Hayao Miyazaki is the best animator of all time, one of the best filmmakers in the same time frame, and an amazing, recently-retired storyteller. This video so perfectly sums up what makes great characters, including focus on emotions and desires, attention to physical details and mannerisms, and balance between good and evil.
You don't depict fate, you depict will.
The importance of letting narrative choices and direction flow from character development is also so important in improv and I've never realized that Miyazaki does storyboarding and script writing as the animation is happening. A man after my own heart. See also George Saunders on his storytelling process in short stories:
I think it's a little bit, maybe, like I imagine, you know, improvising your music or playing a sport. There's physics going on and there's a lot to be said about it but in the moment of doing it you're actually doing a kind of intuitive thing. And in writing, at least my process, it's based on an intuitive instantaneous assessment of the text that you're reading, that you've also just written. And then it's sort of like a seasoning to taste. And then doing that hundreds of times in revision and then slowly the thing starts to take shape and to mean something but, in my experience, early in my writing career was when I had a plan I would have the terrible failure of exactly fulfilling that plan, which was a disappointment for everybody so now it's much more a process of kind of looking at a story with real curiosity and saying, “What do you want to do?”, you know, “Where would you like me to go?” and then trying to keep the lines clear so I can actually hear what's coming back at me from the text.