624 - Creating Empathy for Your Characters

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.