Saturday

Getting Emotional

In screenplays, and books as well, story is driven by Character and not by plot. It is the characters choices he/she makes when presented with obstacles, that makes up story.

This being said, I was reading (at work, sorry boss) a short snippet of an article about specific scripts and writing screenplays, where a word came up that got me thinking. That word is EMOTIONS.

Bottom line is that we are all driven by emotions (some more than others). We all have needs/goals we want to accomplish. We go about our lives trying to accomplish… stuff. But what influences us and, what ultimately drives the decisions we make are our emotions.

When watching a movie or reading a book, as soon as we are emotionally drawn into a character and the situations they get themselves into, we become invested. We are hooked. A good natured, down on his luck character who is faced with horrible things that have fallen upon him or her, but shows qualities we all love in people, you, the audience wants to root for that character. When a character is a crapper of a dude that does horrible things to other people, we want that guy to get what he deserves. The audience is drawn in. Or, when a character is always up beat, has a better job than you think you deserve, and nothing but good things happen to him or her, you are actually happy to see, or at least emotionally engaged, when a little (or a lot of) hardship falls on that character. The answer to this is that we want to feel emotions.

Getting back to screenwriting… Novel writers are given an open book (so to speak) to dive into background of their characters (remember character drives story, not plot). The novel writer is allowed to describe, in great detail, page after page, everything thing we need to know about the characters. How and why they got to this place they are now in their lives, where and why they live in a certain house, city or neighborhood, what happened to them personally and how they feel about these things that they have gone through. We find out all the important stuff about their family and friends prior to the setting and time of the novel. It is just unfair.

Unfair, unfair… Unfair. It is just UNFAIR. Screw them novel writers (I’m not crying).

Screenwriters are just not able to do this. We the audience drive down to the local theatre maybe once every couple of weeks for 2 hours, and we watch characters on screen wanting stuff to happen to them. We want as much packed in those 2 hours as possible. It is up to screenwriters to do just that… make every scene count. The only way to do that is to set up a need/want of the main character, present obstacles, throw in a couple surprises, and finish the story. The only way to do that is dig down deep into the audiences’ emotions.

A screenwriter has to be able to give you enough background, but not enough background because that would be boring. A screenwriter has to make the audience understand why you should want to follow him or her on the journey in just a handful of scenes. A screenwriter has to pack as much as he or she can in as little dialogue as possible. And, most of all a screenwriter must make the audience care about the main character from scene to scene, all the way to the end.

Here comes the little machine walking across the page… WALL-E. This movie is the prime example of the importance of emotions in screenplays. In the first third of the movie, there is no dialogue but, by the time Wall-E goes to save EVE, the screenwriter has tugged on your emotions. We, the audience, want to follow and cheer on that little garbage compacter. We want him to be happy and we want ourselves to be happy in those 2 hours before we go home.

Now I have to figure out how I can put more emotions in my screenplays.

Back to work.

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