A significant factor that can make the audience love or hate a movie/series/ or story is the characters. Your viewers should love and relate to the characters to care about the story. So the main thing to plan is creating relatable characters!
In this post, we will be giving 9 screenplay writing tricks you can use to make your characters more relatable to the audience.
We say relatable, NOT Likable.
This is a common mistake many screenplay writers make. Don’t waste time making your characters do good things so the audience or readers like them. Such “angle-like” characters turn out to be flat and predictable.
Whether your protagonist is a mother, teacher, police officer, drug dealer, serial killer, or even a robot… They should be relatable so that the audience would root for them and feel the urge to continue watching to see what will happen to them.
Okay.. let’s get to the point: Here are some screenplay writing techniques that you could use to make the protagonists of your script relatable:
1. Make Your Characters Grey
Characters in your script should never be just evil or just good (black or white)… they should be grey.
That is because you want to make them as human as possible. So even the protagonist should have flaws so people would relate more to them.
All-good or all-evil characters result in flat characters that will seem very artificial.
2. Let Them Save a Cat
Blake Snyder (the author of the famous scriptwriting book Save The Cat) suggests that the protagonist should do something good early on in the script.
Think of it as such: A character walking on the street finds a cat stuck in a tree, so he helps it. That does not have to do anything with the story… It just shows that the character has good in them. Snyder thinks that this would make the audience like the character more.
Of course, the character doesn’t always have to save a cat 🙂
Have the character do something nice and selfless at the beginning of the script.
In Netflix’s House of Cards, Frank actually kills a dog at the beginning of the first episode rather than “saving a cat.” But he kills the dog to save it from misery because it is in pain. Even this act is considered selfless according to the justification of the character.
3. Show Their Passion
To make the characters more human, you should give them something to be passionate about.
Passion can be towards the person the character loves, his dream, family, job, or cause…
In most cases, the character’s passion is naturally present in the script as the character’s goal. But we suggest showing and expressing this passion in the writing so the audience would know clearly about it and feel with the character.
4. Give Them Personality traits
When building your characters, you probably considered their traits: caring, OCD, introverted, funny, honest, sneaky…
Great! Now in the script, try to stick to the character traits you assigned, and to make the character more relatable, you should show them and be truthful.
This will, again, make the character more human.
5. Give Them a Backstory
A tragic or interesting backstory usually makes the audience care more about the character. It makes them interested in knowing more about him and how this backstory affected his life.
That is because they know him more and feel empathetic towards him.
This is how you can create an emotional connection between the audience and the character.
Most important is creating the character’s backstory naturally, without overloading.
6. Give Them The X Factor
To have your relatable characters, highlight the factor that makes them unique and cool.
If your main character has a superpower, show how cool it is.
If wise, show how he can use his wits to solve problems.
Or if he is a musician, show how the audience is fascinated by his music…
7. Show Them Struggle
This could be the oldest trick in the book of making the audience love and care about your characters.
People like to see the characters on the screen in their lowest stage. They want to see them struggle in their life before they achieve their great goal or overcome the main obstacle.
8. Make them Take Action
Lovable characters take action. These actions should move the story forward and affect the character arc.
If the character just neglects or complains constantly without taking any action, then the audience would be frustrated with the character and would not like him.
9. Let Them Learn
Use the struggles and back story to move the script forward. When your characters learn from their problems and mistakes, this will make them more human.
This will make the audience appreciate and like the character more.
Relatable Characters ARE Indeed Likeable!
If you want to audience to like your protagonist, the character should be relatable. All the techniques we discussed in this article revolve around a primary goal: Make the characters in your screenplay as human as possible.
This is more important than making the audience like the character only because he is good or nice!
