What most draws audiences in is usually characters’ emotions. What they want, why they want it, what they’re trying to do get it, and most of all, how they FEEL about everything. And how that evolves from scene to scene. 

To me, the writer’s primary job is to convince millions of strangers to care about the people we write about. Or at least the main character, whose story it is. If the audience (or readers) care, and the story is evolving in compelling ways, they will stay with it, and be engaged.

Yes it’s important to have a story problem/goal that’s difficult, has high stakes, and is entertaining to watch, but all of that stems from and is tied up in relatable emotion. And usually the best characters have very strong feelings. They want things intensely, and are motivated by that. And there’s a lot in the way of their desires. (Whether it’s Game of Thrones, Euphoria, Succession or Veep — to name a handful of HBO series.)

For the audience to care, they first have to understand and buy into what a character is going through. It has to feel believable and real. And they have to be able to relate to and identify with it, somehow.

This is harder to achieve and more important than writers tend to realize. We obsess about concept, story structure, dialogue, description, and all the mechanics of a script. But if we don’t make people feel something, and get strongly invested on an emotional level in the characters, we’ve got nothing.

So how do we achieve this?

The actor’s job is to portray emotion believably. And to do that, they have to actually experience that emotion. They have to feel what the character feels, want what they want, and really become them, temporarily.

So does the writer. And we have to do it first.

It’s not enough to just imagine that a certain character would feel certain things and have them behave accordingly. At least not for the best writing — the kind that gets a writer noticed. 

The emotions have to be so convincing that they grab the reader and all but force them to feel the same. And that all starts with the writer being able to put themselves in the character’s skin and experience what it’s like to be them.

The good news is that we don’t have to have gone through exactly what our character is going through. But like the actor, we have to find some emotional hook we can connect to somehow — where we have felt and experienced something similar to their situation that we can write about with authenticity.  

So it starts with being willing to do some emotional excavation within ourselves, while accepting that this deep level of truth and relatability is the cornerstone of making what we write effective and involving.

Secondly, we have to get to know our characters, usually at much more depth than screenwriters tend to do. We have to go beyond just the facts we need to write what’s on the script page. There is so much more we need to understand that informs that– the back story, what happens off screen and between scenes, and most importantly, what’s going on in our character’s mind and emotions. Which we want to be clear about, and make the audience clear about.

When I’m writing a scene, I’m really writing the tip of an iceberg (as Robert McKee says in Story) of a body of knowledge and understanding of that character that I have accumulated over time. The most important part of this understanding is what they feel and have felt, and how that has motivated them, and what that has led to.

Often the notes I have on a client’s scene writing have to do with me not really buying into or understanding what’s motivating a character — which means what they’re feeling at that moment, and why they’re doing or saying what they’re doing or saying. Often I’m wondering how they got to where they’re at in this scene — what the dynamic has been between them and the other characters and situations that underpin what’s going on now, but which might not be part of the script. So I’ll ask the writer about that.

Their most common answer: “I don’t know.” Or “I haven’t really thought about that.”

I can relate. As a writer, I have often been in that situation. But I suggest that we really need to know. Even if it’s not going to be in the script, it undergirds what is. And if we really understand their characters’ realities and emotions beyond the words on the page, what they do and say will tend to ring truer and be more compelling. And readers won’t have these questions about motivations and emotional believability.

So we need to go off and think through a lot more than just what we expect to actually put on the page. In essence, we’re creating a whole world when we write a script. Every character is our creation and we breathe life into them. Emotional life. Even if it’s an adaptation of a true story, it still needs our authorial “take” and ability to get inside the characters, and then write from that authentic feeling place, for it to really come to life. 

Some writers talk about letting their characters speak to them and tell them where they want to go. I think this is really what they mean. Especially with the main character of a story (but to some extent, with all important characters), we want to feel like we can look out at the world from their perspective and know how each situation feels, and what they want, as if we were them. When we can do that, what they do or say just kind of flows.

That’s the good news: this can actually be fun and rewarding, and lead to more confidence, and an easier process in the scene writing, as well as results that are more effective. It just involves more pre-work and a deeper immersion into the characters than we impatient writers often do. But making this a priority is time well spent. It can make a big difference in whether your scripts ring with “realness” and are emotionally impactful to readers (and audiences). Which of course is what we all want to see happen.   🙂