entered into our vernacular; I've never read it in a book or heard any teacher use that exact term anytime since. It was always just there.

For years, I broke the term down to define it. "What is character development?" someone might ask me on an improv game show. "Why, it's the development of a character arc throughout the course of the scene!" I would answer proudly. While it's true that that kind of character development (which is probably more likely to be called emotional development, scene development, or some other such acting term I'm too ignorant to know) is important, that's not what's meant by character development. The problem with trying to do it that way is we get a bunch of scenes where person A is trying to change person B in three minutes! 

Our character development practice became, every semester, two hours of scenes about breakup, love, or death. They were boring and uninteresting, and we would immediately go back to doing other things the next week.
What we all meant (but were unable to articulate, and, even worse, unable to teach) was creating rich, unique characters. Characters that were more than just a funny voice or a strange bodily affliction. What we wanted was to create characters that the audience would be interested in long enough to want to see a character arc.  (Something compounding the problem: improv shows like "Whose Line" rarely, if ever have richly defined characters.  Their scenes tend to, unfortunately, be just a funny voice or strange bodily affliction.)

So if we're not trying to negotiate a character change, what is character development actually supposed to be? The now-me, on the same gameshow, would answer "creating a character on the fly that can survive on his/her own in the universe we've created". What you need to take away is this: a character needs at minimum, two things to survive. One, a point of view, and two, a want. The other stuff (occupation, mannerisms, etc.) is good, but you've got to leave that to be discovered. And most importantly, just relax in the scene and remember that this is the universe that your character inhabits and to try to react as that character would.