“Make Me Care”

It’s probably the greatest story commandment because if a script reader cares about your characters, they will buy into your story. If they do not care…

Every December since 2012, I have carved out time to interview every single writer who has won a Nicholl Fellowship that year. 2019 was no different. This came to mind when I interviewed two Nicholl winners: Walker McNight and Renee Pallai. I noted there was a common thread in their respective approaches to writing a screenplay. First, a quote excerpted from Walker’s acceptance speech at the November awards ceremony in Beverly Hills:

“My favorite storytellers throughout my life have been able to conjure something out of nothing and make me actually care.”

When I heard this comment, I was reminded of the great TED Talk by Pixar writer-director Andrew Stanton. In it, he begins the entire presentation by making this point:

The children’s television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, “Frankly there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you know their story.” And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, “Make me care.”

Please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically… make me care.

We all know what it’s not like to not care. You’ve gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching, channel after channel. And suddenly you actually stop on one, it’s already halfway over, but something’s caught you and you’re drawn in. That’s not by chance, that’s by design.

The difference between caring about a story and not caring about it is the difference between that project’s life and death. Anyone involved in the Hollywood project acquisition and development community — manager, agent, producer, studio exec — enters a script read with this hope: They want to FEEL something. They read so much material, their experience is much like what Stanton describes: They switch from one submission to the next with little to no connection to the content. The implicit assumption is if a Hollywood development exec doesn’t care about your script, then a movie audience won’t either.

But then as they work their way through a stack of scripts, something catches them. They’re drawn in. They care about what’s going on in that specific story.

That is your goal. That’s what you want.

Make them care.

As a writer, you may ask: How to do that? How to make a script reader care? Renee Pillai zeroed in on one key in her Nicholl acceptance speech:

“In everything I write, I try to find and am often spurred by the seed of something deeply personal.”

Find a personal connection to the story. Renee lives in Malaysia. She set the story for her Nicholl-winning script Boy With Kite in Nebraska. She’s never been there. The story’s three main characters: an orphaned ten year-old boy, his estranged aunt, and her current lover. As she said in our interview, “I am none of these characters, but I am all of these characters.”

What she meant was she could identify personally with each character as they are dealing with their own emotional and psychological issues. The fact she cares about each character makes us care about them as we read the script.

At the end of the day, this is the writer’s biggest commandment: To peer out into the dusky future and spy the image of someone who will be reading our script. With arms crossed and a stern look, they say to us, “Make me care.”

For my interviews with Nicholl-winning screenwriters, go here.