Writing for Emotional Impact: 
Maximizing the Reader's Emotional Response to Your Pages
by Karl Iglesias

You can Learn more about Writing For Emotional Impact by taking Karl’s Master Class at The Great American Pitchfest on Saturday, June 26. Visit www.pitchfest.com to register.


When it comes to movies, no one will deny that emotion is the glue that holds our attention to the screen on a moment-to-moment basis.  This is equally true for readers of your screenplay.  Emotion is the glue that holds their attention to the page on a moment-to-moment basis.  

Psychologists call movies “Emotion Machines,” a thought that was recently validated when I heard Ernest Lehman share an anecdote about controlling the emotions of an audience.  During the making of North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock told him, ‘We’re not making a movie; we’re making a church organ.  We press this chord, and the audience laughs.  We press that chord, and they gasp.  We press these notes, and they tense up.  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.’ 

Emotion is everything in storytelling, and Hollywood is a business of human emotions, carefully packaged and sold.  If you doubt this, take a look at your newspaper’s movie ads and notice which words jump out at you.  In today’s Los Angeles Times, I spotted ‘…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.’  Notice how these blurbs are essentially emotional experiences.  The studios are saying, ‘Buy a ticket and you’ll feel this too.’  

So why is it that aspiring writers fail to create emotionally satisfying screenplays?  Why is this crucial element missing from most beginner scripts, despite the overwhelming proliferation of screenwriting instruction books, magazine articles, seminars, script gurus, college programs, and screenwriting software?  For the past thirty years, aspiring writers have had a wealth of information, most of it correct and useful­­ in developing a solid story.  And yet, nothing has changed.  Why?  Because screenwriting is not about rules, page templates and theories.  It's about creating an emotional experience in your readers, riveting their attention, and keeping them glued to the page.  It’s about creating curiosity and interest in your story, excitement for your concept, and empathy for your characters.  And yet, this is a subject too often overlooked.

Is it because evoking emotion is considered the ‘art’ of storytelling, reserved for the truly talented?  I don’t believe so.  Screenwriting is a trade.  And like any trade, there are proven, specific techniques that make it work.  Eugene Vale said it best in his classic book, Vale’s Techniques of Screen and Television Writing: “When you open a Shakespeare play, you find a number of words on white paper.  These words were arranged in a certain order about four centuries ago.  Today, they still have the almost unbelievable power of making us cry in certain places and laugh in others.  Because they were arranged in such a manner as to contain emotional stimuli, they have the effect of making us feel sympathy or hatred, or filling us with pity or horror. If such a transmission can take place over hundreds of years, if generations and generations of audiences consisting of different kinds of people are able to experience the same emotions, surely there must be laws and rules which effectuate such an amazing feat.  And if there are such laws and rules, it is likely that there are craftsmen who have mastered them.”

Highly successful screenwriters have indeed mastered these techniques. That’s why they are in such demand. And we can learn from them. 

Many instructors advise that the first ten pages of your script are the most important part.  Forget about that.  The most important page of your script is the FIRST one.  Then the second, and the third, etc… Readers are such a fickle bunch, if your first page is dull, it doesn’t matter how exciting the rest of your script is.  Mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer is known to put a script down after one page.  You can’t afford even a single a page that’s off.  The solution is to evoke at least one emotion, whether voyeuristic, vicarious or visceral on every page of your script.  Please note, however, that this doesn’t excuse you from the basics of creating an appealing concept, fascinating characters and a compelling story.  But the following three techniques will hold the reader’s attention for as long as you use them:  

1. Create Curiosity

Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and make sense of things.  We love stories because we long to know what happens next.  So the easiest way to arouse curiosity is through the power of ‘Questions’.  One of the best questions in movie history, which have maintained reader interest to the end, have been ‘What is Rosebud?’ (Citizen Kane), ‘Who’s Kaiser Soze?’ (The Usual Suspects), and ‘Will Hannibal help Clarice catch Buffalo Bill?’ (The Silence of the Lambs).  Setting a question and withholding the answer automatically creates an emotional itch that demands to be scratched.  If you analyze films, you’ll discover that every story answers a central question.  Within the story, every act has its own question to answer, within each act, every scene sets up a question.  And within a scene, each beat sets up a question.  For example, in North by Northwest, the central question is ‘Will Roger Thornhill clear up the mistaken identity?’  In the first act, it is, ‘Will Thornhill find the real Mr. Kaplan?’  The second act asks, ‘Will he escape attempts at his life while avoiding police capture?’  In the final act, the question becomes, ‘Will Thornhill save Eve?’  All these questions on a moment-to-moment basis are designed to make the reader ask, ‘What’s going to happen next?’  

2. Create Anticipation

Readers become engrossed in a script when there’s a promise of important events.  As soon as you set up a goal, you create anticipation, creating an emotional tension in the reader.  The reader looks forward, usually eagerly, to something that’s going to happen -- the big showdown, a reunion or a feeling of fear, especially at the thought of experiencing or encountering something unpleasant.  Anticipation should be everywhere in the script, at the story level (will hero achieve goal?), and at the scene level (will character get what he wants?).  

The best technique to set up anticipation is Reader-Superior Position, also known as Dramatic Irony, which means being in on something the characters don't know.  To illustrate this technique, Alfred Hitchcock always used the example of two people sitting at a table in a restaurant with a bomb ticking away underneath.  He gave two versions of the same scene.  One where, like the two characters, we don't know there's a bomb.  When it goes off, we're surprised and that's it.  The better version is tilting the camera underneath the table so we know there's a bomb, and we feel a whole range of emotions as the bomb ticks down.  Another example is the hugely successful Titanic, which had a built-in superior position, because we knew the ship would sink.  But Cameron set up two main anticipations: the Jack and Rose romance sets up their anticipation of happiness, while the fact that they’re on the Titanic sets up our anticipation of the ship sinking.  

3. Create Tension

Once you establish anticipation, you can create another powerful visceral sensation –- tension -- by controlling the delay of the anticipated resolution.  William Goldman once said, “Make ‘em laugh. Make ‘em cry.  But most of all, make ‘em wait.”  To maximize reader interest, you can create a balance between frustration and reward -- frustrating readers by preventing or postponing the resolution or rewarding them when the problem is resolved.  The longer the delay, the longer interest is maintained.  Many film theorists point out that drama is nothing more than a series of problem moments, related to the goals and emotions of the characters, which produce tension in the reader.  Aaron Sorkin puts it this way:  “Tension and discovery.  It's what rivets an audience, holds its attention and makes a story absorbing.”

Which events do we usually associate with tension?  Any unresolved pressure or obstacle that affects our basic needs, such as survival, belonging, esteem, our need to know, etc…(life or death situations, deadlines, bombs ticking down, planes running out of fuel, a jury reaching a verdict).  The more there is at stake, and the greater the delay in resolution, the greater the tension, especially if you create doubt as to when or how the problem will be resolved, such as the unpredictability of a bomb with no clock which could blow up at any second or a disturbed character who could snap at any moment. 

Successful screenwriters always think of specific emotions, especially the visceral responses of their readers.  You can do the same as you craft a scene.  You are a painter on the page and emotions are the colors on your palette.  Get to know them, like a painter knows the power of each color on the spectrum.  If you keep emotion at the forefront of your scenes, your words will disappear, and readers will lose themselves in the script.  The best compliment a writer can get is that the reader forgot he was reading.

Karl Iglesias is a screenwriter and sought-after script doctor and consultant, specializing in the reader’s emotional response to the written page.  He is the best-selling author of Writing For Emotional Impact: Advanced dramatic techniques to attract, engage, and fascinate the reader from beginning to end and The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters. He teaches at UCLA Extension’s Writer’s Program, online at Writers University, and is a regular columnist on the craft for Creative Screenwriting Magazine. He can be reached through his website at www.karliglesias.com.