624 - Creating Empathy for Your Characters
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2024
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this compendium episode, John and Craig look at how we can best articulate our characters’ inner lives and get the audience invested in them. They discuss the intricacies of point of view, finding truthful emotional states, and why it’s so important for your characters to be liars.
How do you engage an audience’s empathy? What makes an audience cry? What emotional response breaks their trust? Why is point of view important, and how can it be manipulated? How can lies be used to drive a character to emotional authenticity? And what is the best way to reveal your character’s secrets?
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig talk single-use characters and crown the greatest day-player of all time.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Episode 358 – Point of View
- Scriptnotes Episode 472 – Emotional States
- Scriptnotes Episode 151 – Secrets and Lies
- Scriptnotes Episode 467 – Another Word for Euphemism
- Gödel’s incompleteness theorems
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and |
| 0:02.5 | welcome my name is John August and this is episode 624 of script notes |
| 0:06.0 | a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters |
| 0:09.4 | Craig and I were both traveling for the holidays so so we asked producer Drew Markwart to dig through the archives and compile a character compendium. |
| 0:18.0 | So Drew, what have you got for us? |
| 0:20.0 | We've got three character-related segments that all kind of do with getting |
| 0:24.4 | into a character's head space and bringing the audience along with them. |
| 0:28.0 | And so we're really focusing on scene work. That's great. So this is probably top of mine for you because I know you were just |
| 0:34.3 | working on this character's chapter or chapters for the book. Yeah, exactly. And these are ones that just sort of popped out to me. We talk a lot about sort of character on the level of the entire movie or the entire show, but it was really fun to sort of dig into the specifics in a scene. |
| 0:48.5 | That sounds great. |
| 0:49.5 | So what's the first segment we'll hear? |
| 0:51.0 | First is a segment on point of view from episode 358. |
| 0:55.0 | So that's again point of view for the whole story and also for the scenes and |
| 0:58.0 | sort of how to play with point of view and use it to your advantage. |
| 1:02.4 | That's terrific. |
| 1:03.0 | That's always a good lesson. |
| 1:04.0 | And once after that. |
| 1:05.0 | Next is sort of the character's inter-emotional states from episode 472. |
| 1:09.0 | So that's sort of finding the emotional truths in a scene |
| 1:12.0 | and thinking about using verbs versus |
| 1:14.4 | adjectives in terms of what a character is doing. So the way that like, you know, |
| 1:18.4 | watching someone cry doesn't make you cry necessarily, but watching someone try not |
... |
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