Screenwriting and Psychology

Characters drive Story, therefore, it’s imperative for writers to be ‘armchair psychologists’ when crafting a narrative.

“Screenplays are structure.” That’s what William Goldman once famously said. And that’s true, most especially because a screenplay serves as a blueprint for a movie’s production. However, most movie viewers and script readers don’t make an emotional connection with a movie or script due to its structure. Rather it’s the characters we connect with. And developing and writing characters is fundamentally about psychology. Consider these aspects of the screenwriting and story-development process:

• Transformation: The traditional arc of the Protagonist’s emotional journey.
• External World and Internal World: The two realms of a screenplay universe, the External World where we see and hear a character through actions and dialogue, and the Internal World where we sense and interpret a character through intention and subtext.
• World View: Each character has their own unique take on everything, from who they are to who other characters are, to the universe itself.
• Archetypes: Each is a reflection of human behavior and the human psyche.
• Character Interviews: How to use curiosity to dig deep into our characters, asking them questions, hearing their answers, engaging them in a ‘live’ dialogue.

Each of those is at its core about psychology. I don’t have much in the way of formal training about psychology. In fact, I only took two intro psych courses as an undergraduate. Some of you may have more of a professional or academic background in the field, others perhaps none at all. But that doesn’t really matter — because the mere act of being a human, interacting with other people day after day after day has trained us to be ‘psychologists.’

The ability to interpret the Other has been a critical resource, necessary for human evolution. When ancient humans met other ancient humans or even creatures, our skill at understanding the Other’s mood and intention was a key part of determining our fate: Eat or be eaten.

Each of us is born with an innate capacity to learn how to interpret the Other. And we practice it — whether we know it or not — every day of our lives.

Moreover, there are stories. Each story is a window into the psychology of being an individual, a conscious being, a fellow citizen of our Earth. Now add the tens of thousands of stories we’ve experienced in our lives — books, movies, poems, gossip, newspapers, TV, radio — and that’s a massive amount of ‘psychology’ we have downloaded.

So each of us has significant psychological tools. And it’s imperative for us to use those tools when developing our characters. Why? Because as somebody once said to me, “If we (writers) don’t understand our characters, how can we expect an actor (or anybody else for that matter) to ‘get’ them.”

So yes, in a truly essential way, screenwriting is about psychology. If you need any more incentive in this area, consider this: Each character we develop is in some way a projection or reflection of us. As we work on our own stories, we are also working on our Self.

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