I’m watching “The Queens Gambit.” It’s a Netflix Limited Series presented as an historical drama, although fiction.
There’s a dormitory scene in an orphanage. It is the 1950s. There’s an open room with rows of made-up beds. Elizabeth is taken to her allocated spot on her first day by the Headmistress. She sits on the old fashioned spring loaded bed, and it sags and creaks.
That resonated with me. That was my experience, too! I went to a boarding school and had those very same beds with sheets and blankets. I therefore felt the coldness of the scene and that bewildering school feel.
You can’t expect to resonate with everybody. Not everyone will have gone to a boarding school. Adding various layers of experience throughout your scenes may harness someone’s memory, but add nuance to another. These are little details which can go far to forming a bond with your viewers.
I am invested in the show. I want to know more. What other experiences might resonate with me?
Tangible Experiences
Your lead character is (hopefully) going through stresses as you have them challenged by the world. You read your scenes back and it feels like you’re getting there but something is still missing.
“Will the audience really care about my hero?” you think to yourself. “Will they really get the pain and suffering?”
If you fail to create that relationship between your characters and audience, then you will fall short of having the impact and care you need. You want viewers to invest in your story.
Recall those TV shows you may have seen where you think about the characters in between watching episodes and wonder how they are going to get through their ordeals. They almost become your friends. You see them in your living room over many nights.
A great example of this is the final episode of season 6 of “The Walking Dead.” Rick and his group are kneeling on the ground with Negan wielding a barbed wired baseball bat threatening that one of them will die. You have to wait for season 7 to find out the result of that.
This really worked because the build up of the characters over the seasons was strong and the gravity of the situation so serious and tenable. Many of us have seen what a baseball bat can do. Some of us might even have climbed over a barbed wire fence and felt the steely prick of the barbs!
If you’re writing a screenplay for a movie, you don’t have multiple hours of episodic television to color your characters. You need quick methods to instill sympathy and emotional investment.
You do this by putting your characters in relatable situations. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a scene where a fictional dragon comes and bites an arm off, or a zombie tears at the ankles of a character. Even within these fantastical genres, however, you can portray moments of peril in tangible ways.
The pricking of a finger on a thorn, trapping a hand in a car window or door, cutting of a finger with a knife, be it swung by an assailant or your character. These experiences are all likely to resonate with your audience as they are plausible injuries which many might have been through themselves.
You can end with the gunshot wounds, axe swings to the body etc... but very few people will know what these feel like. Sure, we know they’re bad, but they are harder to relate to. They don't resonate.
These small instances build up to and lead to your climax scenes. Don’t wait for your third act to use these to grow the bond with your characters. We will feel more toward your hero once we relate to them and their experiences.
This will not be relevant to every story or genre. But notice how when you watch action or horror films, you often see a minor injury earlier on. These resonate and set up for the bigger ones later.
Resonating doesn’t have to be though physical pain:
Other experiences qualify and further your scope for character bonding. Putting your protagonist in other familiar scenarios, like frustration or loss, will also create sympathy or empathy.
Michael Douglas’s character, William Foster, in “Falling Down,” a 1993 film by Joel Schumacher, portrays an unemployed and divorced engineer. His frustration builds from the moment he is stuck in LA traffic and his air conditioning fails. He is trying to get across town to his daughter’s birthday.
A number of tangible issues arise but we feel for this lead character, although he ends up in a rampage. The frustrations of society and its injustices resonate with us. Most of us, if not all, have had our bad days. This is a grand depiction of what happens when they compile and culminate at an overwhelming point.
We shouldn’t, but we do:
Look at the TV show character of “Dexter Morgan.” If you were given a brief premise of the show you would wonder how on earth you would support this antihero protagonist. And yet we do.
He is a forensic blood spatter analyst by day, and a vigilante serial killer by night. The catch? He only targets other murderers who have escaped justice.
We accept this because of the mentoring from his adoptive father and flashbacks to his childhood, where he learns a moral code. Dexter doesn’t come across as a threat to us, if we were placed in the scenes with him. He explicitly “offs the wicked” who should have been caught by the judicial system.
One method used to turn our emotions is Dexter’s love of children. He is portrayed as feeling at ease with them, and thus protects them. This will appeal to any parent, in particular. As a result, Dexter delivers greater wrath on those who have done harm to children. In the audience’s seat, we cheer for this!
Jeez! What did I just say back there? We are rooting for a killer? Through clever writing, yes we are indeed rooting for a killer. The scenarios resonate.