Provoking Emotion. That’s what sets you apart and sets your work apart. It can be joy, anger, glee, fright, sadness, empathy, anxiousness, compassion...

But it had better be something. And it all comes from character.

I read a script this week that laid there like a dead eel. (Ok... Dead Eels can be delicious, but only in Sushi) Not only did I not care at all about what happened to the characters, I didn’t care about who they were, where they came from, or why they were in the situation the writer chose to put them in. Why? Because the writer didn't care enough about them to let me know who they were and why I should care about them. And it's too bad because the premise was pretty good.

The reason audiences choose to watch a particular film or show is to be entertained, period. To escape into another world. To feel with the characters. To experience the character’s lives vicariously. Don’t kid yourself. There’s not a great film out there that you haven’t put yourself into emotionally at some point. To choose to feel what a particular character did.

You need to design your characters and story to evoke emotion and KNOW before you start what emotions you’re going for.

Too many times I read a script where the writer is so fixated on their premise or trying to write too cool characters or twists or action or scares that they forget to build reasons into their characters to care about them.

Premise, in any script, is king. Your logline. In building a great story around that premise however, you have to give the audience characters to love, get scared with, to root for, to hate (and not hate because they’re lame, but because you want the audience to), to... well, anything that makes them CARE. To become emotionally involved with.

One thing that makes audiences NOT care instantly is when you as the writer don’t know your own characters well enough to know what they’d do in a situation. ANY situation. Doing something the audience (or reader) thinks is not in character, but for story convenience. This has killed more scripts than bad spelling.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend time as actor around some pretty amazing actors. The best ones develop biographies about their characters. One very well known actor had a yellow legal pad filled with pages of character notes. Including things not even in the script, but what he gleaned from what the writer built into the character.

Thinking about it, one of the things that helped me a lot in becoming a better writer was my acting experience. It made me look for things that actors (and STORY) need. Consistency of character. As a writer, before you commit your character to doing anything in your story, you need to ask yourself: “Is this something this character as I have built him/her would really do?”

You’d be surprised how many times you’ll have to rethink things. But it could save your scripts from being thrown into the PASS pile. You can’t provoke the emotion you want from characters who aren’t consistent to what you’ve presented earlier. Yes, you can still twist a character. I do it all the time. But I also weave clues all through the script it’s coming. Leaving clues that the reader (or audience) doesn’t see for what they are until after the reveal is the difficulty. It’s work. It’s thought. It’s creativity. It’s not easy. But then, writing a script that evokes the right kinds of emotion is never easy.

For writers trying to break in, the object of your script is for the reader to not be able to put your script down. The ONLY way this happens is if they NEED to know what’s going to happen to the characters you’ve created. That means not only does your story have to be great, but your characters have to be great in it. That means you as the author have to spend the time with each one of them to get to know them intimately. To know their needs and wants and fears. What makes them laugh. What makes them cry. What motivates them as PEOPLE, not just in the situations and conflicts where you’ve placed them.  And not changing it midstream for convenience. To use your well defined characters to evoke the emotion in the reader you need in order for your script to succeed.

I can tell you from experience that I’ve sat in production meetings with development Execs and said, “That character wouldn’t do that” any number of times and explained with complete certainty exactly why. Because I KNOW that character like I know myself. And it’s saved me from having to execute some pretty horrible notes.

Yes, it’s another time consuming and sometimes painstaking thing you need to do before and during writing. So what? Don’t do it and you’ll be wondering why your scripts never get any traction.