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What’s the difference between Hero, Main Character and Protagonist?

July 26, 2005 QandA, Story and Plot

questionmarkI have a supporting character that seems to fill a far greater purpose
than I originally anticipated. The supporting character fits
Wikipedia’s definition of [Hero](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero). However, [your definition](http://johnaugust.com/site/glossary) says hero and main character are synonymous.

In my story, the protagonist is the main character; it’s his story. But everything is affected by this supporting character’s possession of “character far greater than that of a typical person.”

Is it wheels off to have a main character and protagonist not be the hero
in the end? Do you think the audience will feel cheated by a decision
like this?

— Trey
Dallas, TX

We’re venturing into Dramatic Theory 101, so if you’re the type who begins squirming in your seat when professor-types talk about [Joseph Campbell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell) and character arcs, you can save yourself a lot of frustration by stopping after the following sentence:

In most cases, “Hero,” “Main Character,” and “Protagonist” are the same character.

Seriously, you can stop reading now. Here’s a nice article about [raising orphaned squirrels](https://www.squirrelsandmore.com/pages/basic-steps-to-taking-care-of-a-baby-squirrel).

Now, for readers who are still with me, let’s try to come up with more specific definitions for these three terms, and explore why they may apply to different characters in certain stories.

Hero
My incredibly-simplified definition: this is the character who you hope to see “win.” While it’s fine to think of Superman, or Aladdin, the hero doesn’t have to be noble, or courageous, or especially talented. As long as you’re rooting for him, that’s what matters.

Main Character
Just what it sounds like: this is the character who the story is mostly about. Confused? Often his or her name is in the title: Shrek, King Arthur, Tootsie, Citizen Kane.

Protagonist
The character who changes over the course of the story, travelling from Point A to Point B, either literally or figuratively. She learns and grows as the story progresses. Generally, Protagonists want something at the start of the tale, and discover they need something else.

Now, remember, most times, one character is all three of these things. For example, Ripley in Aliens is clearly the Hero (fighting the monster), the Main Character (the story is mostly about her), and the Protagonist (she reluctantly joins the trip, but ends up descending to the depths to fight for her “daughter”).

The same triple-aspect applies to Cher in Clueless, and John McClane in Die Hard. And it’s fine for movies to have “teams” of characters fulfiling these roles; in Charlie’s Angels, Dylan, Natalie and Alex are each Hero, Main Character and Protagonist.

However, in some stories, the Hero, the Protagonist and the Main Character are not all the same person. One very current example is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

There’s no question that Charlie’s the Hero. You want to see him win that Golden Ticket, and for only good things to happen to him. Likewise, he’s also the Main Character — though Wonka’s a close second. While Charlie recedes into the background a bit during the factory tour, he’s still the main focus of the movie’s storytelling energies. When the Narrator talks, it’s mostly to fill in details about Charlie.

However, Charlie is not a classic Protagonist. Charlie doesn’t grow or change over the course of the story. He doesn’t need to. He starts out a really nice kid, and ends up a really nice kid.

In terms of Classical Dramatic Structure, that leaves us one Protagonist short, which leads to the biggest change in the screenplay versus the book (or the 1971 film). In our movie, Willy Wonka is the protagonist. He grows and changes. We see his rise and fall, along with his nervous breakdown during the tour. Charlie’s the one who’s always asking — ever so politely, in the Freddie Highmore Whisper(TM) — the questions that lead to Wonka’s flashbacks upon his rotten childhood. (In Classic Dramatic terms, that makes Charlie an Antagonist. Not to be confused with a Villain. Are you sure you don’t want to read about some [squirrels](http://www.squirrels.org/raising.html)?)

As I pitched it to Tim: Charlie gets a factory, and Willy Wonka gets a family. It’s the whole want-versus-need thing. Charlie doesn’t need a factory. Wonka really needs a family. Otherwise, he’s going to die a giggling misanthropic weirdo.

Assigning labels

Playing “spot the protagonist” can be a good intellectual exercise — up to a point. As I started writing Charlie, asking “Who’s the protagonist?” led to some important decisions about the storytelling. But trying to pin firm labels on the characters in Go or Pirates of the Caribbean would only prove frustrating.

If a story works, it works — regardless of whether characters are fulfilling their archetypal roles. So be wary of trying to wedge characters into defined classes, simply because that’s how they “should” fit.

Scriptnotes, Episode 624: Creating Empathy for Your Characters, Transcript

January 30, 2024 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/creating-empathy-for-your-characters).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 624 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I were both traveling through the holidays, so we asked producer Drew Marquardt to dig through the archives and compile a character compendium. So Drew, what have you got for us?

**Drew Marquardt:** We’ve got three character-related segments that all kind of do with getting into a character’s head space and bring the audience along with them, and really focusing on scene work.

**John:** That’s great. This is probably top of mind for you, because I know you were just working on this characters chapter or chapters for the book.

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly. These are ones that just sort of popped out to me. We talk a lot about character on the level of the entire movie or the entire show, but it was really fun to dig into the specifics in the scene.

**John:** That sounds great. What’s the first segment we’ll hear?

**Drew:** First is a segment on point of view, from Episode 358. That’s, again, point of view for the whole story and also for the scenes and how to play with point of view and use it to your advantage.

**John:** That’s always a good lesson. What’s after that?

**Drew:** Next is the character’s inner emotional states from Episode 472. That’s finding the emotional truths in a scene and thinking about using verbs versus adjectives in terms of what a character’s doing.

**John:** That’s great.

**Drew:** The way watching someone cry doesn’t make you cry necessarily, but watching someone try not to cry and try and do something else can bring out a lot of emotion.

**John:** That sounds good. I remember that discussion of verbs versus adjectives is so useful in talking with actors, but it’s a good way to think about the characters on the page as well.

**Drew:** It’s a very actorly segment, but it all has to do with writing.

**John:** That sounds great. I see the third segment here is all the way back to Episode 151, so quite far into the vaults.

**Drew:** It’s one we don’t do a lot, because Craig’s audio in it is a little bit wonky, if I’m honest. But it sounds like he’s on the phone. It comes through really well, and everything he’s saying is gold, so I had to include him.

**John:** That’s great. It’s on secrets and lies, so why it’s important for your characters to be liars. Your point on audio is well taken. We’ve always prided ourselves on audio on this podcast, but I feel like over the last two or three years, people’s expectations of audio on podcasts has dropped in a weird way.

**Drew:** Interesting. Have you heard it in other places?

**John:** I have. Things that used to be good double-ender conversations where they would send an audio engineer to have a microphone there at the place, now they’re just doing it on Zoom. Even on The Daily, I hear some audio there that I can’t believe they’re getting away with. So I won’t feel so bad about Craig’s audio on this one.

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Our character theme continues with our bonus segment for premium members. Is that right?

**Drew:** Yeah, we’ll do a segment on single-use characters from Episode 467, including the greatest single-use character of all time, which is, of course, Edie McClurg in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s get into it. I will be back here at the end for the credits. Everyone else, enjoy.

[Episode 358 Clip]

**John:** Let’s jump ahead. Let’s go to our big topic of point of view. So this is a craft topic that I said we would talk about in some future episode. This is the episode we’re going to talk about it. So point of view I’m going to define as which characters in a story, movie story, a book, have the ability to drive scenes. Basically, that they can be in a scene by themselves and you will follow them. They can be a scene with strangers and you’ll still follow them. And in some stories it has a single POV, so only the hero can drive a scene.

Harry Potter is a classic example of, both in the books and in the movies, essentially, every scene has Harry Potter in the scene. And so you don’t get any information that Harry Potter doesn’t know. Other stories, you could follow anybody in them. So classically, an Altman film. Anybody who wanders through the frame, the camera could follow them and they could be in their own story.

Most films are going to have a mix of point of view. You’re going to have obviously scenes driven by your hero, but perhaps you’re able to cut off to the villain and see the villain do stuff and see scenes that are just driven by the villain, or a supporting character, a love interest. So there are different choices. But the choices we make have to be deliberate. And they really help tell the audience how to watch your movie.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. I always think about point of view as an answer to a question. With whom am I supposed to identify with in this scene? And by identify with, I don’t necessarily mean I want to be like them, or they are like me, but rather I’m with them. Even if it’s a villain, sometimes I’m with the villain because the villain is considering the glorious possibility of so on and so forth, and I am with them and their ambition or their desire.

The big thing that I think a lot of early writers and, frankly, a lot of not early writers, a lot of practiced writers, make the mistake of doing is not choosing a point of view in their scene. To me, there is no possible way to create a successful scene if you do not know whose point of view you’re asking the audience to follow.

We are, I think, only capable of having one point of view in a scene. One. That means everything that transpires ultimately is about one person’s eyeballs, essentially. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have other people feeling things and wanting things and doing things, but it’s from one person’s perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I think you make a distinction here which I think was important to call out is that we can talk about point of view for an entire work, so the course of an entire movie, the course of an entire book, so this book has a certain character’s point of view. It’s told from a certain character’s point of view. But every scene is like a little movie, and every scene is going to have a point of view as well.

And so you may have scenes in which two different characters, we’ve followed them separately, and we’ve seen them have separate scenes, they can do stuff, but once we’re in a scene with them together, you’re going to have to tell us which character’s point of view this scene is from. And sometimes you see writers not making that choice, or the writer may have made that choice, but as it was directed, as it was staged in front of you, it wasn’t actually done from that character’s point of view. And that is a real challenge.

And so that’s a thing, even at this last Sundance Labs I saw. I’ll describe this project in broad terms, because it’s not a movie that’s out there for people to see yet. It was a story that follows two young boys who have an encounter when they’re kids. Then it jumps forward 30 years. You see these two people as adults. We follow one’s person story. And then we cut to the other person’s story. And we know, because we’ve seen movies before, that eventually they’re going to meet. And in fact, they do meet. But the question is, when they meet, who is driving that scene. And interestingly, as the story was structured, as I was reading it, it had gone back to the first character before the two characters met. And so I was saying that I think it’s from this character’s point of view, because he controlled the last scene. The last person we saw driving a scene is the person we’re going to assume is driving the next scene.

And so we talked about like, well, if we took out that scene it would shift, and we would still be in the point of view of the second character. And that’s a crucial distinction. We know they’re going to meet, but literally, who are we going to meet first? Who is driving the scene?

**Craig:** Yep. Absolutely. And it is an important distinction to understand that there is the macro and the micro. And honestly, I find point of view to be the most useful thing to discuss when you are in the micro. Generally speaking the large questions are answered. Who is the star of the movie? Who is the protagonist? Who is the hero? And so on and so forth.

But then you have these little moments inside of movies where you have a real choice to make. Harry Potter is certainly, you’re right, it’s from the perspective and the point of view of Harry Potter. But then here and there you have these moments, things like a scene where Ron Weasley is watching Harry and Hermione together, and he gets jealous. That’s from Ron’s point of view.

A lot of times, the audience will make certain assumptions based on the way the scene unfolds. And one of the simplest assumptions they make is “The first character I see is going to be the person through whose point of view I will be experiencing this scene.”

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of Harry Potter, in most scenes we’re going to probably see Harry first and then we’re going to see the supporting characters. Granted, over the course of eight movies we’re going to be used to sort of seeing a different one of those characters first. But you’re not going to have any scenes that are just one character or the other character. There may be shots or little action sequences where we’re only following one, but in terms of bigger sequences, Harry is going to be around for all of those things.

If you are figuring out how to tell one story point from the book, you have to figure a way to visualize this information and keep Harry still centerpiece to all this stuff. There’s a great example in Goblet of Fire where quite late in the story, Harry is captured by Voldemort. And there’s sort of an information dump that Voldemort needs to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s an information dump that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily need to do for Harry Potter, but it’s very important for us as the audience to understand. And it’s important that Harry be part of that information dump, because he is our way into this world.

**Craig:** Correct. And in the writing of that section in the book, and then by extension, in the writing of the screenplay and the film that we saw, there is not just a metaphoric point of view but an actual point of view. An actual perspective. And this is a very useful thing to think about as well. When you’re writing these scenes, if you decide that this… I always start by like, “Okay, emotionally, whose point of view should we be honoring here?” And then once I have that understanding, then I start thinking about physical points of view, not just through eyesight but also through sound.

So, for instance, a slight variation on the first character you see. You may see a character first, and then we pull back to reveal that someone is watching them. Clearly, there the point of view is with the watcher. You may be on a person’s face, and you hear sounds, and you know that they’re listening. But the actual physical point of view, point of sound is really important in scenes. It’s important because ultimately that is a huge part of how the director directs.

There’s no other way to make those scenes work unless you understand point of view, because a lot of directing, just at least from the physical position, is angles. The question is what are the angles? Where are we looking? Where does the camera go? Who is it looking at? And why?

**John:** Last week we talked about the scene from Aliens. And if people watched the scene, you’ll see that even though Burke is doing most of the talking, the scene is very clearly from Ripley’s point of view. She is the one watching and trying to process what he’s saying. And the camera work shows that. It’s really favoring her, and it’s favoring her reactions to his lines rather than him talking. So it’s still her scene even though he’s the one providing the information and bringing what is new to the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can play games with point of view. You can make it seem like the point of view is one person’s and then it’s another. The great example of that is in the brilliant third act switcheroo in Silence of the Lambs where you think Starling’s point of view is one thing and it turns out it’s another and vice versa. There are scenes where two people have a long discussion, and you’re not quite sure whose point of view it is. And then they get up and they leave and then we reveal that a person has been listening, and they weren’t even in the scene, but it was their point of view retrospectively.

Also, point of view gives you an opportunity as a writer to shake things up. If you have a scene that maybe feels a little perfunctory or a little cliché, but it fits nicely into your story and solves a lot of problems, then maybe the answer for spice is point of view. How can you change that point of view? How can you make the point of view of that scene somebody that you wouldn’t expect? Suddenly, the scene becomes so much more interesting and fresh.

Here’s a cliché scene. An 11-year-old kid is called in on the carpet by the principal. So it’s the principal yelling at the kid scene. Maybe it’s from the point of view of the principal’s secretary or assistant. Maybe it’s from the point of view of another kid who is waiting to go in next to be yelled at. You find fun, interesting ways to make these things happen.

Also, maybe the answer to that scene is, 9 times out of 10, it’s from the point of view of the kid, because the kid is getting yelled at, and we identify with the kid. What if it’s from the point of view of the principal? What if we’re identifying with the principal as they struggle to try and make this work, and then the kid leaves and we stay with the principal after?

And that’s what point of view and those decisions get you. It makes you think about what the beginning and the end of the scene will be and who your eyes should be on and who their eyes should be on. It’s an indispensable way of approaching scene work. And I think we honestly just saved a lot of people a lot of money for film school stuff.

**John:** So let’s talk about the specific example you gave for a kid in the principal’s office and what if it’s the secretary’s point of view or the principal’s point of view. Those are all really great, fascinating choices. And if it was the first scene of your story, it would be really interesting and unexpected, because we expect it from the kid’s point of view, and it’s actually from the principal’s point of view or the secretary’s. But if it was the kid’s story, if it was about the 12-year-old boy, we sort of couldn’t stay with the principal’s point of view unless that principal is going to ultimately have storytelling power later in our movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the moment you decide to stick around with a character who is not established to be a major character, who is not established to have a storytelling power, you’re suddenly elevating that person. You’re saying like, oh, this is a person that we now have an expectation that we’ll be able to come back to and see independent individual scenes.

There’s maybe like 5 or 10 seconds where you can hold on a character after the main character has left before that character goes like, “Okay, there’s something bigger there.” There’s some expectation you’re setting.

Just yesterday I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This is not a movie review. The movie is nuts in a way that I had not anticipated. I really enjoyed it. Partly because it does really odd things. And one of the odd things it does is, there’s a young girl character who is not really established. You don’t see her. But suddenly, like 20 minutes into the movie, we’re cutting to her and her POV and she’s driving scenes by herself. And it sort of threw me at first. It was like, what is this movie? And then I remembered that the Jurassic Park movies always sort of cut to minor characters. They were always elevating these minor people who could suddenly do things by themselves. And this movie takes that and runs with it very fully.

But it becomes interesting later on in the story where she and other characters meet and it does get a little bit murky for me, who was in control of the story at that point, because it wasn’t clear whose POV we really were in in some of those scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great point you’re making that point of view, more than line count or screen time, determines the importance and the salience of any particular role in a story. The more point of view you afford a character, the more important they are, the more elevated they are in the tale. And you’re right. You can actually have quite a few people doing this. But when they all get together, then you do have a problem, because, again – I’ll just say it’s my rule – we as human beings really can only have one point of view at one time. And maybe it’s just the narrative is reflecting the biological. We have one field of vision. We have one field of sound. We can’t see two things at once, and we can’t hear two things at once. We hear a combination of things, or we see a combination of things, but that’s it. And it’s just our one view.

So in those conglomeration scenes it’s really important that the screenwriter make sure to figure out who is the point of view person here, because I need to make it really clear in that moment, or else the scene will feel very trifurcated, quadfurcated, and so on and so forth.

Sometimes the best thing to do with those characters that you’ve given point of view to is, before you get to that conglomeration scene, kill them. Wayne Knight in the first Jurassic Park has wonderful point of view scenes, and then he dies, because who needs him later?

**John:** This again I don’t think is a spoiler, that Henry Woo, the character played by B.D. Wong in the Jurassic Park movies, shows up in this movie again. And it was strange to me that he didn’t seem to have POV. For a character who has been established through the whole franchise, he’s not allowed to drive any scenes by himself. And it felt like he had sort of earned that. But also, if you look at the course of the actual movie that we’re watching, he shows up kind of late. And so it might have felt strange to give him that power so late in the movie, to elevate him to a place so late in the movie.

When you do shift POVs and we do unexpected things with POVs, you do get a real jolt of energy. So I think back to Gone Girl. So Gone Girl as a book, which I loved as a book and was dying to write the adaptation of that, is told as alternating chapters between the husband and the wife. And for reasons I don’t want to spoil in the story, that structure would not continue necessarily, but then when it does continue in ways you couldn’t imagine being possible in the movie, it’s so thrilling that we’ve changed POV midway through the movie. Our fundamental rules of how we watch the movie change halfway through. It was a great adaptation of a really great story that was told from a specific point of view and had to change its point of view in order to work as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s jarring. And when it’s done well, it is as exhilarating as any car chase, because you are creating a kind of emotional free-fall in people. And one of the thrills we get, I think, from going to movies and watching television shows is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s point of view, somebody else that’s wildly different from us. Frankly, that’s what we do as writers all day long, right? But when we receive it passively, it can be, because it’s surprising, it’s awesome.

And it can really wobble the ground beneath you for a bit in a fun way, as long as it is done expertly and you feel like you’re caught. When it’s not, then it just feels clunky or confusing, or you start to say to yourself, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel here or why.” These are the things that we want to try and avoid when we’re shifting points of view radically.

It also occurs to me that sometimes when we talk about stock characters or when we see a movie and we complain about a character that feels cliché, that they aren’t really getting a proper point of view. Rather, they are only existing in someone else’s point of view, and therefore they exist to serve a function.

Okay, so you’re going to be the judge in the trial. Well, you’re never going to get a point of view. You’re just there to go, “Overruled,” so that the prosecutor whose point of view we’re living in or the defendant whose point of view we’re living in can see it and hear it. And one way to avoid those kind of cliché stock characters is to consider that perhaps maybe they deserve some point of view. But then you got to make space.

**John:** Yeah. You got to make space and make sure that you’re not creating an expectation with the audience that your movie will not be able to match.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. It’s tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk about general guidelines for when it makes sense to limit point of view and when it makes sense to broaden out point of view. So, some benefits to limiting POV is it does make your audience identify very closely with whoever that central character is. Generally, if you’re limiting your point of view to one character, like in a Harry Potter situation, you’re going to identify very closely with Harry Potter because he’s in every scene so it’s driving everything.

And particularly, if you have a character whose experience may be different than sort of your audiences, it can be great to limit POV, because then you’re seeing everything through his or her eyes. And so if you have a tale of racism and you’re seeing it through this Black character’s eyes, I think an audience might be able to understand and empathize with it in ways they wouldn’t see otherwise, because we so closely identify with this central character. That’s a huge advantage to that.

It really focuses your storytelling, because you’re only providing information that that character can actually get to. And so that’s helpful. So anything that the audience wants to know, the character needs to know too. And so you’re following in his or her footsteps as they’re going out and trying to do these things. And so we identify very closely with characters if we limit the POV to those characters.

On the other hand, if you broaden POV, suddenly your movie can feel much more expansive, because suddenly you can cut to Egypt, you can cut to Morocco. You can see all these different parts of the world, and so you establish new characters when you want to establish them. That’s hugely helpful too. If you’re the kind of bigger, epic-scale story, that makes sense. If you’re Game of Thrones, you don’t want to limit it to one character’s point of view, because you have to be able to jump around and have different characters be the hero of one story and the villain of another.

**Craig:** Perfect thing to mention, Game of Thrones, because when people talk about George R. R. Martin’s books, they literally refer to point of view characters. So, generally speaking in his chapters there is a character that is sort of the point of view. And they get an inner life. They have an inner voice. And the events unfold through their eyes and their experience. And you’re absolutely right. Any kind of epic story demands it, I think.

And you should kind of know, I think, from the sort of story you’re telling, whether or not you want to be expansive in your points of view or you want to be limited. But some other things to think about beyond just scale is how much your character is meant to know. If there’s certain kinds of mystery, or if there’s a certain sense of powerlessness, generally speaking, it’s great to side your perspective with characters that have less power and less knowledge, because then there’s more to learn, and there’s more to know. And that’s interesting. And it’s instantly sympathetic.

We don’t really want to share the POV of people that know a lot or are in control. We don’t need Morpheus’s POV really ever. We just don’t need it, except maybe, for instance, in the scene where he needs to break free from the agents and run and jump. We are in his perspective, because at that moment he is very powerless. He is weak. And he isn’t really sure he’s going to make it or not. There you go.

**John:** Yeah. A crucial example. So most of what we’ve been talking about has been sort of movie point of view and the things about which character the camera is on. Those are sort of movie conversations. But point of view is always a part of fiction. It’s always been one of the classic things we talked about. Going back to Pride and Prejudice, we are at Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view and not Darcy’s point of view. And we see the story through her eyes rather than his eyes.

Sometimes, just like in movies, it’s good to change point of view. It’s good to change point of view in books as well. The first Arlo Finch book is entirely from Arlo’s point of view. We only know information that Arlo knows. And if there’s information I had to get in there, I had to have Arlo be present for that information to come out.

The second book, for reasons that become clear when you actually read the second book, we do break POV at one point in the story. And my editor was really nervous about this, but then as we talked through it, it actually makes sense that we break POV, and suddenly the rules of sort of who we’re allowed to follow in the world shift a bit. But hopefully by that point, you are comfortable enough with the characters that I’m breaking POV to that it makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t remember which Harry Potter book began with an entirely different POV of somebody coming home and finding Voldemort in his house or something. It fills the world out. And partly, it also creates a complex reading experience, because we are asked as readers to build little walls in our mind. Like, “Okay, I just learned something and saw something, but the character whose POV I’m going to be following for the rest of the book has not been there or seen that. I’m going to put a little wall between them. They don’t know that stuff.” And then ideally, the story at the end will link it together, and then they will learn it, and in the learning of it, will learn something else and so on and so forth.

But it’s exciting. You just have to do it really deliberately. That’s the thing. We always say everything is about being specific and being intentional. As long as you know what you’re doing and why, it should work.

**John:** It should work. And exactly the scenario you described, where a story starts with a different character’s POV before going back to the hero, that’s a very classic movie thing as well. So how many movies have you seen that start with some rando people you’re never going to see again? They’re establishing some nature of the world or some nature of the fundamental problem before we get to our main characters. That’s classic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beginning of Scream, for instance. We never see Drew Barrymore again, but it’s entirely from her point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s teaching us how to watch the movie. So don’t feel like you’re breaking POV just to do that introduction to the world thing. That’s very classic. Or the tag at the end. That’s also well established.

**Craig:** Yep. I really do believe that honestly that’s worth one year of film school.

**John:** Done.

[Episode 472 clip]

**John:** Let us shift gears completely, because I want to talk about a very crafty kind of issue here. The project I’m working on right now has characters who are experiencing some really big emotions. You and I, Craig, haven’t talked a lot about the inner emotional life of characters. We talk about sort of the emotional effect we’re trying to get in readers and viewers, but I want to talk about what characters are feeling, because what characters are feeling so often impacts what they can do in a scene, how they would express themselves, literally what actions they would take.

And so to set us up I wanted to play a clip from Westworld. And so this is Evan Rachel Wood. I think this was from the first season. And what I love about it is that she’s so emotional, and then because she’s a robot, she can just turn it off.

**Craig:** What would you know about that?

**John:** I set myself up for that.

**Evan Rachel Wood:** My parents. They hurt them.

**Jeffrey Wright:** Limit your emotional affect please. What happened next?

**Evan:** Then they killed them. And then I ran. Everyone I cared about is gone. And it hurts so badly.

**Jeffrey:** I can make that feeling go away if you like.

**Evan:** Why would I want that? The pain. Their loss. It’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me. Like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.

**John:** I’ll put a link in the show notes for that too, so you can see what she’s doing in the scene. What I like so much about that is you look at how she is at the start of that scene and she’s so emotional. She has a hard time getting those words out. And then when she’s told stop being emotional, it brings her way back down, and she can actually speak the words that she couldn’t otherwise say. And that’s so true, I find, both in my own real life – as I get in these heightened emotional states, I can’t express myself the way I would want to – but also in the characters I write. I feel when I know what a character is going through inside their head, it completely changes how they’re going to be acting in that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a pretty great clip. Evan Rachel Wood is an outstanding actor. And one thing that’s fascinating about that is that Jeffrey Wright, who is playing there against her, who is also a spectacular actor, what he says is, “Limit your emotional affect,” not eliminate it.

Because she’s a robot, she can dial it from an eight to a three. By the way, what he’s doing there essentially is what directors are doing all the time on a set. They walk over to an actor, “Great, let’s just roll it back. Let’s just pull it back five points and see what that’s like.” Because then what happens is you’re still feeling emotion. She still has a quavering in her voice. You can still feel her pain. But it’s like she experienced it three hours ago, and now she’s starting to get a handle on it, as opposed to she’s in the middle of it.
First things first when you’re thinking about your character’s emotional state is ask why are they experiencing these emotions and how distant are they from the source of it, because that’s going to be a huge indication to you about how you ought to be pitching them.

**John:** Absolutely. So one of the things you learn as you’re directing actors is to talk about verbs rather than adjectives. Gives them a thing to do rather than sort of a description of how they are supposed to be feeling, because it’s very hard to feel a thing. And what I might describe as being happy is a thousand different things. But if I describe, “Invite the other character into the space. Share your joy with them,” that’s a thing that an actor can actually play.

Be thinking about sort of not only what is causing this emotional state but what is the actual physicality of that emotional state. What’s happening in there?

And it’s not rational. And that’s a hard thing to grasp is that we always talk about what characters want, what characters are after. This isn’t really the same kind of thing. It’s an inner emotional drive. Something they cannot actually control. It’s more their lizard brain doing a thing.

So what may be useful is imagine that you’re at a party, and how differently you’d act or speak if, for example, you were terrified of someone in the room, or if you were ravenously hungry, if you were ashamed about what you were wearing, if you were proud of the person this party was about, if you were disgusted by the level of filth in the room. Those are all sort of primal things that are happening.

And if you’re experiencing those emotions, the affect is going to be different. You’re going to do different things. You’re going to say different things. You’re going to position yourself in the room differently. So getting an emotional register for each of the characters in a scene can be super important in terms of figuring out how this scene is actually going to play out.

And I do want to stress that we really are talking about scene work here. It’s not overall story plotting. It’s not even sort of sequence work. It’s very much, in this moment right now, what is going to be the next thing the character says, the next thing the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also what people came for. You’re absolutely right to distinguish between the normal acting place and the normal writing place as one of intention. I want something, so I’m going to figure out how to get it, whether it’s to get your attention or have you fall in love with me or stop the bomb from exploding, whatever it is. That’s the rational stuff that actors go through. And that’s the rational stuff you’re writing in there. That is the plot.

But what people come for is the emotion, because the emotion is when the character doesn’t want anything. They are simply expressing the truth about what they are experiencing in the moment. And that is the part we connect with. We do not connect with the intricacies of disarming a bomb. We connect with fear. We connect with the anticipation of terrible loss, the foreshadowing of grief. That’s what we imagine.

If you’re a parent, you know this feeling. You put your kid on a bicycle for the first time, and whether you realize it or not, your heart beats a little bit faster, because you are anticipating them falling and getting hurt. So that’s the truth. And that’s what we all experience. That is the universal nature of this. That’s the part people come for.

So our job is to understand very realistically what somebody would be feeling in that moment, because while audiences will forgive things like… The first movie I ever had in theaters was a movie called Rocket Man. Not the Elton John story. This was 1998 silly children’s comedy, Rocket Man. And the director, I didn’t get along with. I just didn’t appreciate his creative instincts.

And one of the things he did, I guess, when he was shooting was, there were all these scenes were these astronauts were walking around on Mars, and the visors and the helmets were causing reflections from the lights, so he said, “Let’s just remove those visors, and we’ll put them in later with visual effects,” because he thought that would be easy to do. And then later, Disney was like, “This movie’s not even that great. We’re not spending more money on it.”

So there are scenes in the finished movie where they are walking around on Mars and there’s no visor in their helmet. And audiences will forgive that, because they know on some level these people aren’t really on Mars and who cares. But here’s what they will never forgive. An inappropriate emotional response. Because they know what feels real and what doesn’t. That’s where they will kill you.

So our job is to be as realistic as possible in those moments to avoid the extremes of melodrama, where things start to get funny because they’re so wildly too big, or to avoid the constraint of, I guess we would call it unnatural emotional response, where things don’t connect right or simply aren’t there at all. Is it better to underplay emotion than overplay? Usually. Can you underplay emotion to the point where it’s just not there and the whole thing feels kind of dead and battened down with cotton? Yup.

**John:** Oh, we’ve seen those movies. We’ve seen those cuts where it just got too stripped down. It sounds like we could be talking about actors and how actors create their performance. And this is not a podcast about acting. But there is such a shared body of intention here. And it doesn’t even necessarily go through the director. Because we are the first actors for all of these characters. And so we have to be able to get inside their emotional states and be able to understand what it feels like to be in that moment, you know, experiencing these things, so we can see what happens next.

And so often when I find things are being forced, or when I don’t believe the reality of stuff, I feel like the writer is dictating, “Okay, this is the next emotional thing you’re going to hit,” rather than actually putting themselves in the position of that character and seeing what happens next and actually just watching and listening to what naturally does happen next.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s always a balancing act there.

**Craig:** The mistake I think a lot of writers make is to think, “I want the audience to feel sad, so let me make my character sad.” That’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** There are times when the character should be sad, but that’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** Absolutely. And so often the lesson you learn is that if you want the audience to feel emotional and sad, limiting what we see of that character feeling that way or how that character externalizes that thing is often more effective. The character holding back tears generally will generate more tears from the audience than the character who is actually crying, because we put ourselves in that position and we are sort of crying for them.

**Craig:** Yes. And sometimes there’s a situation where the actors, the characters may not be feeling an enormous amount emotionally, but what they’re doing is something we can empathize with so deeply that it makes us cry.

There’s a moment in Chernobyl where Jessie Buckley’s character is with her husband, who is a firefighter, and he is dying, clearly, evidently, and disgustingly. And she’s right next to him, and she tells him that they’re going to have a baby. Obviously, she knows this. She’s not super emotional in that moment. And he sort of just takes her hand, and he’s not super emotional. He’s just pleased with this news. But I cry when I look at it, because I feel such terrible empathy for them.

And it’s hard to even explain, to parse out exactly why that makes me so sad. Is it that she’s smiling and he’s smiling and they’re experiencing this moment of joy and hope, even though he’s perishing in front of her? Is that what it is? It’s hard to say.

But what I do know is that if I try to make people cry then it just gets dumb. So you find your moments. For instance, Jessie, who is a spectacularly good actor and just has amazing instincts, there are moments in the show where she is very emotional. And I don’t necessarily feel emotional in that moment. What I feel is alignment with her, like, “Yes, I’m glad you’re angry. Yes, of course you’d be scared. Yes, of course you’re upset.”

**John:** That comes back to empathy, because you successfully placed us as the viewer into her position, so we are seeing the story from her point of view. And that is not just the intellectual point of view, but the emotional point of view. And that’s why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. We are identifying with her.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But let’s talk about sort of how writers can be thinking about these emotions. I want to get back to your example of you’re the parent whose kid is riding off on the bike for the first time and you know they’re going to fall. That is such a specific example. And the reason you were able to summon that is, when that happened, you were probably kind of recording that. A little red light went off in the corner, “Okay, this emotional thing that I’m experiencing, this is real. This is a thing that I can hold onto. It’s in my toolbox right now.”

A thing I’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic is I started doing Head Space, the meditation app. And one of the things it forces you to do is to really evaluate what are you feeling right now at this moment. And when you get good at being able to analyze what are you actually feeling, you can start to think like, “Okay, what would it feel like to be proud of this moment? What would it feel like to be angry or fearful?” And you can start to distill what that emotion is like independent of the actual cause. And sometimes as a writer, you have to be able to do that. So you actually say, “Okay, what is the moment,” back to Evan Rachel Wood, “with a little bit more fear dialed in? What is this moment like with a little bit more dread or curiosity dialed in?”

Because with that, you’re like a musician putting together the chords and figuring out like, okay, what is the best version of this moment, this scene, this character’s experience in this moment because of the emotions that I’m aware of and able to apply.

**Craig:** That’s right. Then you have the difficult job of figuring out how that would work within the tone of whatever you’re doing. Because every piece has a different tone. And over time, the way we generally make and then absorb culture changes. When you watch action movies from the ‘80s, what you will generally see are a lot of people behaving in ways that are emotionally insane. Just insane. You know, stuff blows up and they’re just like, “Wow, should have worn my sunglasses.” Whatever the dumb crap is.

I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger would quip after murdering people. Who does that? You just murdered a human being. I mean, he deserved it. He was a bad guy. But you killed him, and then you have a little snappy joke that’s a pun based on the manner in which you killed him. That’s the tone of that.

As we’ve kind of gone on, things do change. And generally speaking, our culture has become more emotionally expressive and in touch. I think it’s generally a good thing, of course. And we are, all of us living in a post-therapy age, where many people have gone to therapy, or they’ve just read books like Chicken Soup for the Soul or whatever it is. We’ve been absorbing certain things.

And so now when we write this stuff, part of what has to happen is, you, the author, cannot be afraid of your own emotions. And you can’t be afraid to confront how you felt in moments. And that means being honest with yourself and understanding that when we go to the movies… So forget about you wanting to project some image of yourself to the world. It would be cool to project John Milius to the world, because John Milius is super cool and everything. But I’m not John Milius. And I just don’t write tough like that. I just don’t. I kind of do the opposite. And so you have to kind of forget about projecting some perfectly strong, invulnerable sense of yourself to the world, and instead recognize that everybody who is sitting in there wants to feel comforted by a created human being’s weakness and their triumph over that weakness, because that’s inspiring to them.

And if you want to look at one genre that encapsulates that the most, the embracing of the emotional self, particularly the emotional male self, it is Marvel movies, because superhero movies were about these sort of emotionally distant people, because they were perfected. And now they’re tormented, which reflects Marvel.

**John:** Now it’s about Tony Stark’s relationship with Peter Parker. It’s very specific character interactions is why we go to these superhero movies, especially the Marvel movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you have to get it right. That’s the challenge. This is I think probably where writers will fall down more than anywhere else, because they actually don’t understand their own selves, so they don’t know what a character should feel. How many times in our Three Page Challenges have we said, “Why is this person speaking in a complete sentence when somebody has a knife to their throat?” You can’t. You just can’t. There’s a lack of emotional truth.

**John:** Yeah. And so as you’re talking with actors, and they can be frustrated, like, “I don’t know how to do this scene. This isn’t tracking for me,” a lot of times, what it is, they’re saying, “I don’t know how to get from A to E here. You’re not giving me the structure to get from place to place.” And maybe you just didn’t build that, or maybe there’s a way there that you didn’t see before.

As writers, we’re not documentarians. So we’re not necessarily creating scenes that are completely emotionally true to how they would happen in real life. There’s going to be optimization, and it’s going to move faster, and people are going to have to make transitions within the course of a scene that they probably would not do in real life. But that’s the art of it. That’s how you are sanding off the edges and getting there a little bit quicker. But you have to understand what the reality would look like first before you try to optimize it.

**Craig:** Correct. That is absolutely correct.

[Episode 151 clip]

**John:** So Craig, what motivated this talk of liars and liars in scripts?

**Craig:** I’m working on a movie right now. Essentially, it’s a whodunit. And when you start to investigate the world of whodunits, you… I’ve been reading a ton of Agatha Christie. I’ve always been a Doyle fan. And I’ve always been a Poe fan. Poe is really the kind of inventor of the modern whodunit detective story.

For this kind of movie, I felt that Agatha Christie’s genre was the most appropriate, and so I’ve been just reading a lot of Agatha Christie. And one thing that I’ve noticed is all of the characters, with the exception of the detective, are liars. Part of the fun of a good mystery is that when you ask the question whodunit, the answer is any one of these people could have done it.

And we think that they could have done it in part because perhaps they all had motive, they all have opportunity, but more importantly, they are all lying. And it’s lying that makes us suspect them.

But as I started to think about this, I realized, in fact everyone is a liar to some extent or another. All humans are liars. Lying is part of the human condition. But there are different kinds of liars. And there’s different kinds of lying. And when we talk sometimes about new writers who are writing and the characters, we’ll say, “Oh, everything seems on the nose,” or, “There’s not enough subtext.” In a weird way, I think sometimes the mistake people are making is that they’re writing people, and those people aren’t lying. They’re writing truth-tellers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s just less interesting. So I wanted to talk about how useful it is to think of your characters as liars, but also the different grades or categories of lying and lying characters that you’ll find.

**John:** I think it also feeds into our concept of motivation. Why a person is saying the things that they want other people to believe is key to understanding who they are in a scene and overall in the film itself.

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea of drama and of experiencing a narrative where humans move through it and transform is that they are not at the end who they were in the beginning. And if they were just truth-tellers in the beginning, naturally, they’re simply going to say, “Well, here’s the situation. I’m very scared of this. I’m scared of growing up, and I’m scared of telling you that I love you, but I do love you. And I’m hoping that by behaving better, I will in fact grow up, and whether I get you or not, I will be a better person.” [Yawns] Movie over. Everyone has to be concealing something in some way. But then there are characters who are lying for other reasons. Maybe not such understandable or empathetic, or sympathetic, I should say, reasons.

So, let’s talk about some of the different kinds of lying there is. The most useful kind to me is self-deception. I think every protagonist to some level or another is engaging in self-deception. We’ll say the character has an arc. It is a bad character, a dramatically unsatisfying character who has complete access to his or her emotional states, weakness, flaws, and can pinpoint them perfectly, and then throughout the course of the movie, go about and achieve them.

One of my favorite examples of this, because it was done so cannily, is Jerry Maguire. I honestly think that Cameron Crowe pulled off one of the most brilliant self-delusional moves of all time. We’ll see sometimes in comedy, “Hang a lantern on it.” If you have something that seems a little wonky in your story, just go for it and embrace it, and people feel like it’s intentional.

**John:** Yeah. Call it out to the audience, so the audience knows that you recognize that it’s there.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, what does he do with this character of Jerry Maguire? The movie begins with a man who, in a moment of frustration, writes a manifesto about the kind of person that is a good person. But he is still engaged in a very high level of self-delusion. He is in fact not that person. Even the writing of that manifesto is a manifestation of his self-delusion. He’s actually a bad person. The manifesto itself is really more of a temper tantrum, and nothing that he actually thinks he should or could do.

As a result of writing that manifesto, he loses his job and all of his clients except for two. And actually, really what it comes down to is one. And then must struggle over the course of the movie, clinging all the while to his self-delusions, to finally get to the place where he realizes, “Oh my god, I’m supposed to be the person I wrote about in that manifesto.” That’s how strong self-delusion is. Even when you can write down the truth of yourself, you do not believe it.

**John:** Self-delusion is commonly the starting place for a movie where the journey is for the character to come upon emotional honesty, emotional authenticity. And so when we talk about how useful it is for a character to lie, that’s not that the movie should be lying. It’s that the character needs to have progress from this inauthentic state to an authentic state at the end, and Jerry Maguire is a great example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think all protagonists to some level or another have a self-delusion. If they have an arc, it means they have a self-delusion. Going into the world of animation, the character of Marlin in Finding Nemo, he is honest to himself to a point. He honestly believes that he must take care of Nemo at all costs. But he’s deluding himself, because somewhere down there is access to a truth, an inherent truth, that this can’t last. The boy will grow up. He must let him go.

**John:** Even in movies that are more action-based or sort of have more classically sort of like here’s the hero protagonist, you often see that the hero at the start of the movie is really kind of a series of poses. It’s acting the part of the hero, but it doesn’t actually have the stuff inside him, because he hasn’t been tested in ways to really show what it is that matters to him.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** What it is that is sort of unique to his own journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, in fact, that can start to give you a clue. Everybody is afraid of the second act, but this gives you a clue to your second act. What situations should this person go through so that their own delusion can be laid bare to them.

**John:** Their normal way of doing things and the normal person they’re presenting out into the world is called out in a way or is ineffective in a way, and they’re forced to find a new identity.

**Craig:** Right. And this works in part because it is the function of drama to… Why we are attracted to drama is because it illuminates our lives. All of us are delusional.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everyone on the planet is delusional. We are all walking around either ignoring something in ourselves, willfully or subconsciously, or simply misunderstanding ourselves. No matter how much therapy you go through, there will always be a glitch in the system, because we’re made of meat. We are rational to a point, but the part of us that is irrational is not accessible by the rational, so therefore it’s happening out of our control.

**John:** I would also question whether if you got rid of all your self-delusions, if you got rid of all of the lies, would there even be a person left underneath there? I think so many cases, our personalities and sort of who we perceive ourselves to be is a narrative that is carefully constructed based on experiences, based on our hopes, based on our dreams. And you are sort of a story. And a story is made up of some fabrications.

**Craig:** That’s right. Just as you can’t step into the same river twice, every new realization you have changes your mind. It changes who you are and gives birth to a new level of potential self-delusion. One hopes that you can improve your life. Know thyself is a great goal. But you’re right, it’s actually an impossibility to truly 100% know yourself. Let’s get really heavy for a second. Are you familiar with Gödel’s theorem?

**John:** I don’t know Gödel’s theorem. Tell me.

**Craig:** First of all, a great book. This is my One Cool Thing for every day. Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an incredible book. Douglas, I want to say it’s Douglas Hofstadter I believe is the… He wrote this I believe in the ’80s, this brilliant, mind-boggling book that goes into mathematics, artificial intelligence, logic, and ranges from Alice in Wonderland to the music of Bach, to the drawings of Escher, and then interestingly in to the work of Gödel.

And Gödel had this very famous mathematical theorem. And essentially what it said is, for any given system of mathematics… In math, I don’t know if you remember, you can prove things.

**John:** Yes. Absolutely. That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Do you remember that? Right. So you have a system of rules, and then somebody gives you an assertion. And then you can create a proof of that assertion using the rules, and you can prove that it is true, and that’s important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** What his theorem said was, for any system of mathematics, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. And that’s kind of mind-boggling in and of itself. And it gets to this whole idea of recursion, all the rest.

But what it really comes down to is our brains are closed systems. There will always be things that are true that our brain in its current state simply can’t prove. You’re right; self-deception is inherent to the human condition. So, wonderful thing to think about as you’re creating your character.

**John:** And if you go in further, if you actually were to strip away everything you think about yourself, your entire narrative… I’ll put a link in too. Datura. I may be pronouncing it wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** But you know that drug?

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** It apparently just lays you completely bare, and you sort of see yourself and your wholeness and all of your flaws. And very few people can withstand that sort of spotlight of scrutiny.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** When you lose yourself, you lose all of your lies.

**Craig:** Precisely. And that’s why the journey for a character that is struggling with their self-deception is difficult. See, bad screenwriting teachers will always talk in terms of bloodless structure, because that’s all they understand. So, they’ll say things like, “It’s important that your hero face obstacles.” Why? Why? Let’s just start with these really fundamental questions.

I remember I took a philosophy class in college, and the professor asked a question. “It’s good to know that things are true, but why? Why is truth better than not truth?” [laughs] Then you go, “Huh, I guess I should probably think about that.” Why obstacles? Because if there are no obstacles… The obstacles aren’t the point. The obstacles are the symptom of the difficulty of undoing your self-deception. It’s hard.

**John:** All right. So, self-deception is a key thing. What other types of lies do you think are fundamental for storytellers?

**Craig:** So, that’s the first, and that’s the most common class. Then there’s this second class that doesn’t apply to every character. And I call this the manipulators. These are people who lie for a purpose. They’re lying for an external purpose. And we can break them out into two subgroups. There is the protective manipulators, and there are the manipulators who are lying for gain. So, protective liars are people that lie in order to avoid pain or hurt or to maintain some lifestyle that is their best option.

**John:** So, they’re not trying to deceive themselves. They’re trying to deceive other people, to either protect what they have or protect the things they love.

**Craig:** Right. And you and I have both written movies that have this. Big Fish, Edward Bloom, he’s a protective liar. He is lying because it’s helpful to him. He’s certainly lying more than the average person. He’s not lying to get rich.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And he’s not self-delusional. He’s lying purposely, but in order to protect himself on some level.

**John:** Yeah. I would push a little bit back on protect himself. The only thing he can pass on is his vision of how the world should be, so he’s attempting to use these fabrications in order to create an idealized world, a vision for what he wants for his son.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I actually think that that’s consistent with protecting yourself, in the sense that if you don’t do it, then you feel inept as a father, that you’ve somehow failed, that this is something he needs to do for his son.

In Identity Thief, the character of Diana lies because she is lonely and unloved, and the only way she can survive is by constantly lying. Constantly. It’s become a crutch. And these characters can be very sympathetic, actually. They’re frustrating. They’re frustrating, and that’s fun. They create conflict, which we love, of course. And they also keep the audience guessing, which we love. And then, of course, they have the audience begin to connect with that person. The audience naturally tries to make sense of things. It’s part of what we do as human beings.

So, don’t try and make sense of why this person is doing it, and now they’re doing your work for you. They are engaged. And your job when you finally explain why is to explain why in a way that is satisfying to them, that does make sense.

**John:** Absolutely. So, you’re describing the character’s secrets and lies, which is really the same thing. There is something that they’re not showing. There are cards they are holding back. And that’s a way of engaging the audience’s curiosity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And anything that makes your audience lean in to the story rather than sit back is a very good thing.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, the second sub-heading under manipulators are the people who lie for gain. And these are typically villains. Sometimes, however, they’re heroes. For instance, Danny Ocean lies constantly for gain. He’s a thief. But, you’ll take a look at a villain like Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Wonderful liar. Wonderful, brilliant liar, and lying for gain. He also too is a thief.

These people who lie for gain are oftentimes much better liars than the people who lie to protect themselves or conceal a personal secret. And they’re definitely better liars than people who are simply self-delusional. They’re professional liars. So, you get to write somebody who is not only screwing with the people around them, but screwing with the audience, and this is important.

**John:** When you say they’re lying for gain, it’s not just necessarily monetary gain. If you look at Jeff Bridge’s character in Jagged Edge, that’s a character who is lying with a very specific agenda. He’s trying to protect himself, but he gets so much more by establishing and maintaining this lie. It’s his natural way of going through the world is that lie.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes the reason, the gain is actually quite noble. Flick, the ant, goes and gets these guys to help save the village, but they’re just circus performers. And this lie has to be maintained until finally it’s laid bare.

There are all sorts of ways that people can lie for gain, but when they do so, they have to do so with some skill. And therefore, as a writer, you have to actually think like a manipulative liar here who is trying to get something. The truth is no longer important. What’s far more important is what you have to say. And the audience shouldn’t always know.

One of the great things about Ocean’s Eleven is that they lie to each other. They lie to Matt Damon. Not everybody knows what’s going on. And then the movie lies to us through their perspective, because we think we’re seeing something we’re not, and then they reveal how they’ve lied. So, that gives you so many opportunities.

**John:** I think the challenge for a screenwriter is recognizing when it is good to let the audience in and see the liar doing his work, because that can be really rewarding to see somebody be really good at the thing they’re doing, and when you’re better off holding back and keeping the audience in the same point of view as all the other characters, where they’re being manipulated as well.

**Craig:** Yes. And the revelation of their lies should have the punch of some kind of climactic feel, because if you reveal it too soon, you’ll simply lose interest. I mean, we understand the basic lie of Hans Gruber fairly early on, but there’s this other lie that he’s hiding from his own guys, of what’s going to happen with that last bit of security lock. He hasn’t told them, which is actually kind of great. I mean, because look, realistically if you were leading a gang of henchmen into a building to rob it, and you knew that there were seven things you had to get through, and the last one was an impossible-to-break electromagnetic seal on the vault, you would say, “Don’t worry. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stage a terrorist attack. Eventually, they’ll follow the handbook, turn off all the power, and that will open the thing for us. You ask for a miracle, I give you the FBI.” But he doesn’t tell them.

**John:** You like at Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects, and you know that he is manipulative, you know that you can’t trust him, but you didn’t know that everything you’re experiencing was a lie. And it was the right choice to save that reveal to the very, very end. The punch line to the joke is the revelation of this last lie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m sure those decisions, he probably went back and forth about like, “If we revealed a little bit earlier, then we would have the tension about will he get caught.” And this was the decision like, nope, that the whole movie has to be set up to this point.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s a great segue to our next category, because Keyser Söze is a perfect example of somebody that manipulates and lies for gain. He’s also a very bad person. But his badness isn’t his lying. His badness is that he’s a murderer. The lying is done to get him gain for his other badness, which is murdering.

But then there’s the last category of liar, and this is the worst liar, and these are always villains. And these are some of the scariest characters you can create. They are bad, bad people. These are the chaotic, pathological liars.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** These are the people that lie because they love trouble. And they lie to create strife and drama. They can’t control their lying. I don’t think they’re alive unless they’re lying. I don’t think they even know what the truth is.

So the character that often comes to mind in this case is the latest incarnation of the Joker, the Heath Ledger Joker. One thing that I thought was just – I think everybody thought it was pretty amazing – in Dark Knight was when the character the Joker explains how he got his facial scars. And it was very scary, very revealing confession of a trauma.

**John:** It made you almost sympathetic for a moment.

**Craig:** It did. And then there is another scene later where he explains to somebody else how he got his scars, and it is just as compelling, and just as terrifying, and just as true feeling, but it’s a completely different story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s when you realize this man is just a liar.

**John:** Yeah, he’s truly a sociopath. A psychopath. I mean, all he can sort of do is lie. It’s the air he breathes. If he says hello, that’s a lie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And these characters are very difficult to write, because for the most part, we aren’t them. I mean, occasionally – god help us – we will run into these people.

**John:** I worked for a person. I worked for one of those people.

**Craig:** There you go. And part of the problem is that they’re so good that you don’t really know for a while what’s happening. And then eventually, it becomes clear, and then part of the struggle is it’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that another person is actually… You, like the audience, want to make sense of them. But you can’t, because they are operating in a way that is… Frankly, they don’t even care about their own destruction, you see?

The Joker doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He has no interest in that. He loves chaos. He loves the chaos that lying can bring. And you’ll see these characters sometimes in noir. These characters will skew towards female, because when you put it in a man you immediately start to think, “My god, he’s going to just start stabbing, shooting, killing, and all the rest,” whereas women can maybe just scramble your brain and make you second guess your own name and all the rest of it. And then finally, Bogart sends you up the river.

But liars, pathological liars are very scary people. And if you’re going to write one, you just have to know that the movie will be deeply infected by them, that they are going to take over.

**John:** It’s a movie that hasn’t come out yet, but Kristen Wiig is terrific in a comedy I saw – I guess you’d call it a comedy, kind of a comedy, kind of a drama – called Welcome to Me. It should be out later this year. And she’s not a psychopath, but it’s one of the rare cases where I’ve seen just a chaotic, manipulative person really at the center of a film, where she is supposed to be the protagonist, but she honestly kind of can’t protagonate in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really challenging task for a writer and for an actress to put that person at the very center of a movie and not have that person be the villain.

**Craig:** Of course, because the protagonist at some basic level is trying to achieve something. We ask simple questions of our heroes. What do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? What scares you? This or that. What does the pathological, chaotic liar want? Trouble.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s what they want. They want trouble. So, the only person I’ve written like this, and I loved writing him, was Mr. Chow.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Mr. Chow is a chaotic, pathological liar. He does not care if he lives or dies. In fact, he thinks it’s awesome. He just loves trouble. But because he’s so comic, and also embodied in this kind of very small, physically frail man, it’s funny.

**John:** But if you tried to have the Mr. Chow movie, good luck. It’s very, very challenging to put that person in the center of a movie and have them do any of the kinds of things you want a person at the center of a movie to be able to do.

**Craig:** Absolutely. In fact, Todd and I talked for a bit about the idea of what a Mr. Chow movie would look like. And it was totally different, because it was the darkest thing imaginable. And I remember we had this one idea for a scene that sort of sums it up. Mr. Chow comes home to see his elderly father. And he walks in, and his old, old father looks up at him and says something like, “Leslie, you returned to us. You came back.” And Mr. Chow walks over to him and then cuts his throat.

And as his father is dying, his father looks up at him and says, “Good job,” because that’s the only… That’s how Mr. Chow is born. It’s just pure awful chaos and darkness, willful self-destruction. The only goal there is is to blow up the world.

**John:** Yeah. Those characters are almost un-human, because they don’t work in our normal ways. Crispin Glover and I had a few conversations about taking his Thin Man character from the Charlie’s Angels movie and just doing his own movie. And ultimately, nothing will ever come of that probably. But it’s a fascinating character, but such an incredibly challenging character to put at the center of anything, because he is chaos. He’s like chaos and death in ways that’s very hard to… He’s a challenge. It’s very hard to have insight into that character, because deliberately, they’re supposed to be opaque, and you just can’t know them.

Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin is a similar situation, is where she’s just this lioness. There’s just not a human. There literally is not a human underneath that. It makes it very challenging.

**Craig:** Right. It essentially doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. There needs to be somebody in opposition to it, or they need to not be human, and that’s sort of the point, and then the purpose of the movie is to illuminate the difference between humans and non-humans. But they will infect your movie, and you have to write them carefully. They can kind of get in your head. And by all means, if you run into one of these people, go the other way.

[Present]

**John:** And hey, it’s John back again in 2024, which seems impossible to be real. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a replay by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to give you on single-use characters. Thanks.

[Bonus Segment: Episode 467 Clip]

**John:** OK, so Craig, this last week I was writing on a scene and I recognized that this was a scene where I created a character who is essentially single-use. This character only appears in this scene. He’s very memorable and distinctive and hopefully very funny within this scene, but story-wise this character is never going to reappear again. And not only is there not a natural reason for them to reappear again, they really can’t reappear again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it got me thinking about the situations in which I do have a single-use character and times when I want to make sure the characters can come back, and what our expectation is as writers and as readers and audiences when there’s a character who appears in only one scene.

**Craig:** And generally, we’re going to try and avoid this, meaning when we do engage a single-use character, we’re doing so very carefully and very intentionally, because every actor that we bring on board, that’s an expense to the production, and somebody has to get wardrobed and costumed. And it also demands the audience’s attention. They are just going to presume that when they meet people, those people are in the movie. And the more people they meet who show up once and leave, the more frustrated they get. You keep throwing new people at them, they’re just going to stop paying attention, because they’re like, ah, none of these people are going to stay around, so why am I bothering?

**John:** Yeah. I think people create a mental placeholder for them. And I find as I read scripts, often I’ll circle the first time a character shows up just so I can keep track of, oh, this is that person. And if I find myself circling a bunch of characters, like, oh wait, how many people are in this movie? I think you’re saying that expectation is that this person might come back, so I need to remember something about them.

In some cases, especially if the scene is very dramatic or very funny, there’s kind of a misleading vividness, where it feels like, oh, this person must be important, because look how much screen time or look at what a big moment they had. And that can be a trap in and of itself.

So, looking back at the scene that I wrote, I know it was the right choice to do it, and this was a scene which in its initial conception was going to have a group of people speaking, and then it became more clear that like, oh no, it should just be one person driving it, because it was going to get too diffuse if I had a bunch of people speaking in the scene.

But what I was able to do is, because this scene takes place in a specific set that the hero is going to, and there’s not an expectation that they’re going to come back to it, I think I was able to make it pretty clear we don’t have an expectation that that character is ever going to be seen again. So by having it be a destination and not part of the regular home set in a way, I don’t think we’re going to plan on seeing that thing again.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the ways you can inoculate the audience against thinking that they’re going to keep seeing this person is… Very common use of single-use characters is they die. So, we’re not worried about them. They’re not coming back. I’m thinking of the very opening scene of the first episode of Game of Thrones. There are a bunch of guys we don’t see again. They all die. It doesn’t matter who they are. They die. That’s the point.

Another way we can inoculate the audience is by making sure that our single-use character is rooted by circumstance into a position. So, we have a main character moving through a space, whether it’s an airport, or it is a department store.

**John:** A DMV.

**Craig:** A DMV. Somebody is stuck in their job. They’re not going anywhere. Your character moves in and then leaves. And we understand that character can’t go anywhere else except where they are. I mean, one of the greatest single-use characters of all time is Edie McClurg playing a rental car saleswoman in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And she’s perfect.

**John:** We wouldn’t want any more.

**Craig:** You couldn’t ask for a better foil for Steve Martin losing his mind. And we know we’re not going to see her again, because she lives and works behind that counter and does not exist anywhere else.

**John:** Another thing I think you need to keep in mind with these single-use characters is, always ask yourself is my hero still driving this scene, because so often you have this funny idea for a character, this funny situation, but if my hero can only react to that situation, they’re not actually in charge of it. So what you describe of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the scene is not really about her. It’s about his frustration and what happens, what he does in response to her. It’s not about her. And so making sure that if you are going to use a single-use character, they’re not just going to take over the scene and just leave your hero, your star just facing them as an obstacle and not doing anything themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. There may be a tendency among new writers to try and jazz up a scene by having a waiter come over and be wacky. Nobody wants it. Nobody.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Every now and then, for instance, here’s a for instance. Bronson Pinchot created a career for himself with a single-use character in Beverly Hills Cop.

**John:** Beverly Hills Cop, yeah.

**Craig:** And it was so good. It was so fascinating and so weird that you kind of wanted more of him. And you didn’t get more of him, because he was single-use. And you wanted more of him, and you got more of him eventually. Bronson Pinchot went on to do other things, because I think that was before he did Perfect Strangers, I think. I think it was. I’m sure somebody will write in and tell me I’m an idiot, which I often am.

But the point is, every now and then you will get something like that. But don’t aim for it, because it almost never happens. And you really do want to design these single-use characters as functions for your main character. They are obstacles. They are information. They are omens. They are distractions. But they are rarely the person who is supposed to be drawing the audience’s attention.

**John:** Yeah. So in certain circumstances, your waiter example is exactly right. Because you would say like, oh, you want every character to pop. And it’s like, yeah, but you don’t necessarily want that waiter character to pop. If the waiter needs to be there, but it’s not actually the point of the scene, you kind of want that character to be a little bit background. You want that character to be helping inform the setting, but they are kind of scene setting. They’re not actually the point of it.

And they should be a little bit more like set decoration than the marquee star, because they’re going to probably pull focus away from what you actually want to be focusing on, which is probably your hero and what your hero is doing in those moments.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** So as you look at your script, if you have a lot of single-use characters, there may be something wrong. It’s not a guarantee that something is wrong, but there might be something wrong. So if there’s four scenes in your script that have major single-use characters who have multiple lines and are really doing a lot, ask yourself why. And not necessarily there’s a problem, but there could be a reason why. Maybe these characters should be combined or there’s some way in which they can come back. And you may not be spending your script time properly.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s worth policing through. And every now and then you might find a way to maybe collapse them into one. If you have two scenes, you may be able to get away with just combining those two characters into one character. But yeah, be aware of it and try to avoid. And by the way, when possible ask yourself does this person need to talk at all.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because the difference between a person who says one word on camera and a person who says nothing is a lot of money and also a lot of attention.

**John:** A lot of time actually shooting, just to come around to film their lines-

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** … is hours on the day.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 358 – Point of View](https://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 472 – Emotional States](https://johnaugust.com/2020/emotional-states)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 151 – Secrets and Lies](https://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-and-lies)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 467 – Another Word for Euphemism](https://johnaugust.com/2020/another-word-for-euphemism)
* [Gödel’s incompleteness theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/624standard.mp3).

Scriptnotes, Episode 535: Main Character Energy, Transcript

February 24, 2022 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/main-character-energy).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 535 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, as screenwriters we’re constantly looking for ways to expose a character’s inner states, but what happens when real-life people start performing with main character energy?

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ll look at the issue from both the perspective of writers creating characters and 21st century humans trying to function in a society.

**Craig:** We live in a society, John.

**John:** We live in a society. If everyone’s the main character, society probably doesn’t function. We’ll also have Follow Up and lots of new listener questions, and in a bonus segment for Premium Members, we will talk about population, speaking of society. Craig and I grew up in a time of Malthusian predictions of overpopulation. You remember that, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, ’70s.

**John:** Oh, ’70s, and now there’s just not enough ’80s. We’ll talk through that.

**Craig:** Depending on where you live.

**John:** Depending where you live. It’s a very situational and very local thing, but also the trends are pretty clear. We’ll get into some of that. First, Craig, this is pretty huge news. It was hard to sit on the whole week. We almost put out a special episode, but we didn’t. Fans are suing Universal Pictures because the 2019 movie Yesterday did not include Ana de Armas. I was aware she was not in the movie, but I wasn’t aware of the controversy around this, because Ana de Armas is in one of the trailers for the movie, but she does not actually appear in the movie itself. Fans have taken it on themselves to actually sue Universal Pictures over this. Craig, you are the legal expert on the show. Medical expert, legal expert, expert in puzzles. Can you help us figure out what is the likelihood that this lawsuit will go through and that these fans will be justly compensated for the lack of Ana de Armas they got?

**Craig:** It depends on whether Universal wants to make an example of these people or just settle and give everybody a five-cent coupon for something. It’s pretty silly. Obviously the defense is simply that she was in the movie when they made that marketing material. They do put together trailers before the movie’s finalized. Then they creatively came to the conclusion that she didn’t need to be in the movie, and so they removed those scenes. This happens all the time. I remember when I was in high school, my friends and I were very excited to go see, I think it was Nightmare On Elm Street: Dream Warriors is the name of number three.

**John:** (sings)

**Craig:** (sings) Yep. Was that Tesla or Dokken? In the commercials, not just the trailer, in the television commercials, every single commercial, at some point Freddy Krueger would go, “How sweet, fresh meat.” We thought this was the funniest line, and we couldn’t wait to go to the movie and smoke the 1980s weed, which is the equivalent of nibbling one 19th of a gummy today, and then sitting in the theater, and when that line would come, we would go, “Yay! How sweet, fresh meat.” Then he never said it. What we did was we sued.

**John:** That’s how you raised the nest egg that let you become the successful screenwriter you are now.

**Craig:** We live in a society. Basically, so this is ridiculous, either Universal goes, “Yeah, we just want to make a point of never having anyone do this ever again,” which is what I will suspect, they will just fight this to the bitter end, because even the people are asking for $5 million. This is a class action, I presume. $5 million spread out over affected viewers in their home states. Even if Universal lost and had to pay every dime these people wanted, whatever. This is ridiculous. I think they’ll fight it all the way. There’s always the possibility they just settle and everybody gets, like I said, 20 cents, a 20-cent coupon for something.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes that lets you see the trailer that actually has Ana de Armas in it. Apparently she plays another guest on a talk show when the guy, the hero of Yesterday, is playing a song. There’s some sort of spark between them. It’s not even clear that it’s beyond the one scene. I do just hope that the end result of this, whether it’s found in Universal’s favor or the fans’ favor, is that it’s really found in favor of Ana de Armas, who needs to be in all movies, because she is one of the most delightful things about the recent Bond movie. She’s so fantastic in Knives Out. We need more Ana de Armas. If this lawsuit is what it takes to bring this awareness to the general public, I think it’s worth it.

**Craig:** Seems like the general public is saying that she is so compelling, the only reason they went to go see a movie with Beatles music in it was to see her, and no other reason.

**John:** No other reason.

**Craig:** No other reason.

**John:** I’ll say, even the movie without Ana de Armas in it, I really enjoyed the movie. I don’t think people talk enough about Yesterday, because I thought it was actually a really well constructed movie, and took a very high-concept premise and ran with it well. I wish good things upon the movie Yesterday, even if it doesn’t star Ana de Armas. If we get the Snyder cut that has Ana de Armas back in it, maybe that’s the best of all possible worlds.

**Craig:** That sounds good.

**John:** Yeah. Now Craig, you texted me last night asking about, “Hey, can we pull this Scriptnotes podcast that you and I record off of Spotify, because,” you said, “F Spotify.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Spotify has been in headlines lately. Neil Young pulled his catalog off. I think Joni Mitchell just did the same in solidarity with him, because Spotify is the main patron and platform for Joe Rogan’s podcast. I don’t have anything against Joe Rogan the person. I don’t watch his podcast or listen to the show.

**John:** To be clear, you don’t listen to any podcast.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Including this podcast.

**Craig:** That’s right, so that’s not a judgment.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Stipulated it’s a thing that one could watch or listen to. Therefore I don’t. But I certainly have read enough transcripts and quotes from him that indicate that he’s not on what I would call the right side of the science when it comes to epidemiology and COVID-19 and public health and vaccination. I think it’s fair for these people to say, “Look, Spotify is … ” I think they made a $100 million deal with him. They don’t like the things he says. They’re not asking Spotify to kick him off Spotify. They’re not asking Spotify to censor him. They’re just saying, “I don’t want to be at that party. If that guy’s talking like that at that party, I don’t want to be there.” I think that’s reasonable. I don’t want to be there either. Now we don’t make any money off of Spotify. Did we get $100 million from Spotify?

**John:** We did not get $100 million from Spotify.

**Craig:** I just wanted to check real fast before I said no.

**John:** Here’s what’s confusing about this is that in terms of a podcast versus a song on this, like Neil Young or Joni Mitchell pulling their catalog off, that means that Spotify cannot play their things anymore. Joe Rogan’s podcast is a Spotify Exclusive, so you can only listen to his podcast through Spotify. Scriptnotes is a free and open podcast for the whole world to enjoy, so people can choose to use Spotify to listen to it, but our files are not actually ever on Spotify. People are choosing to listen to it. Scriptnotes is like a webpage that you could go to in Firefox or Opera or Safari or whatever else. We could theoretically somehow block Opera from opening our page, but that’s not really how the internet works. It’s just an RSS feed. We’re not getting any money from them. The only thing we did recently is we made it so that our Premium subscribers, if they’re using Spotify as their main app, they can now subscribe within Spotify, but it’s not Spotify paying us money. It’s just that they can go to the webpage for everyone else who wants to pay us five bucks a month to listen to all the back-episodes.

**Craig:** Does Spotify put ads on us or anything like that?

**John:** No. Just a podcast player. Just like opening a PDF in Acrobat versus Preview or-

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Something like that. It’s just an app. It’s not actually a thing that’s paying us any money.

**Craig:** It sounds like if we said to Spotify, “You can’t do that,” they would feel nothing, and nothing would change for us either. That’s what I’m hearing.

**John:** I think if our listeners want to choose to not use Spotify, that’s their choice to not use Spotify, and should not pay Spotify their money. I’m not paying Spotify any money.

**Craig:** I don’t either.

**John:** Easy for me to stop. You know what? Last week on the show I talked through my experience of coaching a friend, like, “It’s time to leave your reps,” and his career improved. We have a Follow Up question from that from a person named Frustrated. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana Rao:** Frustrated wrote in, “I’m a mid-level TV writer who has written/produced several episodes of television. I’ve only ever had a manager and no agent. In the last few weeks it’s become clear to me that my manager has got to go. It was on a new show, my second, when COVID hit, and we went virtual for several months, but eventually the plug got pulled and it never went into production. Since then I’ve tried everything, pitching on open writing assignments, writing new material, pitching original ideas, networking, etc. I’ve had lots of good feedback, but ultimately no paid work. It’s been a year and a half with nothing to show for it. My question is, can you talk more about actually firing your reps? Do you simply send an email? Should I try to find new ones before firing the old ones. How do you sell yourself to new reps when you’ve been out of work for a long time? Are agents or managers better for someone in my position at this point?”

**John:** All good questions.

**Craig:** Great questions.

**John:** Let’s talk about first firing your old rep before getting a new rep. My instinct is that you can start the process of looking for the new rep and get those initial conversations happening. It doesn’t really matter that much if you fire the first one before you start hiring the second one. It’s all going to work out the same.

**Craig:** I’m going to-

**John:** You disagree?

**Craig:** A little bit, because it’s a small town, for being such a big town. The one thing that managers seem to be good at and agents seem to be good at is hearing that other managers and other agents are sniffing around their clients. In fact, they seem to have way more attention paid to that than, for instance, getting their client’s work. What happens is you can find yourself in a weird middle ground where you head out there, you start talking to people, your manager finds out, yells at them about poaching. Managers and agents do poach from each other, but they’re careful about how they do it, because they don’t want to get into open warfare. The new people might back away. Your current manager is super pissed off. Now you’re stuck in a house with somebody that’s not talking to you. Other people feel like, “Okay, just come back when you fire that person,” but it’s gotten weird.

It’s better to go out clean, I think, but before you go out clean, I think the person you need to talk to, Frustrated, is your lawyer. I’m going to presume you have a lawyer, because you say you’re a mid-level TV writer, you’ve had work, you’ve got credits. Your lawyer will be able to give you a decent sense, because they’re the ones who talk to business affairs, about where you stand, and ultimately where you might be able to go. Your lawyer is also able to, in an intermediate fashion, talk to some of the agents or managers that she or he knows, and whisper, if say something was going to happen, and get a sense, a little preview of what the world is like out there. If it’s bad, if generally there’s not a lot of interest, you got to get something going and then walk, but if there is, then I think you cut it clean. I think you can send an email or you can phone call. It doesn’t matter. Maybe they have some sense of what is fair. Who cares? They’re fired. Fire them. Then go out there and start talking to new people.

As far as agents versus managers, as someone better for your position at this point, I am so old-fashioned, and I think that agents are better options, because they don’t mingle production in with representation. It is also true that often, depending on where you are on the ladder, managers may have more time to focus on you.

**John:** Craig talks about the important stuff, discussing this with your lawyer. I think the other people you should really involve in this conversation are the other execs you’ve been interacting with. Say you’re pitching writing assignments, you’re doing this stuff, there’s people that you’ve connected with. I think it’s worth asking if you have any relationship with them, like, “Hey, what is my manager like? Is my manager actually doing a good job? What do you think? Do you have any better suggestions for me?”

Same with you were on this room writing the show, those are other writers who have reps. Talk to them about your experience and what their experience has been, and they’ll give you a good sense of is this manager doing a good job for you, which it probably sounds like they’re not, and who might be the better people suited for you, because I remember as I left my first agent, went to my second agent, that was really part of the discussion is who was the right person for me to even be going to. You will find those answers by talking with folks who are working with those people all the time.

**Craig:** That’s a good point, that Frustrated has been in rooms. He or she knows other writers. They have reps. That’s a good place to start. When you’re a feature writer, you interface with executives all the time. When you’re a television staffer, you generally don’t. There may not be that person to go to, but then you have the availability of all these other writers that you’ve been with, and who knows, maybe they have a sense of things. I think you’ve identified a problem when you say, “It’s become clear to me that my manager has to go.” Trust that feeling. It’s not going to get better.

**John:** Yep. Agreed. All right, some more Follow Up here. Two episodes ago we were just talking about the 100-year-old screenplay format and how frustrating it is that some certain things are hard to include in it. Clint wrote in to point us towards Script Hop, which is a service that can package up your scripts, along with supporting material, so visuals, audio notes, music, and things like that. It feels like something that’s designed for pitching your project to places. It’s not necessarily the kind of format that would be useful for a production, for something to represent the whole project for a production, which is I think more what Craig and I are looking at, but sure, different people are trying different things.

Script Hop is owned or seems like it’s created by Script University, which makes me shudder a little bit, but it feels like the kind of thing where people are trying to do experiments around the edges of that. Great, experiment with it, but I think we are both still looking for what is that service or format that it’s going to be a great way to say, “Here is the script, the text you’re going to be shooting, but here is important stuff that goes with it,” that goes beyond just my suggestion of just like, here’s the deck that the company sent.

**Craig:** I’m looking at this, and it absolutely does seem like a pitch. They’re literally saying pitch content. That’s what they’re calling it. The Premium fee here is $8 a month. You can create as many packets as you need. This is not exactly what we’re talking about, but it looks pretty. From the demo here, it looks snazzy.

**John:** Some more Follow Up on We Hear and We See. Alex in Liverpool, England wrote, “I do see the value in avoiding we see/we hear [inaudible 00:14:24] for the sake of brevity. Why have, ‘We see a woman walk into the room,’ when you can simply have, ‘A woman walks into the room.'”

**Craig:** Oh my god, I never thought of it that way. Oh, I have. We have. We’ve talked about it literally four billion times, Alex. That said, big fan of Liverpool.

**John:** We love Liverpool. Let’s talk about we hear and we see though, and why it’s useful in situations where you can’t just literally just have the clean sentence there, because, “A woman walks into the room,” yes, that is correct. For me, we hear/we see is most often a case where the cause of something isn’t known, so it’s happening off screen. We experience it as an audience, but the characters in it aren’t there. You can describe a thing that’s happening, but there’s not a verb that goes with it, or if it’s a stand-in for the camera. Really I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s a way of not talking about cameras and shots and angles. It’s really like folks in the audience’s attention on something without calling out the camera does a thing.

**Craig:** Those are all excellent practical reasons. In addition, philosophically, brevity, this kind of extreme brevity is not the goal. We see and we hear also has a psychological impact on the reader. It is immersive. It means you are immersed. You are feeling and experiencing something in this moment, the way that a character would if they would be right next to it, or the way you would if you were right in the middle of it, which is very different than if you don’t. If the six characters, five letters and a space, gets that done, and gets it done that efficiently, why not? Just brutal, spartan brevity is a style, I suppose, but it is not the holy grail.

**John:** Two examples I was trying to come up with. Here’s the first one. We’re falling through an emerald void. All around us we hear crackling sounds, like ice shattering. You could do that without the we’s in those cases, but it’d be hard and brutal. The we’s really give you the sense that we as an audience are falling through this space, that we are hearing these things, and it’s not dependent on this character hearing the things. This is what the experience is like in the theater.

**Craig:** How else would you do it? An emerald voice. Crackling sounds like ice shattering. That doesn’t tell me much, including falling.

**John:** It doesn’t tell me the experience we’re getting. It’s like pointing at things. Here’s a second example. While Tom is digging through his pack, we see a shadow move across the headlights.

**Craig:** Tom does not see that shadow, but we do.

**John:** That’s the important thing.

**Craig:** Oh sweet, fresh meat, I assume is what the next line would be.

**John:** 100%. That is exactly what I had planned. Literally, you reached into my mind and pulled the words out before I could even say them.

**Craig:** I love that commercial. I’m going to sue. The example that Alex gives us, why have, “We see a woman walk into the room,” when you could have, “A woman walks into the room.” “A woman walks into the room,” that feels like, I don’t know, a very dull man is telling a story, “A woman walks into the room.” Wait, does everybody notice that a woman walks into the room? Are we really close to her when she walks into the room? Are we really far away when she walks in? “We see a woman walk into the room,” I already have an idea. The camera’s pointed toward the door, I’m going to say a wide shot here, because we see her walk into the room. We don’t see at the door, a woman enters frame. There’s lots of information here. That’s why I think we get so frustrated by this whole, “Don’t say we see or we hear,” not because it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt.” It helps. It’s incredibly helpful. There we go. I think at this point we should just change the name of this podcast to the We See Cast.

**John:** That’s what we do. One useful exercise for people who still are bucking up against we hear and we see is to go through some of the screenplays that we’ve mentioned, like some of these award-nominated screenplays from this past year, and look for situations where the writer was using we hear or we see, and try to rewrite those sentences without them. I think you’ll find it’s a little more difficult than you would’ve guessed.

**Craig:** Or not as good.

**John:** Or not as good. Honestly, probably just not as good. It’s not to say you have to use it. Many screenwriters do not use it, and that’s absolutely their choice, but I think it’s a useful tool, and to take it out of your belt unnecessarily is dumb, in my opinion. Aaron from New York writes, “I’m pretty certain I first read the instruction that discouraged the use of we see and we hear in David Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible,” which was first published in 1994 and Aaron read back in 2004. “I’m not sure if it matters. I’m not sure if Trottier himself started it.” I think it predates that, because, Craig, I think I remember a prohibition on we hear and we see from when I first started in film school, which would’ve been ’92. Do you have a sense of when you first heard this as a quote unquote “rule?”

**Craig:** It was on the internet somewhere.

**John:** Yeah, I guess, early internet, because you were in a film school situation that would’ve discouraged that.

**Craig:** No, late ’90s or early 2000s I think maybe. Who’s Dave Trottier? Trottier?

**John:** I recognize that name. I think he’s still a person who does stuff about-

**Craig:** I’m looking him up. Tell you what, not to be a jerk about it, but go ahead and everyone out there just choose who you think you should listen to. I’ll just leave it at that. How about that? Not being a jerk. I’m just saying-

**John:** Not being a jerk.

**Craig:** You have choices in to whom you listen.

**John:** Now another thing we’ve discussed in a previous episode I think was a listener question talking about how this person’s partner, spouse was not supportive of his screenwriting, he was feeling frustrated. I think you and I actually had a good back and forth about how supportive that partner needs to be. Some Follow Up that Megana can read for us.

**Megana:** Once Felt Neglected Too wrote in and said, “I’m a recently produced screenwriter. The film has some serious household name actors in it. While the film was in production, I started dating someone. This person was lovely, with a regular, non-creative office job, who only displayed a mild, passing, supportive, light interest in this accomplishment and a general disinterest in my career choice and abilities as a whole. I would be lying if I didn’t feel some disappointment when I wanted to express something about a project and was met with a superficial support one might give a child about their 5,000th drawing. This attitude persisted even when we were exiting the movie theater after watching the first screening of my film. My head knew they were a good person and supportive in their own ‘I support you as a person’ way, but my heart felt it was death by 1,000 ambivalent cuts I tried my best to ignore. This all became very clear one day when an old college crush had seen the movie and I met them for coffee.”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** “They expressed such awe about the film and what I had done.”

**Craig:** Of course they did.

**Megana:** “It felt like I had touched their soul. I remember thinking if my partner had looked at me for just five minutes like this person across the table had for a couple hours that day, I might still be with them. It’s one thing to be recognized on a surface level. It’s another to be wholly and completely seen by your companion.”

**John:** Craig, this person’s having an emotional creative affair with this other person. That’s what it is. Someone is looking at you with those big eyes, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I want to feel this desirable.”

**Craig:** It feels great, obviously. Those of us who write or create, any artist of any kind, we all are making things for others. It is a rare artist who is so self-sufficient in their motivation that they legitimately don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, good or bad. Certainly for those of us who are trying to make movies and television, which is a fairly popular artistic kind of pursuit that is entirely driven by audience, yeah, we’re looking for applause. That’s our dream. Our dream is we write something and everyone just looks at us and goes, “Oh my god, you’re incredible,” and then you win awards and you do your speeches. That’s our dream.

When your old college crush met you for coffee, which is quite a commitment on their part, and expressed such awe about the film and what you had done, which must’ve taken an enormous amount of effort on their part, yeah, it felt like you touched their soul and maybe they really liked the movie, but also here’s the thing. Not everyone loves movies that way, and yet maybe they do other things for you that this college crush couldn’t. Look, practical advice for Once Felt Neglected Too. John, you’ve read Love Languages. You’ve read Love Languages.

**John:** I’ve not read Love Languages. I’m sorry. I know the term, but I’ve not read it.

**Craig:** There’s a book, I think it’s called the Five Love Languages. It’s a staple of couples therapy, but it’s also great for anybody in any kind of relationship, friends, whatever, coworkers. It’s incredibly useful. The basic thesis is that people experience love in different ways. For some people, when someone spends a lot of quality time with them, that’s what makes them feel loved. For some people, receiving gifts from people is what makes them feel loved. For some people it’s very much a physical thing. For some people it’s words of praise. Now I think a lot of screenwriters experience love through words of praise.
I think it is useful, Once Felt Neglected Too, to say to your partner, “I’m not asking you to be a different person. I’m not asking you to care more about this than you actually do. What I’m telling you is the way I experience love most viscerally is through words of praise. If you love me and you want me to feel loved, that’s how it works. I’m not asking you to lie. I am asking you to figure it out. Then I think it might work better. I just feel so sad at the thought of someone’s solid relationship with a human being that would look after them when they were sick and back them up and defend them and stay with them and be faithful and loyal, all going to hell because they just also didn’t super love movies or know how to express love for a movie, because I got to tell you, people can say stuff like that over coffee and it means nothing. Nothing.

**John:** You don’t want a relationship with a fan. This coffee date was a fan. That’s not a strong foundation to build a relationship with. Now it’s entirely possible that your relationship, sounds like it broke up with this partner who wasn’t as supportive as you needed, maybe that was not a right relationship for you either. I’m not saying you need to go back to this person or that was the end all, be all of things, they should sacrifice what you want out of this for that relationship, but yes, there’s levels of support. It wasn’t like this person was standing in your way or telling you to give up your writing career or mocking your writing career or doing anything to hinder you. They just weren’t as rah rah, enthusiastic about it as they could be. Maybe you need rah rah enthusiasm. That’s fine. Maybe that’s why the relationship doesn’t work. To compare it to the super fan is only going to be at your detriment.

**Craig:** I couldn’t agree more. Let’s get personal for a second, shall we?

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Has Mike ever just not really loved something you’ve done? I’m not talking about a script. I mean just the movie comes out, or the show, and he watches it and he’s just like, “Okay. Yeah, not for me, but great. Good for you.”

**John:** Yes, but I would say that in those situations it’s also been a thing where I wasn’t incredibly delighted with how it turned out either. I think there’s also recognition that there’s genres and things that I will like that he will not like. I think we know each other well enough to know that I’m not going to be expecting wild praise about those things. Same with you and Melissa?

**Craig:** Very much so. It’s always been surprising to me, the things that have grabbed her that she’s loved and the things that were like, “Meh, not so much,” because it wasn’t an easy thing to predict. Then again, that’s the least surprising thing of all, because people are unique. They like different things, even within genres. It’s never been the kind of thing where I thought, “If you don’t understand what I tried to do here, then you don’t see my heart,” because there’s an us that is beyond and separate from the work we do. That’s really important to differentiate. Megana, in your extensive life, I’m keeping you as young as I can.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Megana:** I’m very young.

**John:** The few years that you’ve been out of high school.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** In the few decades you’ve been out of high school.

**Megana:** In my youthful experiences.

**Craig:** In your youthful experience.

**Megana:** I was telling John that this … A couple of things. The dynamic that this person is setting up with wanting to feel like they’re touching their partner’s soul, that doesn’t feel like an equal partnership to me. They want someone who is going to make them feel like this really visionary auteur. I think that it goes back to something you guys have been talking about in recent weeks, that success often feels like failure. You also can’t expect to be receiving that external validation from the people closest to you. It just seems like the dynamic and the expectation is off.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great way of putting it. Look, if you guys are farting in front of each other, how much worship can you expect.

**Megana:** The other thing I was telling, because John and I were talking about this yesterday, was that it would be so stressful for me to be in a dynamic like this, because I feel like professionally for myself, and I have reps and all of these other people invested in my project success, to also have my partner invested in that would really freak me out. It would feel like way too much pressure. I think the creative process can be messy. None of us are always producing great work. If I felt like my partner’s support of me was contingent upon that, that would be horrible.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

**John:** Craig and Megana, I have some advice that could change your life, so if you just want to take a seat, because it sounds simple, but it may actually bring about some changes for you.

**Ashley Ward on TikTok:** You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character, because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed, so take a second and look around and realize that it’s a blessing for you to be here right now.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** That’s main character energy, Craig. That is main character energy. That’s our marquee topic for today. I think it’s good that we have Megana on here as the Gen Z Millennial cusp person to talk us through this, because it’s not quite what you might at first expect, because we have main character on the internet, which is not this at all. Main character on the internet is the villain that Twitter chooses every day for everyone to pile onto.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** Main character energy is that sense of life is a movie and you are the central character and you just start acting like the central character in your movie.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** It’s different from I think a thing that I’ve advocated a lot on the show, which is treating yourself as a protagonist and recognizing the protagonist struggle. This is really almost more about an aesthetic series of choices that you’re making about how you’re going to present yourself and how you’re going to perform as the character in a movie. Looking into a little bit of the history of how this came to be, but hopefully also really look at how screenwriting invented this problem and the weird way in which we now have characters who are aware that they are characters in a drama and are living their lives this way. Emily In Paris is an example of a character who has main character energy and she’s actually the main character of a show. I want to grapple with this a bit.

**Craig:** Is that where that is from, that clip you just played?

**John:** It’s not, no. That was actually from a TikTokker from this last year. Some really good things we will put in the show notes that link to it, there’s an essay by Coco Klockner. They have a really good overview of the philosophy of main character energy. Here’s an example from Lauren Is Oversharing. “It’s drinking out of a wine glass and looking over a balcony so everyone on the beach knows I’m the main character.” You get that. You get that feeling?

**Craig:** This is crazy.

**John:** This is from Coco Klockner’s essay, “Main characters have an impeccable magnetism to them. They’re creative. They don’t play by the rules. They’re a little ugly, but in a hot way. They’re full of themselves, but humble in the right moments. They’re self-aware, but unanxious. They’re not perfect, but if they stumble, a lesson is learned. Perhaps foremost, a main character emerges as someone who can pull of the paradoxical feat of conveying interiority in a world of surfaces.”

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** “Main character energy is not a matter of being individualistic or singular, but rather a matter of being extremely legible.” What I think they’re pointing to here is that it’s projecting interiority, it’s projecting an inner life, only through these surface manifestations. What as screenwriters we’re trying to do is trying to expose an interior life through what we can see on a film and TV. In this case it’s real-life people trying to present that they’re having this interior life just through all the outward trappings and through the Instagram stories and the trips they’re taking with influencers. It’s this weird thing that’s happening that I want to grapple with a bit.

**Craig:** I’m horrified. I’m legitimately horrified by this. I guess maybe movies and television just got too clever for their own good, because what we’re supposed to be doing is creating … Drama is not meant to be life at all. In fact, that was the point. When they created drama, back in … They created Western drama in Greece. There was certainly drama predating Greece. The idea was we’re all aware this is not life, right? Get it? There’s a stage. Or you’re sitting in a room watching a fricking piece of glass on the wall. It’s obviously not real. In this unreal representation of the world, you will learn some interesting things that might actually be thought-provoking or make you think about stuff in your regular life, or maybe they’ll make some sense of things in your life, or maybe you’ll just feel like you’re not alone in your emotions and that other people have felt the things you have felt. In no way, shape, or form should anyone ever want to live their lives like a, quote unquote, “main character.” That’s insane. You’re not a character. Help.

**John:** Let’s let you stew on that for a little bit.

**Craig:** Help.

**John:** We could talk about movies, which is a easier way into it, because there are characters in movies who seem to be aware they are characters in movies and are living their life that way, so Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off seems like he’s aware that he’s a character. He’s performing with main character energy, because he’s literally stirring stuff up and creating adventure around him at all times. Emma Stone in Easy A has main character energy, and it’s not just because she’s narrating. I think narrating is an important part of this. She’s also presenting herself on video in a pre-TikTok way and communicating what her arc is and what her change is, what’s going on. Fight Club has it. Emily In Paris we talked about before. The whole series Search Party is all about I have to be the central character driving the story. Girls is about that. We had Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge on to talk about Deadpool and Fleabag. Those are both characters who are aware that they are characters and aware that they were being watched and how they’re being perceived by audiences.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re all characters. If you actually met somebody like Fleabag, you would be repulsed and go running, because that’s awful. It’s amazing when you watch it on television. The reason why, and Phoebe’s a genius, because what she’s done is create an externalization of the inner ticker tape in her mind, the hamster wheel that runs, the self-commentary that we go through, but we never go through it in the moment. Normally we go through the day, we have these encounters. Then we go home and then we get into bed and then we start thinking about them and rummaging them over and over and over in our heads and reliving them and thinking, “I should’ve said this,” or, “That was weird.” She takes it, because she can, inside of art and makes it happen all in the moment contemporaneously as it’s happening. It’s fascinating to watch. It’s a really cool way of showing the way the human mind and heart function. If you act like that actually in your life, you’re nuts and you’re awful. This just feels like a very fancy way of saying be a pointless, empty narcissist.

**John:** Narcissism is a interesting word for it, because you’re staring at yourself, but also we are all living in the Truman Show anyway, at least a generation is living in the Truman Show, because they are constantly performing and presenting themselves on YouTube, on TikTok, on social media, to present themselves as a certain kind of way. Megana was talking about people she knows who are especially, I don’t know if you want to say adept, or entrenched in this means of self-identification through self-promotion. Megana, you have one great quote, which I want to make sure you get credit for here.

**Megana:** I have some friends who are self-professed aspiring Instagram influencers. I was telling John, I was like, “Why is everyone always on a boat?”

**Craig:** Why is everyone on a boat?

**Megana:** Why are they always partying on a boat? I don’t get it.

**Craig:** What’s special about the boat?

**John:** Because the boat photographs well.

**Megana:** You can shake champagne.

**Craig:** They’re all doing the same goddamn thing in the same way. I don’t even think anybody at this point is like, “Oh, influencers, I want to be like them,” because people want to just be like influencers to influence other people. They don’t actually want to, “Oh, that influencer came up with a great way to do makeup.” They don’t even care about makeup. They just want to be the person that’s doing the makeup on the camera that other people think about the makeup for.

I do have to believe that these people who are extremely online and who are obsessed primarily with how they present to the world are experiencing some very serious issues when the camera is off, and that as time goes on, it is fascinating to see how reality simply doesn’t go away, it just waits for you and catches up. You cannot keep that up if this divorce between who you actually are and who you want to show the world, because you’re not a real person but a character, that’s a recipe for ruin.

**John:** When I was doing my Arlo Finch book tours, I was visiting a whole bunch of schools, I would give the same presentation twice a day, sometimes three times a day for groups of 6th to 7th and 8th graders mostly. One of the things I tried to stress towards the end is that … We were talking about heroes and what heroes in stories do, what protagonists do in stories. Protagonists are always struggling. They’re growing. They’re changing. They’re facing obstacles. They’re overcoming adversity, but it’s tough. They’re creating change by changing themselves.

I tried to just turn that around and say, “Listen, if you think about yourself as the hero of the story of your life, you’re going to face obstacles. Heroes also have principles, they have codes, they have things they learn to live by, they have rules they set for themselves. Most importantly, they have allies, they have people who were on their side and they are an ally to somebody else.” What I find missing in a lot of this main character energy discourse is forgetting about the other people, forgetting that we live in a society, forgetting that we live-

**Craig:** We live in a society.

**John:** That you have relationships with people. It goes back to our previous email about the guy who wasn’t getting support from his partner. It’s like, yeah, but you’re thinking about yourself as only the main character and not recognizing that your partner also has needs and stuff too. You’re not acknowledging those.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting. There are lots of different kinds of characters. It seems like this main character energy is really focusing on poorly written characters. The quote that you played about romanticizing your life, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the exact opposite thing that I think about everything, than that quote. You can go ahead. Go ahead, start romanticizing your life. We’ll wait, because here’s the thing. Life is not romantic. You’re a big sack of slowly decaying meat that will eventually stop functioning. Everybody that you know and meet and love will eventually die. You are going to be sick. You are going to ache. You are going to have moments that are wonderful, moments that are terrible. You also don’t deserve everyone’s attention. You almost never deserve anyone’s attention.

The best thing that you can do with your life, other than fulfilling yourself and feeling like you’ve achieved something you wanted to achieve, is helping someone else. Go ahead and make a life or help a life or nurture someone or something, teach someone something or something. You know what’s not romantic? Teaching. This romanticization is just really superficialization. That’s what it is. You don’t want to be a main character in a good thing. You want to be a main character in a soap opera that holds wine and looks out over the balcony or the boat railing. Megana, what is going on?

**Megana:** I think that example is sincere, but a lot of the other examples that I see on social media are funny and tongue-in-cheek. I think it’s because there is this awareness of constantly curating and filming your life and playing with these tropes. There is a self-aware humor to it. I’m curious also how that affects how you would write people who are grappling both with their own presentation of image versus themselves in film.

**Craig:** I’m just not interested in those people. I got to be honest. I’m not.

**John:** Here’s a great example though of a character predating social media. This is from Sleepless In Seattle, which is a great script, Nora Ephron’s script. Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell are talking. Rosie O’Donnell’s line to her is, “That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” Nora Ephron, thank you very much for that-

**Craig:** Good quote.

**John:** Good insight. Good quote. It’s the unrealistic expectations of how life is supposed to be, that life is supposed to be like a movie, that things should be as extreme, as beautiful, as perfect as that. It’s that desire for impossible perfection. It’s like some sort of body dysmorphia disorder applied to your life, where you don’t actually see things as they truly are.

**Megana:** Have you seen Bo Burnam’s Eighth Grade? I think it’s just such a brilliant depiction of that.

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous because it confronts what Nora Ephron was getting at here, you want to be in a love in a movie. She’s literally saying you want main character energy. You want to be the main character. If the movie ever got this right, it was The Graduate. It’s the last shot of The Graduate. It’s brilliant. It’s the most wonderful thing. It still remains just like a little miracle to me.

**John:** He’s done this big dramatic thing that is such main character energy.

**Craig:** He stopped a wedding. He stopped a wedding by banging on glass and, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” and stopped a wedding and comes up to her, and she goes, “Yes,” and leaves the stupid guy that she shouldn’t be marrying. She runs off with him. They run out. All the adults are like, “What’s happening?” These crazy kids, they’re in love, and it’s the most romantic thing ever. They get on a bus and they sit down, full of just this romantic energy, and then the camera just stays with them, and you see the reality of what they’ve done slowly sink in.

**John:** As the adrenaline fades.

**Craig:** The adrenaline fades, and now, “Where are we getting lunch?” and, “I guess we need an apartment,” and, “Yeah, I don’t have a job.”

**John:** This has been on my mind, partly because the thing I’m writing right now has characters who are struggling with main character energy and presentation and public shaming and all the things that wrap up in that. It’s a thing that’s going to be there. I just want to make sure as we’re wrapping up the segment is that we don’t be afraid of having your protagonists protagonate, but those are actual actions and choices and difficult things that they are doing to achieve the thing that they want. The thing that they want is probably not to be a character in a movie. Hopefully they want something that is actually tangible and real that they need to pursue for their own inner being, and that as screenwriters, it’s our job to externalize these internal thoughts, but make sure the characters have internal thoughts and have internal drives and desires, because otherwise they’re going to just feel like empty puppets running around, which is what I think Craig and I are worried about, some of these Instagram influencers are just feeling like empty puppets running around.

**Craig:** They tell you they’re empty puppets. They just say it. It’s wild, man. It’s wild.

**John:** It’s wild.

**Craig:** You know what? The kids are all right. They’re going to be fine.

**John:** They’ll sort it out.

**Craig:** I just think that the internet has essentially become the playground of people with extreme personality disorders, that yes, main characters have an impeccable … Most main characters, if you really study them, have personality disorders.

**John:** Ferris Bueller is pathological.

**Craig:** He’s evil. The things that he does, it’s evil. He’s a terrible villain. Anyway, thank you for this. I’m stunned and horrified, but hopeful that everybody knows, like Megana says, a lot of it is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It’s like the new version of big dick energy. I get it, but also I feel like for people like the lady that said you have to start romanticizing your life, deromanticize your life, and then you might actually get a chance to live an interesting life.

**John:** Use your drones to spy on people, not to photograph yourself. That’s what they’re really made for.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right, we have time for two listener questions. Let’s listen to questions from Bex and Alex. Megana, can you start us off?

**Megana:** Bex asks, “I’ve taken a particular online screenwriting course from a writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, and I learned a great deal, but he said to be careful about submitting your work to agents, managers, or studios too soon, because if the writing isn’t good, your name goes on a do not read this person’s work ever list. That list is maintained and shared by all, or at least a majority of the industry. Once you’re on that list, you’re blackballed from ever having legitimate industry people look at your material, no matter how improved your work is. My question is, is this true? Does the industry share and maintain such a list of blackballed unknown writers? The writing instructor says he’s seen the actual list.”

**John:** No. The simple answer is no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Here’s the answer with a little bit more subtlety is that within a certain agency, they will keep a database of who they’ve read, just so that if one agent has read and passed on a thing, that they won’t keep reading it, the same person again and again, if it’s not for them, but the idea that there is an industry-wide list of like, “These are all the upcoming writers, the ones we’re not going to pay attention to,” is absurd, because not only would it be collusion, no one would make that list. It’s just not actually helpful to anybody.

**Craig:** They’re not even competent enough to maintain a list like this. This falls under the Bush did 9/11 heading. Do you really think Bush was smart enough to do 9/11? No. He couldn’t even figure out how to plant weapons of mass destruction in the middle of a desert. I don’t think he did 9/11. Similarly, Hollywood is just not organized enough to even keep anything close to a list like that, nor would anybody care. Here’s the thing. Unknown, unproduced writers, who have never worked before, nobody knows who they are. Nobody’s going to sit there and make a list of names. You know how much time it takes? You know how quickly I could figure out if the script is good or not? Three pages.

**John:** Three pages.

**Craig:** Who needs to look at the list?

**John:** I do like the idea that there’s a anti-Franklin Leonard out there somewhere, who’s making a list of all the unrepped writers, all the unproduced writers who are just trash, who should never be produced. That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** That’s a great James Bond character, but no.

**Craig:** You get ranked from negative one to negative 10?

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** I love it. No, that’s crazy. To the writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, stop it. That’s just not true. You think that she or he is doing it as a scare, oh he, that it’s a scare thing, like, “I’ll just motivate you by-”

**John:** I want to be generous in interpretation. I think that perhaps the writing that he’s reading right now, he knows it’s just not at a level to be getting work, and so he doesn’t want these people, writers he knows will improve over the next year or two, to go too hard too fast and try to get their stuff out there, because they’re just going to hit a meat grinder. He sees potential in them and he wants their potential to be-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Better.

**Craig:** It’s like parents telling their kids that Santa knows if they’ve been naughty or nice.

**John:** Yes, that’s what it is. How about Albert’s question, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. Albert writes, “I’ve been writing for about three years now, and I always have this internal battle about using ing in my screenplays. After writing my first script, I was heavily criticized for using ing words by a professional screenwriter after submitting it to a screenwriting feedback service. When I looked it up on Google, I keep coming across, quote, ‘Screenplays are written in the simple present tense.’ Is this correct? Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards? I appreciate the time and hope to hear an amazing reply soon.”

**Craig:** Amazing reply forthcoming.

**John:** Forthcoming. I’ll put a link to a blog post I did about this at some point, because what you’re really talking about is simple present tense was like, “I kicked the ball,” versus present progressive, like, “I am kicking the ball.” Screenplays are largely in the simple present tense, but Craig and I both use ing forms, the present progressive, in times where action needs to be interruptable, where you’re showing simultaneity of things. There’s reasons to use the ing version of things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. This is very similar to the let’s save a little bit of page count by removing we see. There’s something that’s happening while I’m doing something. Doing something. As John is loading the gun, Craig comes up behind him and hits him in the head with a golf club.

**John:** Jesus. Craig, what did I do to you? First off, where did I get this gun? I’m not a gun [inaudible 00:49:27].

**Craig:** We’re going to get into what happens next, because then it goes, “Three weeks earlier.” John loads a gun. Craig comes up behind him and hits him on the head with a golf club. That means the gun got loaded.

**John:** It’s finished.

**Craig:** Then I came up and I hit John in the head with the golf club. You can see that once again, I know this is crazy, the full breadth of the English language is valuable when writing in the English language. If you were, underline, heavily criticized for using ing words by, and then you put it in quotes, “pro screenwriter,” all I can say is you may have just been using them way too much.

**John:** That’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** Make sure that when you use them, you’re using them purposefully, because they are not as elegant inherently as the standard form. I’m fascinated by this final question, “Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards?” Wouldn’t that depend on who that guy is and who Albert is?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** If Albert is royalty, then the guy punched upwards. Are you a prince?

**John:** Is he punching or did he punch? That is a simple question. Is he still punching?

**Craig:** Is he still punching?

**John:** Is the action interrupted? I agree with Craig’s generous interpretation that maybe you were using it too often. Any time you’re using one, it’s worth a look, like do you need that present progressive or could just a simple verb work? If a simple verb works, use a simple verb.

**Craig:** There is an answer to that question. There is always one form that is more accurate to what you want to show on screen than the other.

**John:** Yep. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The Afterparty, a new series on Apple TV. Plus created by Chris Miller, produced by our friends Lord and Miller. It’s delightful. It’s a comedy. It’s a murder mystery. Each episode follows the same crime from a different character’s point of view. Terrifically done, as you expect from these. Craig, in this workflow here I have two pieces of artwork from this. This is the movie within the show. The character who dies, this is not a spoiler, his name is Xavier. He is I think a musician and an actor. The poster I want to point to is Private Eyes: The Hall and Oates Story. As you look at this poster, so much of it is fantastic, as Channing Tatum plays Oates. Yeah, Oates. I have an issue with the credit block. Can you tell me what my issue is with the credit block?

**Craig:** Yes. In the credit block for a film, these days it would go, at the bottom, reading left to right, producer, then writer, then director. In the old days it would go writer, then producer, then director. This one, for some reason, doesn’t even … Does it have a director?

**John:** Yeah. It says A Stephanie Preston Film before Private Eyes, but no, there’s no director listed.

**Craig:** There’s no director. For some reason also, it says executive producers are listed last, when in movies the producer would be way more important than the executive producers. There doesn’t appear to be a producer. We have to talk to Lord and Miller about this. This is just a disaster. I can’t recommend the show anymore.

**John:** Hopefully there is time to go in and do the post-work on the poster that’s on the wall and put that in there. I would also point out the written by credit is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, and there needs to be something between those two, unless the person’s name is-

**Craig:** Karen Tate Wallace Doe.

**John:** Unless this one writer’s name is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, there’s either an and or an ampersand between those names.

**Craig:** That is correct. There are so many problems with this. We have to talk to them. This can’t happen again.

**John:** This is the only flaw I saw in the first episode of the show, which I think is actually just delightful. It stars a bunch of talented folks, including Ike Barinholtz. Your golden girl pal Tiffany Haddish is the central investigator there.

**Craig:** Did you say my golden girl pal?

**John:** Yeah. I’m sorry. Your Golden Globe pal.

**Craig:** Oh, my Golden Globe pal. She was my Golden Globe pal. She’s fun.

**John:** Yeah, you had that weird, awkward moment there on the stage with Tiffany Haddish.

**Craig:** It wasn’t awkward for me. Her feet were hurting. She took her shoes off and just leaned on me. It was fun. That’s what happens on those shows. “My feet hurt. Can I lean on you?” “Absolutely.”

**John:** From that moment forward, the Golden Globes really went down. It was really the highlight of the Golden Globes. From that point forward they realized, “We cannot top this. We need to stop the Golden Globes all together.”

**Craig:** They keep on rolling. I was lucky enough many years ago, so this has been in development by Chris primarily for the longest time, and many years ago I actually went and saw a staged reading of this one. I think it was a movie.

**John:** I think [inaudible 00:53:49] was originally a movie. I’m sure it was great as a movie. I think it works much better as this series, because you can just do more. You’ve got time.

**Craig:** I think almost everything does at this point. An additional fun bit, and you know what, maybe I’ll make this my One Cool Thing. I’m going to tack on to yours. I had another thing that was technical. I’ll get to that next week. In addition to The Afterparty being a delight, no surprise, and featuring posters that are visually hysterical, but in terms of credits, absolutely horrible, the show The Afterparty also includes quite a few hidden hints, clues, and puzzles that were developed by my wonderful, magical friend David Kwong, and my wonderful, magical friend Dave Shukan, who is a puzzle master and indeed was one of the primary puzzle creators of the MIT Mystery Hunt, which I think was my One Cool Thing last week.

**John:** Nice. The character that Sam Richardson plays in The Afterparty is an escape room designer, which feels exactly in your wheelhouse there, Craig.

**Craig:** Probably modeled after me. One would think.

**John:** Actually, yeah. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Julia Hostetler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes, more often than not now, @clmazin.

**Craig:** I’m around.

**John:** I’m @johnaugust. You could find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Our whole main character energy thing came from Chris Csont’s newsletter about main character energy, which was in Interesting. Thank you, Chris, for putting that together. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also get the hoodies now. The hoodies are so comfortable. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on population. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, can you help our younger listeners understand how we thought about population in the 1970s?

**Craig:** Sure. In the 1970s we were constantly warned about two problems that were going to come and kill all of us. Sorry, three. Three problems that were going to come kill all of us.

**John:** Let’s see if I can name them. Nuclear war.

**Craig:** Four problems that were going to come and kill us.

**John:** Oh wow. Nuclear war was not even one of them.

**Craig:** Yep, sorry. Four.

**John:** Wow. Nuclear war was my only go-to. Obviously population was going to be one of them. Population and famine, those are really related, right?

**Craig:** Population and famine, connected. Nuclear war.

**John:** What were the other things we were worried about?

**Craig:** People snatching you off the street with a van.

**John:** That’s entirely true, because that happened a lot.

**Craig:** It didn’t. It actually didn’t.

**John:** No, seriously, Craig, it happened all the time.

**Craig:** It did not.

**John:** That’s a thing.

**Craig:** It did not. Gary Gulman has an amazing bit about this in his show The Big Depresh or The Great Depresh. Basically a guy went on TV and said there are 50,000 kids being pulled off the street every year. Everyone lost their minds. Three years later he came back and he was like, “It’s 3,000 kids.”

By that point, when we grew up, Megana, so John and I would go to school and we would have milk, because you had to drink milk when you were a kid in the ’70s or you would die apparently. On the milk cartons were pictures of missing children. Gary Gulman has this amazing bit about how, “What were we supposed to do about it? We’re eight. Are we supposed to be out on the hunt? What?” “Have you seen this child?” “I’m in third grade!” It was horrifying. You would have to drink milk from a carton with this sad kid staring back at you like, “I don’t drink milk anymore.”

**John:** We have men in white vans stealing children.

**Craig:** Men in white vans, nuclear war, overpopulation and famine, and acid rain.

**John:** Oh yeah, I remember acid rain.

**Craig:** Eventually the rain was going to come down and melt the skin right off your bones.

**John:** Here’s the thing. We actually got some of the acid rain taken care of to some degree. The hole in the ozone layer was probably a little bit later than that. We actually dealt with that in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah, unfortunately, because the ozone layer is holding in all the carbon dioxide. Everything’s working out great for us.

**John:** Everything’s working out fantastic. Let’s just solve the population problem, because China took it upon itself to actually solve the population problem. This is a thing that I remember learning about in grade school was the one-child policy, which is basically a couple can only have one kid. I didn’t understand how math worked, because I was in third grade. They explained, “Okay, so when the mom and the dad die, that one kid will replace them.” That’s only half people, but then you realized they actually have grandparents too, and so it all works out. It sounded like they took care of it, but it didn’t work out so good.

**Craig:** There aren’t many examples of grand social architecting that does work out.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Particularly when you’re interfering with basic biological functions like how many children do you have and how much do you eat. What we know now is that Malthus, the father of this fear, Thomas Malthus, who was doing his best in the 18th century, and in the 18th century, there was this very rampant population growth within urban centers. You could see London transforming and these other places. People were dealing with crowding in a very specific way in the West. There’s this fear that the more people you had, you would eventually run out of food, because industrialization hadn’t occurred yet, and so our ability to feed ourselves was not as advanced as it would be even 50 years later.

**John:** We would have to turn to cannibalism at a certain point.

**Craig:** At some point we would eat ourselves.

**John:** That was always part of the stories, like, “Oh, and eventually we’ll have to start eating people, because that’s what happens.”

**Craig:** Yeah. “We’ll start with grandma, because she’s got to go.” By the time it got around to us, obviously the United States is spatially enormous, although they kept talking about overpopulation, even in the United States, which is bizarre, since no one lives in Wyoming, for instance, or Alaska. There certainly were places in the world, and there still are places in the world, that deal with overpopulation, including China at the time certainly, India, Indonesia.

There were famine issues, because in the ’70s we didn’t realize, because we were children, how close we were to the ’40s and ’50s. Kids who are growing up now don’t realize how close they are to the ’90s. The famine that was happening around the world in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was astonishing. It made sense that people were scared of this. No one talks about the Bengal famine. The Bengal famine was one of the worst famines that ever, ever happened ever, on any planet, as far as I’m concerned. Two to three million people died in 1943 in Bengal.

**John:** I agree with you. In the ’70s I associated overpopulation with famine as being the same thing, not understanding famine is actually caused by many things. It could be crop failures, but more often it’s just actually poor government. There’s a reason why democracies don’t have famines. It’s all about power and control. That was the problem. Let’s fast-forward to today.

**Craig:** By the way, just to back you up on that, ultimately the cause of the Bengal famine probably was Churchill. You’re right, it was not just as simple as too many people, not enough food.

**John:** This one-child policy in China went on for 35 years. They eventually took their foot off the brakes a little bit. It feels like they should’ve been aware of it more quickly, because you look at what happened in Japan. I remember hearing about the stories in Japan 10 or 15 years ago about, “Oh crap, we are so far below our replacement rate, we’re going to have a bunch of old people, and no young people to look after them.”

One of the findings that came out of Japan is really it comes down to once you educate women, once you give women opportunities, that they’re going to choose to have fewer children. You don’t have to have a government policy about it. You just make it so that they don’t feel the need to have large families, because if you’re not in a agricultural society anymore, they’re going to have smaller families. Depopulation is now more of a concern to most certainly Western countries, but really countries around the world.

**Craig:** Yes. Depopulation is becoming a serious problem in Europe, a very serious problem in Russia. Depopulation is one of the driving factors behind the rise of nationalism, white supremacy, because as traditionally majority white countries depopulate, there are labor needs that have to be filled, and the gap is filled by immigration. Now Russia just won’t let anyone in. Russia’s just like, “Nope! We’re white people only!” Let’s see how that goes for them.

In standard Europe, as we’ll call it, there’s been a lot of immigration. The immigration is necessary, because as traditionally white countries just cannot keep up a replacement rate of birth, then yeah, you’re going to need more people. What one would hope is that most people would understand that what it means to be English or Swedish or German is not, “Let’s start with white.” It’s not. Their culture is not skin color. Also, of course, America has, in our finest moments, has shown that there is a proper melting pot and that cultures can collide together and make something beautiful.

There’s this panic that’s going on because it’s the great replacement theory, that they’re panicked. The truth is the tenets of the great replacement theory, they’re not there yet. I think the white paranoia is extreme. You are in fact seeing issues of depopulation in non-white countries as well. What does humanity do as it no longer is I guess what a net positive human creation.

**John:** Yeah. You run into problems of how do you keep a standard of living going for a country when there aren’t enough people to actually do the work, to do all the things that need to be done, how do you take care of older people. These are all real challenges. I’m curious for Megana, who’s coming into this whole conversation 20 years later, going through school, did you hear about population being a crisis one way or another way? How does this land for you?

**Megana:** I feel like when I was in school they told us about overpopulation and some of the same fears that you guys described having, being taught in school were still in our curriculum.

**John:** When you were visiting your family in India, did you perceive that India perceived population as being a crisis, a problem? What was that experience like for you?

**Megana:** It’s interesting. It’s just so overwhelmingly crowded, as an American going back to visit. I don’t know that that came from my Indian family or Indian relatives that this place was too crowded, but I do think it came from the white people I grew up around in Joplin, Missouri, who would be like, “Oh, you’re from India. That place is overpopulated and it’s a Third World country.” That sort of mentality I think I internalized. I think that came from my experience of being an Indian immigrant in America and what older white people said to me.

**Craig:** As you were growing up, the rate of population change in India was starting to slow. There is still a net positive growth in India. There’s still a net positive growth in the United States, but it’s very tiny. India currently, population growth rate is 1% annual change. The United States it’s .4%. Now let’s take a look at Russia. This ought to be good. Russian population growth, yeah, so they’re minus. They’ve gone into minus territory. They were as low as minus .5% in 2000. They are currently at minus .2. They are losing population, and that will probably accelerate, which is bad, and they’re going to have to figure that out.

**John:** Let’s talk about what solutions governments and societies, because we live in a society-

**Craig:** We live in a society.

**John:** Let’s look for what are the things that can be done to address this. Obviously first and foremost is creating policies that actually make it easier for people to have children, because we have so stripped away a lot of the support systems that should be there for families to just begin to have families, to have a kid, but much less two or three or four kids. It’s funny that we used to think about poor families would have a bunch of kids, and now it seems families of a certain means are the only ones who can afford to have a certain number of kids, because they worried about educating them, food is cheaper than it’s ever been and clothing is cheaper than it’s ever been, but that there’s still all these expenses that come with a kid. If we’re not creating policies that make it possible, both financially and time-wise, it’s just not going to happen.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think if a country is concerned with maintaining its population so that the functions of its structure are functioning, then it has to make this a priority. In the United States in particular, it’s like, “Screw you. You want to have a kid, fine, go, do it, but we’re not paying you. We can fire you. We’re not giving you time off. If you’re a dad, you get nothing.” Also maybe you don’t have health care. There’s no child care. We don’t have extended families here. It’s not like there’s grandmas and aunts and uncles. Basically, yeah, lol. It’s hard. It was hard when we had a kid. When we had our first kid, it was hard. Melissa wasn’t working. It was hard.

**John:** It’s challenging. The other obviously thing to address is immigration, because the other way a society can function if it’s not creating enough people of its own is to import people from other places. Certain countries can afford to import a lot of people here and bring them into the fold. America has had a tradition of being a country that can take in groups from other places and make Americans and change America’s identity to include new people. We need to remember that and ber better about it.

**Craig:** We’re terrible.

**John:** Easier said than done.

**Craig:** We suck. The celebration of immigration was part of my education in the ’70s. We used to celebrate it. The poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty was a big deal. Now it’s just like, do you remember that idiot Pat Buchanan?

**John:** Yeah, I do.

**Craig:** Pat Buchanan used to be considered a loony, and now I think he would be actually probably not conservative enough. “America first.” There have been idiots saying, “America first,” forever.

**John:** It was always up against the Italians or the Irish or whoever the new group was coming in.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. Boy, if they were that pissed off about white people showing up … We’ve always had this fricking problem. I’m like, isn’t it a sign that you’re doing well, that people want to come to your shop? People want to live here, on purpose. This is great. We have massive, massive stretches of land and resources. We have more than we need, way more than we need. What happened? What happened to who we … We should be celebrating immigration as much as we can.

**Megana:** I do remember that as a distinct shift, because I was in the fourth grade I think when 9/11 happened. I remember in elementary school feeling like, “Oh, I am a super-American because I am a child of immigrants.” I think after 9/11 it was no longer a thing that was necessarily celebrated in school.

**Craig:** This country lost its goddamn mind on 9/11. Lost our minds.

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Lost our minds.

**John:** Absolutely. It did. We didn’t solve anything, but at least discussed it.

**Craig:** I think we convinced people earlier that they can use we see, so there’s that.

**John:** There’s that. If we all think of ourselves as the main character in this story, as main characters we need to solve the issues of population and immigration and really family rights.

**Megana:** Yeah. I think the other thing you guys mentioned is having more progressive policies instead of shaming and blaming young women.

**Craig:** This is the thing. We live in a society.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Men only understand one mode. That is control women, force them to have babies, that’s how we’ll get babies. That’s it. They don’t know any other way. They can’t think. They cannot possibly fathom any other way to encourage birth. Pregnancy and birth.

**John:** It goes straight to Handmaid’s Tale.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically.

**John:** On a future bonus segment I want to talk to you about your show and the post-apocalyptic, I guess you consider your show post-apocalyptic, and that sense of when population drops so low, just that certain functions cannot be fulfilled anymore, because I find it so fascinating. I feel like we explore that in fiction all the time, but we will actually experience some of that in real life.

**Craig:** Until next time.

**John:** All right. Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Fans Are Suing Universal Pictures Because a 2019 Movie Didn’t Include Ana de Armas](https://www.ign.com/articles/ana-de-armas-universal-lawsuit-yesterday-cut-scenes?utm_source=twitter)
* [How Sweet Fresh Meat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2I897TyglY) clip on YouTube
* [Ashley Ward’s original Main Character TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/foryou?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=6831269918864870661#/@ashlaward/video/6831269918864870661)
* [Main Character Energy: Interiority in a world of screens](https://reallifemag.com/main-character-energy/) by Coco Klockner for Real Life Mag
* [We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/we-all-have-main-character-energy-now) by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker
* [Rediscovering ‘The Truman Show’ in the age of Main Character Syndrome](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/rediscovering-the-truman-show-in-the-age-of-main-character-syndrome/) by Mischa Anouk Smith for Far Out Magazine
* Gary Gulman’s [The Great Depresh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1L08I5gjQI) Kidnapping Hoax
* [Main Character Energy and Narcissism – Inneresting Newsletter](https://mailchi.mp/johnaugust/inneresting-2556884?e=5f1449ed84) by Chris Csont
* [The Afterparty](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/the-afterparty/umc.cmc.5wg8cnigwrkfzbdruaufzb6b0) on Apple TV from Lord Miller, [First Ep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P07_FHcRNEU) on YouTube
* Puzzle pals [David Kwong](https://www.davidkwongmagic.com/) and [Dave Shukan](https://www.geffenplayhouse.org/people/dave-shukan/)
* [Malthusianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Julia Hostetler ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/535standard.mp3).

Scriptnotes, Ep 307: Teaching Your Heroes to Drive — Transcript

July 10, 2017 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2017/teaching-your-heroes-to-drive).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 307 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, Craig, what are we talking about?

**Craig:** Today on the podcast, John, we’re going to be answering some listener questions as we often do. We’ve got some exciting follow up to cover from our prior podcast. And our main topic today is going to be talking about how characters can drive story instead of the other way around. Should be a good episode, John.

**John:** It should be a great episode. Craig winged that and did a fantastic job. In our follow up we’ll start with something that has been long promised but is finally now here. The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide is now available. There is a link in the show notes. Or you can just go to johnaugust.com/guide. So this was the thing that Craig wanted to call Scriptdecks. But no.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** This is a 113-page document, a PDF you can download for free, that has the listener recommendations on the best episodes of Scriptnotes in case you are catching up on the show late in the game.

**Craig:** That sounds like, what, $19.99? Or…?

**John:** No, I already said it was free. It’s a free PDF download.

**Craig:** So like about $8 maybe?

**John:** Yeah, so less than that. It’s actually all the way down to $0.

**Craig:** Not including shipping and handling, or?

**John:** The shipping and handling is handled, we email it to you. So essentially if you are already on the Scriptnotes mailing list, we’re just going to send it to you, so you will have already gotten it.

**Craig:** Oh, like that U2 album that Apple gave us, and they just gave it to us.

**John:** No, but, no, they forced it upon you. This we’re not forcing upon you.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. OK.

**John:** So I guess we’re emailing it to you, but it’s like not already – I guess it’s in your email system. In some ways, Craig, your analogy is completely appropriate. I feel bad.

**Craig:** Well, no, it’s more like if people used Kindle or iBooks and this just showed up in it. That would be the U2.

**John:** That’s probably the more accurate thing.

**Craig:** What a weird thing, right? Like they gave us a free album from one of the best bands in the world and everyone was like, “Screw you. Get this out of here.”

**John:** Here’s the thing. Nobody really wanted the album. Like nobody was into U2 for new music at that point and just it felt intrusive. It was tone deaf. Weirdly tone deaf for Apple.

**Craig:** I think there’s also this psychological thing. When someone says to you, “Hey, by the way, I’m going to give you something that you would normally consider paying for, or certainly somebody would have to pay for, I’m just going to give it to you for free.” You look at it like, oh, well, it’s not very good then, is it?

**John:** Well here’s the thing I would also say like let’s say you like fish, you like to eat a nice piece of fish, but someone just shows up and hands you a fish. No. I don’t want a piece of fish. I want a fish when I want a fish, not when you want to give me a fish.

**Craig:** I like that you use the article A. When you order fish you have A fish. You ask for an entire fish. Not some fish. You ask for, I would like, you know what I’m in the mood for some fish tonight. No, I want A Fish.

**John:** I live in France where they serve you a fish. They serve you a whole fish. It’s got its head on it. It’s got all the pieces.

**Craig:** Un fish? Un pechine? What is it, pechine? What is it? No, it’s poisson. Poisson.

**John:** Le poisson. Le poisson.

**Craig:** Oh, so it’s un poisson.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** And fish is always delightful here. Once you have this PDF of the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide, and by the way Craig I thought of you often because I went through so many debates about where to put the apostrophe for the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide. So you will see in the notes, so that’s wrong here. So in the notes I listed it with apostrophe-S, but in the real thing I put the apostrophe after the S.

**Craig:** Thank you. Because otherwise it’s the guide of one Scriptnotes listener. And we’re really implying that we only have one also. You know, the Scriptnotes listener? This is her guide. [laughs]

**John:** The argument in favor of apostrophe-S was that it’s good for a listener.

**Craig:** That would be A Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide.

**John:** It’s true. It could be read that way. So this is the guide belonging to and a product of the listeners of Scriptnotes. Once you have this in your hands, you can use it to listen to the back episodes. Well, you might choose to listen to the back episodes. You could find those at Scriptnotes.net, but also on the brand new 300-episode USB drives.

**Craig:** Ta-da!

**John:** Craig, have you clicked through to see what these drives look like?

**Craig:** I’m doing it right now. Because, you know, I like to wing things. That’s my style. I find that I’m more exciting. Whoa. Look at that. This thing looks like a little mini-grenade.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a grenade full of knowledge.

**Craig:** Yeah. It looks like a little mini-mag light. It looks like so many little mini things. It’s very cool. Is it metal?

**John:** It is chrome-plated, apparently. I’ve not actually touched these. Etah had them and they were all in our office for a while before we shipped them off to the fulfillment company. But yeah, so we have a bunch of them, so people can buy them. They are $29. It has all the back episodes, including the bonus episodes, the dirty show. Has all the transcripts. It has all of the Three Page Challenge scripts. So, it’s handy. It’s got it all there. And it’s waterproof, or at least strongly water resistant.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It will survive a lot. We had to bump up to the 16GB, because we just talked so much on the show.

**Craig:** Well, the good news is that the price per GB goes down far faster than we can talk. So by the time we hit the, what, 400-episode flash drive, or 500-episode flash drive, we’ll need a Terabyte and it will cost $0.04.

**John:** Yeah. Moore’s Law is in our favor.

**Craig:** Yeah. And how much is this? $80? $100? Something like that?

**John:** This is a $29 USB drive.

**Craig:** Wow. Unreal. And of that $29, I presume the customary amount comes to me of nothing?

**John:** 100% of the customary amount goes to Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Unbelievable.

**John:** Yeah. So good.

**Craig:** You know what? Buy them. Please, everyone, just buy them so I can get thousands and thousands of nothings.

**John:** Another thing Craig will be making no money on is our live show. July 25 in Hollywood. Tickets are on sale now. It’s a benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation which does great work on behalf of writers and people who are aspiring to become writers. Megan Amram is our fantastic guest. We have other guests to be announced soon. It’s 8PM July 25 in Hollywood, so come see us there. And then I think we’re going to do some other special little event kind of things there. Some little games. Some stuff that you’ll benefit from being there in person. I want a little more audience participation in this one, not just questions. So, I think we’re going to get our people involved more.

**Craig:** Like a big Simon Says kind of thing? Or something more screenwritery?

**John:** I think one lucky listener will get something.

**Craig:** And you get a car. And you get a car.

**John:** So the danger is like all the listeners of that show are going to be checking underneath their seat to see if there is something because you’ll remember at our very first live show–

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There was something hidden underneath a seat. And we read their script. That’s right. We read their script.

**Craig:** And we read their script. And it was good. So, what will be under the seat this time, John?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Oh, that would ruin it. Plus, there’s not going to be anything under the seat.

**John:** We’ll have to see. You’ll have to come to find out. So, Craig, please do show up July 25.

**Craig:** How about as people are coming in we microchip them?

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, OK. There will be a little soreness, a little redness at the spot of insertion. However, at the end of the show, we will scan the audience and somebody with the lucky serial number will receive a prize.

**John:** That could be good.

**Craig:** And then we can track them for the rest of their lives.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, that’s really the thing. I mean, Mail Chimp is a start. But I think beyond Mail Chimp we really want to have some full knowledge about our listeners, because that’s how you monetize, Craig. That’s how you monetize.

**Craig:** Oh, you know what? I got an idea for a new thing that we can start.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** It’s called Chip Chimp. OK? I know that Mail Chimp doesn’t have real chimps, but Chip Chimp will. And Chip Chimp’s name is Chim-Chim, you know, like from Speed Racer.

**John:** So Chim-Chim, the Chip Chimp. Oh, I think it’s great.

**Craig:** Chim-Chim, the Chip Chimp. Well, he obviously roller skates through the audience and just – and then ka-donk right to your upper arm. Right in the fleshy part of the upper arm. Moves around. You know, doesn’t necessarily do it in order, because I mean, folks, he’s a chimp. OK? Let’s not get crazy. He can roller skate. He knows how to do essentially a medical procedure, which is the sterile insertion of a microchip into your arm. So, if he doesn’t quite go in the order you’d like, I don’t want to get any complaints.

Anyway, it’s a great idea.

**John:** I think it’s important to keep in mind though when we selected this monkey, I guess it’s not really fair to call him a monkey.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He’s a primate ambassador to a greater world view.

**Craig:** He’s a chimp.

**John:** We had to really compete against a bunch of other possible candidates, but this is the one who won. This is Chim-Chim, the Chip Chimp champ. And he’s going to be there live in the audience.

**Craig:** Honestly, it came down to him and Chris McQuarrie. [laughs]

**John:** Chris McQuarrie? He was busy shooting a movie.

**Craig:** He wasn’t so busy that he couldn’t apply. And honestly, you know, I was not expecting the tears that we got when we told him that he just didn’t quite get it.

**John:** It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Because there have been, what, like 19 Mission: Impossible movies?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s only one Chip Chimp.

**Craig:** Chim-Chim Chip Chimp. Yeah. And it’s not McQuarrie. You know what though? I got to say so much spirit from him. So much spirit.

**John:** We got a listener review from Pedro Lisbow. So, I wanted to read this aloud because I thought it was so revealing. So, at the end you’re going to find out what he does for a living, but I want to see if you can figure out what he does for a living before we get to that point. So, let’s listen carefully, OK?

He says, “This is my favorite podcast. I found it by chance. And though I’m not a writer, I find the discussions pleasant and illuminating.”

**Craig:** All right. Clues. Clues.

**John:** “More than once, I’ve applied the advice they give to writers on my profession. You would be surprised how much of it is universal, provided you adapt the boundary conditions on it.”

**Craig:** Huge clue.

**John:** “Recently I entered a small screenwriting competition. Might as well test one’s self, right? And got honorable mention on my first short.”

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** “In summary, if this back office quant can benefit from listening to the podcast, so can you.”

**Craig:** Is quant supposed to be a giveaway? Because I don’t know what that means.

**John:** Quant is a number cruncher who generally works for a financial services industry. So, sometimes they have degrees in physics or like really esoteric mathematics, but they end up working generally for financial services.

**Craig:** It’s shot for like a quantifier?

**John:** Quantitative Analysis.

**Craig:** Got it. So did you just give away the answer of what he is?

**John:** I did. I did. But hopefully people along the way – you figured out that he was some sort of number cruncher nerd.

**Craig:** Yeah, boundary conditions is very mathematical. Very codey sort of term.

**John:** All right. Last week we punted on a question. So, we are going to jump on that ball and continue our sports metaphors into this week’s discussion.

**Craig:** Jump on that ball! You know, most games require it. Jump on it.

**John:** They do. Jumping on the ball.

**Craig:** Jump on the ball.

**John:** That’s the game I made up. Going to answer a question from Ferris. He was asking about – he was actually sort of demanding that we give him some new answers about how to truly get into the mind of a character, understand their motivations, and how they’ll react in certain situations. How do you go about making the character drive the story instead of the other way around?

So, Craig, tell us. How do you do that?

**Craig:** So this is a big one. I remember we brought this up towards the end of our last podcast and thought, oh no, no, no, we can’t short thrift this. You need two things, I think, to make this work right. The function of having a character drive the story. One, you need an actual character. We say character to cover anybody that has a name ranging from a real name to Cop Number 3 and who says stuff and does stuff. That’s actually not a character. That’s the loosest term of the phrase.

A character is a person, a persona that you are creating, that feels realistic. That feels like an actual person. That’s a character. Otherwise, you have a characterization. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** I think it’s great that you’re focusing on that character, because I also want to define these terms as well. So, let’s define story. If a character is going to define a story, let’s make sure we’re talking about the right things in terms of a story. For story, let’s talk about a sequence of events, a sequence of narrative events that feels greater than the sum of its parts. So it’s not just a bunch of “and then this, and then this, and then this.” It feels like it adds up to something bigger and that ideally, especially in movie stories, it’s the journey of that character from one place to another, either literally or metaphorically. That’s what we’re watching.

So, when we say we want this character we’ve created to be driving the story, we’re talking about what Craig is saying. A very distinct individual person driving a very distinct individual series of events that’s happening, at least for movies, just once.

**Craig:** Yeah. The question that Ferris asks, which I will read verbatim, how do you go about making the character drive the story instead of the other way around, implies a kind of Cartesian duality between character and story. When in fact, they are related to each other. They are in a relationship with each other.

Plot, you can define down I think as very much a series of events that flow one to the next, perhaps and hopefully some causality between them. And beginning, middle, and that’s plot. But story to me is the phenomenon that emerges when a character is moving through a plot. Because when we tell the story of a movie we’ve seen, we don’t – like if someone says tell me the story of The Matrix. Machines have enslaved humanity and they are sucking electricity out of them and enslaving them and they make humans think that they’re in the world when they are really not. And they’re defeated.

**John:** Yeah. So that is a definition of that’s plot. It’s the underlying thing of it, but you’re not talking about Neo. You’re not talking about who is actually in charge of your story. And you’re not talking about the experience of watching your story through that principal character’s eyes and the choices he’s making, the discoveries he’s encountering as these things come to light in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only interesting way to experience a plot is through a character’s movement through it. And that is the story. The story is humans or sometimes people serving – sorry, animals serving as humans, or machines serving as humans, but human-like creatures moving through a plot. And from that marriage and relationship and synthesis comes story.

So the first thing that’s really important to say is there isn’t one and then the other, because you fall into the trap – if you look at Ferris’s question carefully, you can fall into the trap of thinking, OK, there’s a story that happens. Then my character walks in, hits a thing, that changes what will happen next in the story. My character now reacts to that. Very reactive. Even if your character is reacting, and then hitting a thing, and then causing the next thing, your character is simply becoming a plot mechanic. The way that the cops showing up in a story are a plot mechanic. Or an asteroid is a plot mechanic. Or a blackout is a plot mechanic.

That’s not how it works with characters.

**John:** When you were talking about moving through a story, the one thing I want to stress though is movement alone is not enough. So if a character is on a rollercoaster, they are moving. And they can be on a rollercoaster that is sort of the plot of the story, but we’re going to be frustrated as the viewer because they’re not making any choices. They’re just on rails. And so they’re being dragged through the story. And when I see scripts that aren’t working, it’s often because that character really has no agency. Has no real decision-making capability on what’s going to happen next.

Either they’re always responding to what the villain is doing, or what other characters are sort of instructing them to do. They’re put upon, they’re directed, they’re instructed, but they’re not actually doing anything themselves. So, you could write the most delightful dialogue ever for that character. It would still be a frustrating movie because you don’t see that character making any choices, having any control of his or her life within that movie.

**Craig:** And you can see how videogames struggle with this life on rails problem. Because the nature of a videogame – well, I’m only talking really about let’s call them the higher narrative videogames – they tell story. They tell narrative. They aspire to be movie-like. But ultimately the experience is defined primarily by a series of obstacles that you, the player, must overcome. Those are very plot obstacles. They are essentially plot obstacles.

Every now and then you’ll find a game that attempts to pretend that you’re making moral choices. But you’re not because there are only so many choices in their decision tree they can handle. I don’t know if you ever played Mass Effect, for instance.

**John:** I know of Mass Effect. I never played it myself. But I know that it had a bigger built out set of choices and outcomes. It was a little more like a Choose Your Own Adventure situation than an Uncharted, which you truly are on rails. Like incredibly well disguised rails, but there’s like one way through Uncharted.

**Craig:** That’s right. Absolutely on rails. No question. And even in Mass Effect, you’re on rails. And that’s where it actually becomes really frustrating, videogames, when they try and pretend you’re not on rails. One of the reasons why Bio Shock was such a wonderful game is because they pointed out that you were on rails. That was the big twist. Surprise. You’re not making any decisions at all. You’re on rails. And that was brilliant because it acknowledged this big thing. In movies, the experience is not one where we are primarily overcoming obstacles and therefore there is a very narrow set of choices and decision trees that are available to us.

In movies, we’re watching someone’s life. What has happened has happened. We are being invited into watch somebody. And that is the experience of our lives in general. What happens, happens. And the excitement, I think, of proper storytelling in movies is not that we’re watching a character going through a story, but rather we are watching an event in this person’s life that needed to happen to them. Because movies are purposeful, and because they are truly intelligently designed, the way that some people wrongly thing the universe was, everything is absolutely fated. It is intentional. It is as if god created all of this in such a way as to make a point and help this person change. Or fail.

**John:** So, I think you hit on the sort of Cartesian duality here is that you are trying to create a system in which it seems like your protagonist, your hero, is in charge of the decisions he or she is making, when in fact you are – you as the writer are in charge of the decisions that are being made. You are creating a universe where those are the decisions that are going to lead to the most interesting outcomes. And so you’re definitely making it feel like that character is in charge when in fact that character is working for you. That character is working for your story. And so I think the way to sort of back into the answer to Ferris’s question is to be making sure that you have a sense of what the story is you’re trying to tell.

Likewise, have a sense of who the character is in the story and at every moment those stitches have to be working together. That this character needs to go on this journey. This character needs to make these discoveries. Therefore, I will create a universe in which he can have these moments of challenge, these moments of opportunity so that it can change the character. And you’re creating the universe of the story and the character of the story at the same time.

**Craig:** Right. So, at the core of this, Ferris, is a question of design. When you say how do you go about making the character drive the story, here’s how. You design a character, you design a problem that that character has. A fatal flaw. A primary challenge. You design a story, plot rather I should say, that will repeatedly test that character. That will force them to leave their comfort zone. That will force them to confront terrible truths. That will cause them pain. That will threaten to tear them apart. And the only way that that character is going to be able to survive is if they overcome what has held them back. If they overcome what is wrong with them. And in the end, success.

Or, they fail. Either way, both are fine. I mean, traditionally they succeed. Happy endings and all that. But sometimes they don’t. Either way, you have designed a person and then you have designed a plot that are married together. The person does not understand that that plot is going to lead him or her to something important. They have no idea.

There’s this wonderful analogy. I think it was in Slaughterhouse Five. Where the Tralfamadorians, the aliens, they don’t experience time the way we do. And so they’re describing it, it’s like as humans the way we experience time is we’re on a train and there’s a window. And what we see in the window is our present. And when it leaves the window, because the train is moving, that’s our past. And then the future rolls into our present and we see that.

But what we cannot see is what’s coming. We’re only looking out the window. The Tralfamadorians, they’re outside the train. Right? They know where the train is going. They can see it all. Very clear to understand.

You, Ferris, are outside of the train. Your character is inside the train looking out the window. Your job is to create a path for that train which you can see that is going to cause problems for this character. And then your job is in a very strange psychological exercise to exit outside, go into the train, put yourself right in that little train car, and ask, “What do I see out the window? What does this mean to me?” I don’t know anything other than what I have seen and what I’m seeing now.

So there’s two of you, Ferris. There’s the outside guy who can see it all, and there’s the inside guy who can only see what’s there. And your job is to make sure that you can do both of those jobs perfectly well so that they work in harmony and this exciting story emerges.

**John:** Yeah. Screenwriting is always about that shifting your frame of reference. And you’re trying to see only what your characters know and then also know everything that your characters don’t know. It’s ridding yourself of the curse of knowledge of what’s to come, of the motivations of other characters that they couldn’t possibly see.

So, the questions to fundamentally ask is – and we can put a link in the show notes to an earlier episode where we talk about what characters want – but really ask yourself what does this character want right now. And when I say right now, like what are his basic motivations? The primal kind of things they’re going after. What are their higher aspirations? Are they hungry? Are they frustrated? Are they sleepy? Ask yourself all those questions. Look at their sort of near term. Like what are they trying to do in the next ten minutes, in the next two hours, and then also be able to ask the question like where do they see themselves a week from now, a year from now.

Not every scene is going to address those things, then you have to have a sense of what those are for that character, so you can get inside his or her shoes and really understand the world from their point of view. And then when you start to ask those questions, make sure you check in on those motivations, those general goals and wants and wishes throughout the story. And you may need to find excuses and reasons to have your characters expose those to us so that we can see them and so we can remember them.

Because unlike the novelist who can just get inside a character’s head and just tell us what that character is thinking, in screenwriting we are very limited. We don’t really have insight on characters unless they say something or if they’re in a musical they can sing something. So, make sure that we really understand what this character is experiencing in case we can’t see it just by what’s being put on screen.

**Craig:** You know, I went through this whole Sherlock binge. There’s a moment in one of the episodes where I believe its Mycroft, my favorite character, Mycroft Holmes, tells this little story called the Appointment in Samarra, which it’s an old story but it was most famously told by Somerset Maugham. So I’m going to read this story to you. It’s very short.

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw Death standing in the crowd and he came to Death and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, Death said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Now, I love that story. So, you, Ferris, or any screenwriter, you’re death. You know where people are supposed to be. You know exactly what’s going to happen to them and they cannot avoid it because you’re writing it. But, your characters have no concept of this. They are, therefore, free to make choices. And this is a very kind of strange, Calvinistic, pre-deterministic way of looking at life. I don’t think this is actually how reality functions happily, but it does function this way for your universe you’re creating.

Your characters must react. They must have agency. They must have free will. They make choices. But in the end, the movie that will happen to them must happen to them. So, part of what makes “character drive story” is the dramatic tension and often the irony that is connected to characters making decisions and then dealing with the circumstances of those decisions as you create them.

If you know what’s going to happen to them, you have all of the opportunity in the world to make it seem to them that they have succeeded. In fact, it’s a very common dramatic trope in movies to give the characters everything they do want, only for them to discover they no longer want it because of the journey they have been on. And then they must turn away from that to want something more, or something better, or the thing they should have wanted in the first place.

It’s a very difficult thing to do. But once you understand that the plot is there to serve the character’s life, so that when the movie is over the character is either healed or broken, then you understand there’s no other result than to have the “character drive the story.” The character is the story.

**John:** I would refer him back to our episodes on The Little Mermaid, which is of course a mermaid makes a very dumb choice and deals with the consequences, or Groundhog Day, which is nothing but a character getting what he always wanted and then suffering for it, and having to learn how to overcome it and his ongoing struggle.

We’ve never talked about Aliens, but the second Aliens is a great example of a movie that feels like it could just be on rails, and yet isn’t because it’s so carefully constructed that Ripley is on a journey. That she’s on a journey – that she’s making choices herself the whole time through and you really feel her making those choices. They’re not easy choices. There’s continual consequences. And it works so well because of the marriage of plot and character to create story.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have this remarkable tool as a writer. And for lack of a better word I call it torture. You can and should torture your protagonist. No one wants to see somebody very easily arrive at a solution. That’s a boring and short movie. So, you know that there’s a problem in them. And you know that you need them to be the opposite of that when they finish this journey. Torture them. That’s how you make the character drive the story. The story becomes painful for them. It’s hard. When they have to do the right thing, it comes with terrible costs. When they try and do the right thing, punish them for it.

This constant pushback, this constant torture, this crucible that you create is what we want to see because that creates empathy in the audience and a desire for the character to succeed.

The worst possible outcome is for a character to make this large, grand change in their lives and you don’t feel like it was that hard for them to do. You want it to be the hardest thing, because after all, this is the movie. Their lives – they don’t really have lives, but we imagine they do. Clarice Starling had a life before she shows up at the FBI and gets the Buffalo Bill case and has to go talk to Hannibal Lecter. And she has a life afterwards. But that stretch of time where she’s dealing with that case and Hannibal Lecter, that’s the most important time in her life.

So, for her to finally get to the end has to be excruciating for her. Otherwise it didn’t deserve to be a movie. We should have found some other part in her life that was a movie, or maybe her life isn’t a movie at all.

**John:** One last note before we wrap up this topic is we’re both screenwriters. We mostly talk about movies, which are two hours of entertainment, and you’re following one character’s life. But I will say in great TV, like the TV that we get to watch every day now, you do see characters driving story in ways that they probably didn’t do so much ten years ago. And so you see characters making difficult choices in everything from Game of Thrones to The Americans. They’re not simply responding to things. And they’re not trying to just recreate the normalcy of the routine. They are being challenged and they’re pushing beyond those challenges to get to new things.

And so I really do believe that most of the advice we’re talking about can apply to one-hour of television, and two hours of movie, it’s just you have to find ways that you can use those characters and let them continue to grow over the course of a season rather than just one two-hour movie.

**Craig:** 100%. It gets really complicated in television because you do have to now prioritize your characters and your story and television shows do it in so many different ways. There’s a method by which there is an A character and that is the primary story. That character drives the major portion of the story. But there are other characters who have smaller stories inside of the stories that really are driven by them.

And when we say “driven by,” what we really mean is a function of. OK, I think Ferris that will be the cleanest way to kind of resolve your problem. Characters don’t really drive story. Story is a function of character.

So you have a lot of choices about how you handle these things. But ultimately whatever you choose, you do make a choice. And you know your story is a function of character.

**John:** All of our TV writer friends are back in the room now writing the next season of their shows that come in the fall, or come in midseason, and that first week, those first two weeks they do a lot of big whiteboard stuff where they figure out where are all the characters going this season. And that’s what we’re talking about here. They’re figuring out the broad arcs for these characters over the course of the season. And then within episodes how far can they take them within this episode. And that’s great. And that’s the kind of thing that is amazing about the TV we make right now.

So, a lot of this advice can apply to TV as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, imagine how backwards it would be if you showed up on day one for a season and the showrunner said, “OK, we have three characters and we got to kind of arc out how the season is going to work. But here are a few things I definitely know. There should be a train crash somewhere in the middle of the season. I want a huge train crash. And you know what? I’ve always wanted to do a thing where an airplane – it’s like a car chase but with two little small twin-engine planes.”

**John:** Little Cessnas? Yeah.

**Craig:** “Through a city. I want to do that. So those are on the board. So let’s figure out how we can kind of make…”

No. That would be the worst. No.

**John:** Yeah. You and I have both worked on movies that have had that kind of situation. Oh, it is the worst.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. Because in the end you’re just now I guess retrofitting characters that would then have the ability to find meaning in those sequences. But, oh god, it starts getting bad real fast. But if you sit in a room and someone is like, “Here’s the situation. These two guys are best friends. At the end of this season, one is going to kill the other. Now, let’s talk about how that happens.” OK. Now we’re on to something.

**John:** All right, let’s wrap that up. And Craig could you read us our next question?

**Craig:** So, a person whose name is the same name as a famous person’s name writes, “I share the exact same name as a remarkably famous celebrity. I won’t mention who, but I will say he is a household name and sadly one of the most famous people on the planet. It just so happens that this particular celebrity is a total cretin who is very well known for being a major douchebag. My concern is that sharing my name with this incredibly talentless parasite will negatively affect people’s opinions of my screenplay before they’ve even read it. What are my options here?

“Should I use a pen name, so I’m not mistaken for this bungling idiot? Or should I keep my name and dedicate a line on the title page to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that I am definitely not him? Or since he’s famous as hell, should I just keep the name and just roll with it? A famous name might generate more interest, I guess.”

**John:** This is a really easy answer. Do not use that famous person’s name. It will only be confusing and will not help you in your career or your life. Pick a pen name. Use your initials. Do something else. But you will benefit not at all by sharing a name with whoever that is.

**Craig:** Slam dunk of slam dunks here. There’s no point, really. Let me be honest with you, whoever you are. Let’s just call you Donald Trump. That’s not who it is, but it would be funny. Even if the celebrity that you shared a name with was a fantastic person that everyone loved, it still wouldn’t be–

**John:** Like Tom Hanks. Let’s say your name is Tom Hanks. Not helpful.

**Craig:** No. It’s just going to be an endlessly annoying discussion you have with people that will start a lot like this. “Is that really your name? What’s that like?” Every meeting you have. Every – look, you already now. You deal with this in your life anyway.

So, no, John is absolutely right. Get a pen name. I believe you have to register those with the Writers Guild, right?

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re supposed to register pen names. I legally changed my name before I moved to Los Angeles. So, for people who don’t know the backstory, my original last name is German and it looks pronounceable, but we pronounced it weird. It was a challenging last name. And so I was deciding as I went through high school, like I think I’m going to use a different name for my career. And I think I might go be a screenwriter, so it was like my mom’s maiden name is Peters. And I’m like, Peters is a good name. I could be John Peters.

**Craig:** Whoops.

**John:** But, nope, there’s a famous movie producer named Jon Peters. He’s J-O-N Peters, but that would have been confusing as heck. And so I’m really glad I didn’t pick that. So I picked my dad’s middle name, August, and it’s worked out for me very, very well.

So, Kanye West, or whatever your name is, I think you should make a similar choice and pick a name that you like. It could be your legal name, if you want to change your name legally.

You know, if you got an annoying name like that, just change your name legally. It’s not going to help you at all to have a weird name.

**Craig:** I agree. If it’s really bumming you out, just change it. What’s your actual – what’s your middle name, John?

**John:** Tilton. T-I-L-T-O-N.

**Craig:** And you didn’t want to be John Tilton?

**John:** To me it always felt like I was missing a name there. Like Tilton didn’t feel like enough of a last name to me.

**Craig:** Because you just knew it as your middle name.

**John:** I knew it as my middle name. And it feels like a cheese.

**Craig:** John Tilton?

**John:** Like Tilton cheese.

**Craig:** No, that’s Stilton.

**John:** It’s Stilton. I know. But it’s close enough. I just didn’t like it. I didn’t love it.

**Craig:** God. You are just so WASP-y. John Tilton August.

**John:** Yeah, but the Tilton is gone completely. It’s been banished. It hasn’t been part of my name for 25 years.

**Craig:** Tilton.

**John:** Tilton.

**Craig:** Tilton.

**John:** Tilton. Ben in LA wrote in and he sent audio, so let’s take a listen to what Ben wrote.

Ben: I have a quick question. It’s about writing for humor. Now, there’s a thought that “you can’t teach funny,” which I believe to be fairly true. But, is there a method you use to improve, construct, workshop humor in your scripts? I have my own script that I’m trying to break right now that has a decent character and set up, but trying to find all these possible and best scenarios it could go. For TV, you have the audience of the writers’ room, but on features you tend to work alone and I don’t necessarily laugh at all my own jokes.

So, anyways, any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. And, again, thank you very much.

**John:** Craig, what advice do you have for Ben?

**Craig:** Well, this is a tough one. I mean, so no, you can’t teach funny. But certainly funny people can get funnier. And I think that every funny person starts out as an amateur funny person, a class clown, or someone who writes funny emails to their friends, or funny texts. And then hits the rubber and road of being a professional funny person, where you are now not just being paid to make people laugh. You are accountable for people laughing. And that is a whole different world.

The demands of that take some time to develop. Any standup comedian will tell you that time is required. And I doubt any standup comedian’s first set went particularly well. And it’s the same for comedy writing in movies. The first scripts you write tend to be broad. I think basically there’s a lot of insecurity. You know, you’re so worried about people laughing that you try and make them laugh every three seconds and it gets really big and really broad.

The only practical tip I have, other than going through the experience of seeing people react to your work, which is easy enough to do. Have a little reading with some actors and see if people laugh. Is to always keep in mind that surprise is at the heart of laugh out loud comedy. You can’t really get it without surprise. So think about how to surprise people.

**John:** Yeah. I think sometimes we over emphasize this “you can’t teach funny” idea. And we sort of generalize it to like you can’t learn funny. And I think the funny people I know, they definitely spent some time learning about funny. I just finished reading Lindy West’s book, Shrill, which I really liked a lot. And she was talking about how growing up she used to tape Saturday Night Live and SCTV and basically anything she could possibly find. This is back in the days of VHS tape. And she would tape them all, and she would rewatch them, and she transcribed them, and she cut them together into super cuts. And she was really just trying to study and break down how it all worked.

And so she was a funny person, but she was also studying her craft. The same way I think people have musical talent but they also work really hard at it and they sort of – they study it. They really pick it apart to see how it all functions so they can do it themselves. And so I don’t want anyone to sort of think like, oh, because you can’t teach funny no one can learn. People definitely do learn. And it’s important to sort of keep that in mind.

I think one of the first things you’re going to learn is the difference between something being funny situationally and funny because the character is saying funny things. And they’re really different things and we sometimes conflate them. So, situationally funny things are that sense of a mismatch between the character and the environment they’re in. The bull in the china shop kind of stuff. Funny situation is a character trying to keep a secret, physical absurdities. The stuff that’s situationally funny will tend to work even if the sound was turned off, or a language you don’t speak, you could sort of get situationally why it’s funny.

The ability to write funny dialogue is a different thing. The ability to write jokes is a different thing. And you have to understand more what’s happening in the listener’s mind to get a funny line, to get a joke to work. And that, again, takes practice. It’s a different kind of thing.

You know, we talked about shifting frames of reference. Being funny is you as the person telling the joke or setting up the comedy, you know where it’s going to go, but you have to be able to put yourself in the mind of the person who doesn’t know where it’s going to go to see exactly where they’re at, and then be able to surprise them with where you took them. And that takes skill and talent, but also practice. And so you have to dedicate yourself to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, comparing it to music. You can carry a tune, so you can sing. OK, you want to be a professional singer, here are 5,000 technical things you need to learn that are all the way from breath control to different kinds of bravado to how to transition from your chest voice to your head voice. It’s the same with comedy. You do have to be a funny person. You have to know how to sing. But the technicality of comedy is extraordinary. It is far and away the most technical aspect of any writing I think that’s done.

And the rules and the constraints that you set up for yourself are really important. I mean, I can’t tell you how much I learned from David Zucker. And it’s not that I generally even write in that vein of comedy, but I learned technically an enormous amount from him. I also learned a lot technically from Todd Phillips. It was a very different style of comedy. But you have to be an endless student of the technique of comedy because it is rigorous.

Nobody – well, I’m not going to say that. I will say this. There are people that make comedies and they think that the easy part is the joke parts and they’re wrong. Those are the hardest parts. It is a rare thing to find a director that can shoot a funny movie. There’s just not that many of them because that’s where all the technique has to happen. Even if all the technique is in the script. So, what I would say, Ben, is practice. And look at it rigorously. And like John says, study technique. Watch funny movies, that are funny to you, and then stop every time you laugh and go, OK, hold on. Back up. How was that set up? Where did I laugh? Did I laugh when they said the thing, or did I laugh when they cut to that person reacting?

Was it all in one shot? Was it physical? If it was physical, were the elements in play before that physical occurrence blew up? All these things. Analyze them carefully. Analyze them really, really carefully. Because that’s the physics of comedy. And it’s hard. I find it hard, obviously.

**John:** I think the other thing to watch is to watch for trends and watch sort of what’s happening out there. Because something that was funny ten years ago may not play funny now. Watch where the puck is headed. Like I watch Catastrophe, which I think is a terrific show, and smart on so many levels, but one of the choices they’ve made which I’ve seen them talk about is if I’m saying something that’s really funny, you’re going to laugh about it because it’s weird that people don’t laugh in comedies. And so a choice they made in that show is that if he says something funny, she’s going to laugh, and vice versa. They’re going to acknowledge that they’re saying funny things at times. That’s the rules of their universe. That’s the rules of their world. And I can see that happening probably outside of that sort of indie sensibility. I think it’s going to bleed out.

So, look for that kind of stuff. Look for what is out there and what’s possible.

Now, yes, if you’re writing on a TV show, there’s people around you and there’s other people who are going to help you sort of find that funny, which is great. And also to be writing for established actors playing those characters, which is also great. But in most of my experiences I’ve just been like the one guy alone in a room. And how do I know if something is funny? Well, you just kind of know. And to me what I’ve found to be most useful is if I’ve written a scene one day and I can go back a week later, a month later, and that scene is still funny, it’s probably actually funny.

It’s the thing that I wrote and the next day I’m like, ugh, this is just not funny at all, I trust myself in those situations and I rip them up. But I go back and start again.

**Craig:** This is a process that if you are a professional writer, Ben, you will be studying this changing it and perfecting it, whatever you want to call it, for your entire career. It never stops. Comedy is like magic. So, somebody comes along like David Kwong and says pick a card, and you pick it, and then he effortlessly pulls it out of your butt and you go how the hell did you do that? That’s amazing. It’s like magic.

It’s not like magic. It’s actually the result of thousands of hours of practice. And very careful misdirection and a ton of setup. And physics. Literally physics. So, that’s kind of the gig is you got to work at it.

**John:** The other reason why I think that magic metaphor is good is that there are different kinds of magicians. And so there’s people who do really great close up work, or sort of like Kwong does amazing things with numbers and words which are all great. But he’s not making planes disappear. He’s not doing that sort of big look at this giant stadium I have full of stuff. There’s different kinds of magic that are out there. And there’s different kinds of comedy also.

So, a person may be tremendously funny and really good at the jokey-joke stuff, and we love them for that, or the little sketch things, but they don’t really thrive in situations where they have to play the longer game, or they have to figure out the bigger movie. And that’s OK. I think it’s great that there’s people who are good at different kinds of things. And so as you’re writing, and you’re figuring it out what it is you like to do and what you’re good at, you may find that you have a strength. And play to your strengths. Go for what makes you happy.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Cool. I think it’s time for our One Cool Things. I actually have two this week, so I’m sorry, I’m going to cheat. So my first one has been on my list as a One Cool Thing for a long time, but this week it’s especially relevant. So it’s McMansion Hell. Do you know this site, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s the best.

**John:** It’s just the best. And so it’s only because it’s this last week that I know that it’s actually run by this 23-year-old. Her name Kate Wagner. And the blog is great. So McMansion Hell, it’s actually a Tumblr and just every week or sometimes twice a week she goes through and she pulls all the listings of these McMansions across America in different states and she takes like the relator listings and draws on them like little captions for all the horrible stuff you sort of see there, and like the bad architectural decisions. And so it’s really funny, but it’s also really good criticism of the choices that we make to make these giant monstrosities of houses. And how unlivable they are and how just impersonal they are.

So I’ve really learned a lot from this 23-year-old woman who does this great analysis of McMansions. And so I’ve loved the site for months and I should have mentioned this earlier on. But this last week, Zillow, the real estate company, sort of the online relator listings company, sent a letter basically cease and desist. You cannot be using our photos anymore. And basically she pulled down her blog.

So lucky the EFF stepped in and responded to her lawsuit. I’ll put a link in the show notes to what they wrote. And Zillow backed down. And so the site is back up. So you should go. You should enjoy it. You should support her on Patreon like I do. It’s a great site and I’m so happy that this – it’s one of those rare things that it just turned out the way it should have turned out.

**Craig:** I love that site. Where I live in La Cañada, there are a lot of McMansions. I do not live in one. I live in a very – I don’t know if you’re an architecture guy, but there’s an architect named Cliff May who kind of invented the California ranch home. And we live in one of the homes that he designed. It’s old and it’s rambly and it’s not at all a McMansion. It’s the opposite of a McMansion, which is why we love it.

But I look and see the real estate listings in La Cañada and so many of the homes that were built in the ‘90s and 2000s, they are essentially the same. They have this bizarre – I only like to talk about the interiors – this bizarre Italian great entry hall. There’s a sweeping staircase.

**John:** Well, it’s called the Lawyer Foyer.

**Craig:** OK, the Lawyer Foyer. That’s fantastic. There’s a sweeping staircase. Sometimes two. There is a very formal dining room. There is an oversized kitchen with an oversized island. There’s always a wood paneled study and then some weird creepy wine drinking thing with bad Tuscany kind of vibe. And it’s always the same. And it’s over, and over, and over.

**John:** Always the same.

**Craig:** Always. But you know what’s not interesting at all? The ceilings and the walls are just bland and flat. And they all use the same lighting. And it’s just, I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Why people look at that and go, yeah, this is amazing. I want to live here. It’s like that’s their idea of what a mansion looks like, the way that for some people Trump is their idea of what a rich person is.

**John:** Yeah. I was going to use that same metaphor. Yeah, it’s very much that. It’s a weird obsession. An aspirational idea of like if I have this kind of house I will be happy. But, I don’t think those people are happy.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** And if you a Patreon subscriber to her blog, she sends you a link to a slide show that has abandoned McMansions, which is just an extra kind of thing. And so at first you’re like, well, how can you tell they’re abandoned. But then you actually start to look. The yards are completely overgrown and sometimes the windows are like busted out. And it’s just like, oh, it’s great and sad.

**Craig:** It’s a real mess.

**John:** So my other One Cool Thing has also been on my list for a while, so I’m just going to knock it out. It’s call Yoink. And I’ve managed to use it quite a lot while I’ve been here in Paris because I’m on a 13-inch MacBook for this whole year. And mostly it’s been good, but there have been times where I needed to drag files around and just do organizational stuff, which on a bigger screen is easy, but on a small screen, man, it just bites.

And so what Yoink is, it’s a little docky kind of thing that you just drag something over to the edge of the screen and it just holds on to it for you, so then you can navigate to the next thing you need to go to and just drag it back out. It’s so simple, but I use it like nine times a day for putting stuff together. Even for doing the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide. It was so helpful for just dragging stuff in and out and around.

So, Yoink. It’s a utility. You’ll love it. So, I’ll link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** I purchased it. I purchased it and now I just have to remind myself to use it. Sometimes I get these very handy utilities and then I forget that they’re there and I keep doing my old stupid way of things. So, I’m going to do my best to Yoink it up.

My One Cool Thing this week is Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest. Can’t believe this hasn’t been one of my One Cool Things before. So Matt Gaffney is a fantastic crossword puzzle constructor. And he has this website – we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s Xwordcontest.com. And what’s unique about his site, and what he does, there’s only one crossword puzzle a week. It comes out on Friday. But that crossword puzzle is not just a crossword puzzle. It’s a meta puzzle.

In every single one of his crossword puzzles there is a larger meta answer you have to pull out of it somehow. And then you send that in as your contest entry. And as the weeks go on, it gets harder. So there are two kinds of months. There’s the four-week month and then there’s the five-week month, depending on how the calendar is that year.

So, in a four-week month, you get to week four, it’s pretty tough. On a five week month, like for instance the one we are in right now, the fifth puzzle is generally brutal. David Kwong and I are big fans of this. We try and solve them together when we’re stumped. I’ll give you an example, for instance, of a recent one. The puzzle had running through the middle of it this big long answer that was subprime lending. Or subprime borrowing I think is what it was.

And the way to get to the meta answer was to look at all the prime numbers in the crossword puzzle on the grid and then – because it was subprime borrowing, go one letter below that. Take that letter, take all of those, and then unscramble them to get the ultimate answer. That’s the kind of brutality that Matt Gaffney visits upon everybody. Well, I love it.

This week, the entry – this was the first month he had done guest constructors. And this week, the fifth week, the guest constructors are myself and Mr. David Kwong. We have created a puzzle for Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest. And I think it’s going to stump quite a few people.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really happy about that. If you are interested in subscribing, it is a subscription-based service only. You get one month free as a little taster, and then you got to sign on. But it’s $26 for the year. It’s $0.50 a week for, I mean, I don’t want to tell Matt how much I would pay, but it’s 50 of the best cents I spend every single week. I absolutely love the work that he does. He’s a pretty brilliant guy.

So if you like crossword puzzles and you like brain teasers, this is for you.

**John:** Nice. Craig, I don’t think you know this, but because of you I have started doing the crossword puzzle every day. The New York Times. What? And so including David Kwong’s. This past week he did a New York Times crossword puzzle which was terrific.

**Craig:** Yes he did.

**John:** And I got it. And, yeah, so I quite enjoy it. So thank you for turning me on to the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**Craig:** And are you able to handle the Fridays and Saturdays?

**John:** I am most Fridays and Saturdays. There’s a couple times where it was like, you know what, I could spend an hour on this, more than an hour, and it’s not going to be rewarding, so I will reveal it. But here’s what I try to do. If I’m going to reveal, I reveal a word at a time so I can use that to help me get other stuff. So I can at least learn from it.

I don’t reveal the whole thing.

**Craig:** You will get really, really good. It’s just – I mean, I’ve been doing the New York Times now for, I don’t know, 20 years essentially. And you get really good. But it takes time. You pick up things along the way. Some of it is just picking up annoying words like Etui, and Esai, and R, and all that stuff. But some of it is just horse sense. You’re just like, oh, you’re not going for what I think you’re going for. You’re going for this instead.

**John:** Craig, is there a term for people who are famous only because they are useful in crossword puzzles? So, like Uma Thurman, Esai Morales, Enya, she shows up all the time. There’s a class of people who would seem much more famous than they actually are, but it’s just because their names fit well in crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there’s general crossword-ease, and then there are these crossword-ease people. There’s not a specific term for them, but it’s like Uma Thurman, she’s legitimately famous in her own right.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But I think in today, Friday’s New York Times crossword puzzle, spoiler alert, one of the answers is Anna Sui.

**John:** Oh yeah, and I did not know who that was, but she felt well in this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anna Sui is basically only–

**John:** She’s a designer or perfumer?

**Craig:** Yes. She’s only famous because of crossword puzzles. Esai Morales, wherever he is ranked on IMDb Pro, he’s ranked number one for actors in crossword puzzles. And when you start to make them, you begin to understand why. When you build, so I’ve started making them now, and you realize that you get – you know, the basic concept is you lay down your answers that need to be there. Your theme answers. And then you start working around. And occasionally you get into a spot where you’re like the only thing that’s going to make this all work is if I can have an E-S-A-I here. So, it looks like Esai. Let’s get him in.

It’s just an incredibly useful name.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, if we can just make Godwin more famous, Godwin Itai Jabangwe, that Itai could be a useful crossword.

**Craig:** It would be huge.

**John:** Huge.

**Craig:** To have Itai would be amazing. I-T-A-I. So, the most valuable words for constructors to make their lives easy are short words full of vowels.

**John:** Mr. Jabangwe, it will be very lucky to be used in crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** Oh my god, if he became famous, Itai would revolutionize crossword puzzle construction.

**John:** That is an immigrant success story. That is Hamilton for all right there.

**Craig:** That’s right. Immigrants. We get the job done.

**John:** The job done. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send the questions like the ones we answered today. We love it when people send in audio files, so just read your question aloud and attach it to your email. And that is helpful for everyone. Because otherwise Godwin may have to email you and ask you to do it, so just do it the first time.

We are also on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. On Facebook, search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review like the nice one we read aloud today.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. If you go to johnaugust.com/guide, you will get the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide which you can download. And in the store, store.johnaugust.com, you can get the USB drives.

The other way to get all the back episodes is at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for the whole back catalog. We’ve got transcripts. We’ve got everything else. So just visit johnaugust.com and see those there.

And, Craig, a fun episode.

**Craig:** Terrific episode, John. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USBs drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [McMansion Hell](http://mcmansionhell.com)
* [Zillow Threatens to Sue](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/26/15876602/zillow-threatens-sue-mcmansion-hell-tumblr-blog)
* [EFF responds to McMansion Hell lawsuit](https://www.eff.org/files/2017/06/29/wagner_eff_letter_to_zillow_-_2017.06.29.pdf)
* [McMansion Hell wins](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15896146/zillow-will-not-sue-mcmansion-hell-blog)
* [Yoink](http://eternalstorms.at/yoink/Yoink_-_Simplify_and_Improve_Drag_and_Drop_on_your_Mac/Yoink_-_Simplify_drag_and_drop_on_your_Mac.html)
* [Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest](http://xwordcontest.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_307.mp3).

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