“It’s not about what happens to people on a page; it’s about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind.” -Gordon Lish

There are three kinds of feelings when reading a script—boredom, interest, and “WOW!” Your job as a screenwriter is to create that WOW feeling on as many pages as possible. This book is for all writers who want to deliver that WOW, and who truly understand that great storytelling is about one thing only—engaging the reader emotionally.

Writing for Emotional Impact is for all the frustrated writers who have spent hundreds of dollars on books and seminars only to realize that the formulaic writing they preach leads to boring reading, a “Pass” from readers, and unreturned phone calls from disappointed executives desperate for exciting material.

If you’ve read the screenwriting books, taken the seminars, and have mastered the rules and principles, you’re only halfway there, despite the good intentions of the gurus out there. Although most of them would agree you must write a script that involves the reader, I have yet to see a dramatic increase in script quality. Sure, it seems better. We hear new writers exclaim, “Look how well-structured it is… I got my plot points where they belong… My protagonist follows the hero’s journey, and he changes at the end.”

Close, but no cigar. Understand, though, that these structural foundations are an essential part of any screenplay, and some books offer brilliant and valuable insights. But if you want to complete your education, read on.

Why another screenwriting book? Some of you may be thinking, “Do we really need another book on how to write a great screenplay that sells?” As Robert McKee says, “We don’t need another cookbook to reheat Hollywood leftovers.” I agree. Take a look at how many books there are on bookshelves and online—my latest search on Amazon.com yielded over 1200 results! It boggles the mind.

For the past thirty years, aspiring writers have had a wealth of information devoted to the fundamentals and principles of screenwriting, from books and magazines to seminars and web sites, film school graduate programs, not to mention consultants and screenwriting gurus, all promising you that if you put certain events in a specific order by a specific page number, you’ll have a great screenplay that will sell. And yet, nothing has changed . Most scripts being marketed today are formulaic, mechanical, predictable, and therefore dull.

Why? Because screenwriting is more than just theories and plot recipes. Sure, you need to know the basics, but it’s still a far cry from creating a great script. In my book, The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters, Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman says, “Screenwriting is like fashion: All clothes have the same structure. A shirt has a two sleeves and buttons, but not all shirts look alike. Most classes and books teach you that a shirt has two sleeves and buttons and then expect the student to come up with a designer’s shirt.”

Writer Howard Rodman, whom I also interviewed but wasn’t included due to the book’s length, added that these rules, principles, and theories have become “more tools in the hands of bad development executives. Things like act structure, inciting events, plot points and page numbers are ways in the studio world of taking a script that only one person could have written and transforming it into something anybody could have written.”

Might as well come out and say it—there are two reasons for this book. The first is to present much-needed information to the frustrated writer who can’t find it anywhere despite the incredible array of screenwriting sources. Aspiring writers are still desperate for valuable information. I hear them complain at workshops and conferences how they’re tired of picking up book after book and attending seminar after seminar, and yet not learning anything new.

The second reason is a more selfish one: As a busy instructor and script consultant, I’m tired of reading awful scripts. My thought is that if I present techniques used by professional writers, the beginners will improve their writing to a satisfactory level. It may not be great enough to sell, but at least it’ll raise the level of writing and make the reading experience and analysis more bearable.

It’s time to go beyond the basics and focus on what the screenwriting craft is really about— creating an emotional experience in readers. Good writing is good writing because you feel something when you read it. It’s why a great movie can be three hours long and you don’t even notice, while an awful ninety minute one can feel like 90 hours. It’s why psychologists call movies “Emotion Machines.”

The experience of emotions is the most compelling reason we go to the movies, watch television, play video games, read novels, and attend plays and sporting events. And yet, emotional response is a subject too often overlooked.

When I became a script reader, I thought it was a great time for screenwriters with all this available instruction we didn’t have before. I thought I would read decent scripts, especially since many were from mega-literary agencies like CAA, ICM, and William Morris. Boy, was I wrong. Out of the hundreds of scripts I read over the years, I’ve only recommended five. Understand, though, that many of the scripts I passed on were technically flawless—no spelling or format errors, well-structured, with all the prescribed act breaks on the “correct” pages.

The main problem was that they all felt the same, as if they’d been written by a connect-the-dots computer programmed with the same old formulaic algorithm. Not only was I shocked that even agented scripts were mediocre at best, but also annoyed that many aspiring writers were wasting their money on instruction that was getting them nowhere. To this day, a surprising lack of awareness still exists among aspiring writers about what great screenwriting is really about.

Emotion, not logic, is the stuff of drama. Emotion is your screenplay’s life blood.

Thinking about emotion

What if screenwriters took these statements seriously and viewed their product not as a 110-page blueprint bound by two brads, but as the promise of an intense and satisfying emotional experience? Think about how easier it would be to market your screenplay once you truly understood the reader’s emotional needs of great storytelling, why one story grabs them and another bores them, why some words transcend the page and cause emotional fulfillment, and others propel the reader to toss the script away. Emotional contact with the reader is the only strategy for success.

To begin, you must shift your perspective. It’s time to move from thinking about a movie audience to writing for a reader. Your experiences in a movie theatre are caused by the unified craft of about two hundred artists, whose contributions result in the final product you’re watching on the silver screen. You experience emotions from the musical score, the editing, the cinematography, the directing, the set design, etc… Reading is a personal activity. It’s just between the reader and the page, one individual connecting with words. A reader will only experience emotions from your words and how you string them together on the page. You’re the only person responsible for the reader’s emotional response. If it’s not the desired response, if he’s* ( *For the sake of reading simplicity and clarity, the use of the masculine he, his, and him should be viewed as neutral and refers to both male and female readers, writers, characters, actors, executives, etc… No sexism is intended). bored instead of captivated, that’s it. Game over. Still think screenwriting is easy? Sure, it’s easy to write 110 pages in proper format with slug lines, description, and dialogue. Keeping the reader interested and moving him emotionally is another story.

It’s time to move from worrying about the first ten pages to realizing it’s the first page that counts, then the second, then the third… In fact, it’s the first beat that counts, the first sentence, the first word. Several readers have told me their bosses are known for reading one page at random. If it doesn’t grab them, if it doesn’t make them want to turn the next page, the script is tossed away. Try it yourself with a classic script. Pick up Casablanca, Chinatown, or The Silence of the Lambs. Open it at random on any page and start reading. Even if you have no idea where you are in the story, you’ll be hooked by the dialogue, characters, or conflicts in the scene, and you’ll want to turn the page. This should be your standard of excellence.

It’s time to move from fantasies about seeing your script on the screen to building trust between you and the reader. Every time a reader picks up a script, he trusts that you’re a professional writer who’ll create a satisfying emotional experience. If your writing is not skillful enough to deliver that desired experience, you’ve broken that trust, and that reader won’t be as trustful with your next script.

It’s time to move from submitting substandard first drafts because you just can’t wait for a producer to hand you a million dollar check to honing your craft and testing every single page of your script for emotion.

It’s time to move from superficial rules, page templates, and principles to practical skills and techniques that cause the desired emotional experiences in the reader.

But maybe you’re still unconvinced. Maybe you’d like some corroborating evidence that emotion is everything in Hollywood. Not only is the emotional experience the essence of storytelling, it is what Hollywood buys and sells.

Hollywood is in the emotion-delivery business

You already know this is a business, but when you think about it, Hollywood trades in human emotions, delivering emotional experiences carefully packaged in movies and television to the tune of ten billion dollars per year. As I said earlier, movies and television shows are “emotion machines.”

Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense and audience manipulation, once said to writer Ernest Lehman, while they were filming North by Northwest , “We’re not making a movie; we’re making an organ, like in a church. We press this chord, the audience laughs. We press that chord, and they gasp. We press these notes and they chuckle. Someday, we won’t have to make a movie. We’ll just attach them to electrodes and play the various emotions for them to experience in the theatre.”

Look at the way Hollywood advertises its emotional packages—movie trailers and newspaper ads. The next time you see a trailer, disconnect emotionally from it and put on your analytical cap. Notice how each split-second image or brief moment taken from a scene evokes a particular emotion in an instant, the sum of all images promising the viewer a fantastic emotional experience worth the price of a movie ticket.

Take a look at newspaper ads for today’s movies and you’ll notice most of them have review blurbs, some from established reviewers and media outlets, but most from unknown sources. Don’t you wonder why the marketing department would choose to include them, and even sometimes make them up? A reason is that these praises are most often the deciding factor in choosing to see that movie on a Saturday night. Movie marketers live by these statements which are extracted from the actual review written by the film critic. Pay close attention to them and you’ll see words and sentences such as, “will grab you from start to finish, energetically funny, gritty, intense, and unpredictable, a staggering, haunting, and intense movie-going experience, pulse-pounding, highly-affecting, powerfully seductive, superbly gripping, an incredible ride, packs an emotional wallop, hugely satisfying.”

When was the last time you saw a movie ad that said, “Well-structured, great plot points, fresh dialogue?” No. What you see more often than not are emotional blurbs, which are promises of the emotional experience you’ll feel by watching the movie. They’re selling emotions because that’s what audiences want.

Can your script match these emotional promises to a reader? Ask yourself why would a studio invest $80 million in your script (today’s average cost of producing and marketing a movie) if it fails at the emotional level? Without a thorough commitment to developing this craft—in other words, writing script after script until you’re able to evoke strong emotions in a reader, trying to sell your screenplays is a waste of time and money.

I hope you’re convinced. Hollywood buys and sells emotional experiences. Therefore, if you want to become a successful screenwriter you must create emotional experiences in your scripts. Previous books and seminars have been helpful in building a solid foundation, but now you need the skills and the tools to create these emotional experiences. You need dramatic techniques. You need craft.

Craft means evoking emotion

You’ve heard it hundreds of times, how an aspiring writer needs to hone his craft. But what exactly does that mean? Generally, craft is knowing how to make things happen on the page. Specifically, it’s the technical ability to control language to create an intentional emotion or image in the reader’s mind, hold his attention, and reward him with a moving experience. In short, craft is connecting with the reader through words on the page. It’s all about, as McKee says, “a good story well told.” Well told means evoking emotion.

Great writers instinctively use linguistic sleight-of-hand to generate an emotional response in their audience. They’re in tune with what they feel, hope for, or are afraid of for every character, at every moment of the story. They don’t believe in art by accident. Great writers are in charge of the reader’s emotions at all times—from page 1 to 110; every single page. That’s craft. All the techniques presented in this book come from highly successful screenwriters who’ve mastered the craft and created great screenplays that went on to become great films.

Your double task as a writer

“Art is fire plus algebra.” –Jorge Luis Borges

Your job is to seduce the reader, to make them have to turn the pages to see what happens next, to interest the reader so intensely that they are captivated, taken “out” of themselves into the world you’ve created. You want them to forget they’re actually reading words on a page. In order to do that, you have to find the most exciting and emotionally involving way to tell your story well.

“A good story, well told” has two elements. Therefore, you have a double task: First, create the imaginary world and life of your characters (a good story), which is the basic information taught by most books and seminars to stimulate your creativity—how to create concepts, build characters from scratch, develop and structure plots. And second, create the intended emotional effect on the reader (well told). We’ve all been bored by writers and filmmakers who told their stories badly. The same goes for reading thousands of terrible scripts, not because they had mediocre stories, but because they were badly told. As the quote above implies, great storytelling is a mixture of sheer creative talent on one hand (fire) and highly skilled technique on the other (algebra).

Some of you may be tempted to say, “Well, that’s obvious. Every good writer knows that you need to engage the reader.” Sure, talented writers know it. But you’d be surprised how many writers haven’t bothered to study the craft enough to know how to do it. They’re not even aware they’re writing for a reader. They constantly look for shortcuts to writing screenplays—easy solutions, character charts, and fill-in-the blanks templates. The overwhelming amount of artificial, cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers, and therefore rejected scripts clearly indicates this is true.

Most people think writing a script is easy, like playing a video game. A proliferation of screenwriting software adds to this attitude. Writing 110 pages in screenplay format is a piece of cake. Everyone does it. Writing 110 pages that move a reader and keep his interest throughout, now that’s a lot harder than it looks. That requires talent and craft.

So craft means evoking emotion on the page, but which emotions are we talking about?

The three types of storytelling emotions

When reading a script or watching a movie, we experience three different types of emotions, which I call “the three V’s:” Voyeuristic, Vicarious, and Visceral. Ideally, your script should engage the reader on all three levels.

Voyeuristic emotions relate to our curiosity about new information, new worlds, and the relationships between characters. These feelings come from the writer’s passions and interests, and therefore can’t be taught. But you can learn what interests you. Interest, desire to know, to understand, to eavesdrop on intimate conversations are examples of voyeuristic emotions. They’re enhanced by our knowledge that this is make-believe—we know we’re safe from being “caught” as we “spy” on an intimate scene. Make-believe is the glass wall that separates the intriguing events you’ve created in your script from the fear of consequences we might experience in real life. For instance, in real life, we wouldn’t want to swim in shark-infested waters. But when you sit there in the dark, watching Jaws, you imagine yourself in the water, without any fear of being eaten by the shark.

As to vicarious emotions, when we identify with a character, we become them. We feel what the characters feel. We live vicariously through them, and it’s no longer a story about a character in a struggle; it’s about our struggle. These feelings come from the emotions your main character experiences, and therefore from the events you’ve set up. Vicarious emotions are enhanced by our curiosity about human nature and the human condition. If we recognize the emotions the character goes through, and we’re connected with that character, we should experience the same emotions vicariously.

Visceral emotions are the feelings we most want to experience while watching a movie, and the ones you want the reader to feel while reading your script. They include interest, curiosity, anticipation, tension, surprise, fear, excitement, laughter, etc…; the epic films; the special effects; the physical thrills we pay good money to feel. If your script delivers a fair amount of visceral emotions, it will give the reader a sense of having been entertained.

The majority of advanced techniques presented in this book are designed to arouse visceral emotions. But before we move on, we have to understand the difference between character emotions and reader emotions.

Character emotions vs. Reader emotions

It’s important to distinguish these two types. For example, in a comedy, a character may be stressed, but as viewers, we laugh. Or in a thriller, he may be calm and unaware, while we fear for him because we know something he doesn’t. This distinction is essential because writers who have a general inkling that emotions are important in a screenplay focus too much on character emotions. They figure if they make a character cry, for instance, we’ll feel sadness or pity. If we’re empathizing with that character, maybe. But it’s not enough. Think how many dramas with strong character emotions fell flat because viewers were bored—no visceral emotions. Whether your character cries is not as important as whether the reader feels visceral emotions. Like Gordon Lish said, “It’s not about what happens to people on a page; it’s about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind.”

What this book offers

This book goes right to the source— the craft of highly successful screenwriters, analyzing classic examples, and presenting a smorgasbord of storytelling techniques and tricks of the trade that have one purpose— intensify the reader’s connection to the page.

Whereas 101 Habits explored the working habits of highly successful screenwriters in the hope of learning behaviors that would lead to success, this book presents their specific dramatic techniques in the hope of learning what works in a successful screenplay. Whereas 101 habits was about the storytellers, this is about storytelling.

The purpose of this book is not to prescribe but to explore and present. You won’t read “must” and “should” here. I can’t tell you how to write. No one can. But I’m a strong believer in tools, not rules. I can show you what works in great scripts, how skilled writers capture a reader’s attention, and hold it from beginning to end, with a wide range of visceral emotions in between. My hope is that you can apply these techniques, and combine them with skill, talent, and imagination to create great art. The only rule that matters is that the script works, in other words, that it engages the reader emotionally. If fact, it’s the only rule in Hollywood which has no exceptions. Rules, principles, and formulas are about what to do. Craft and techniques are about how to do it effectively. No page numbers, just basic storytelling tools. Put them in your toolbox and use them as needed.

This book is intended to complement rather than replace other screenwriting books. It goes beyond the basics. So if you’re an absolute beginner with no knowledge of the craft, make sure you read them first to build a solid foundation, and then read this book to complete your education.

Writer beware

Before we move on, I’d like to offer some caveats: If you love the “magic” of movies, put this book back on the shelf. This book offers advanced techniques that will demystify what you see on the screen. Many of them will seem familiar because you often see them in stories that work. But beware: you’ll never experience a movie or read a script the same way again. It’s as if you loved magic tricks and were later shown their secret. The illusion is now shattered and you can’t see the same trick with the same fascination. In this book, you will be presented with the secrets of great writing. If you don’t want the “illusion” shattered, do not read on.

This book assumes a basic knowledge of screenwriting fundamentals. This is an advanced book on the craft of screenwriting and is to be used as a complement to any how-to book on how to write great screenplays that sell. The techniques presented here won’t automatically turn you into a great screenwriter. You still need to apply them to your original ideas and keep writing to hone your craft. But they will definitely help you become a better writer.

Okay, so now you know that evoking emotion on the page should be your main focus in drafting a screenplay. Screenwriting means more that writing slug lines, description, and dialogue. It means accepting that your audience is the reader, and eliciting an emotional response in that reader. Emotion means “disturbance” from the Latin “to disturb or agitate.” You’re literally trying to disturb the usual life of the reader; you’re trying to move them, disturb their hearts and minds, in a sense. It’s what readers demand, and what Hollywood is in the business of buying and selling. From this point on, I want you to start thinking, “I’m in the emotion-delivery business, and my job is to evoke emotions in a reader.” Write this in big, bold letters and pin it on your bulletin board to remind you of your duties as a screenwriter.

But before we can disturb readers, we should get to know them. Who are they? Why are they so influential? And more important, what do they look for in a great script? Let’s meet the reader…