First Draft: Put Audiences in Your Characters’ Shoes With These Seven Ways to Elicit Empathy in Your Screenplay

4. Dealing with Disease, Addiction, or Other Inner (and Outer) Struggles

It could be cancer, shame, guilt, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or an addiction. When you give your character an inner struggle to deal with, the audience feels that empathy towards them—even if your character is an antagonist or antihero.

Had Breaking Bad just been about a man who decided to live a life of crime for money, there would have been little to no empathy towards him. But because he had cancer and was doing all of that for his family, the audience feels more empathy towards him.

And this also applies to outer struggles as well. When characters deal or live with physical ailments or disabilities, the audience empathizes with their struggles—even if it is at a superficial level at first. Giving a character these types of traits can be done in a subtle fashion or can be center to the concept as a whole.

Nemo from Finding Nemo represented a character that had a subtle physical disability in the form of a birth defect in his fin. While this wasn’t center to the overall concept of the story, it was particularly central to his character arc—and his father’s as well.

In Wonder, Auggie has a medical facial deformity. This outer struggle is key to the concept of the movie itself and plays a huge part in every character within the story.

Depending on any disease, addiction, inner struggle, or outer struggle isn’t a desirable way to tackle any character or story. Instead, they should be used to inject opportunities for characters to prevail against the conflicts that they cause. That is what offers the audience a cathartic experience as they empathize with your characters.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8