Today we discuss setting up your hero’s life, which will have an enormous effect on how much we care about them during the movie.
Day 1: Writing a Teaser
Day 2: Introducing Your Hero
Now that we’ve discussed introducing your hero, we must discuss introducing their life.
There’s a specific reason for this. When you reach the second act, your hero is going to be entering the “adventure” world. For a movie like The Matrix that will mean a computer simulated kung-fu reality brimming with reckless gunslinging and killing. For a movie like Neighbors, it will mean a world of keg-stands and bongs, sexual experimentation and endless partying. In order for the uniqueness of these worlds to register, you must contrast them against the mundane ordinary world your hero starts in.
Setting up your hero’s world will consist of three primary things:
- Their job
- Their family
- Their social life (relationships and friends)
Job – A person’s job takes up half their life. So it’s a huge part of a character’s identity. You can convey so much about them by showing just one scene at work. For example, if your character is a lowly office worker at a giant company like Amazon, you can convey that they’re just a cog in the machine, a number, lonely and unimportant. Conversely, if they’re the CEO of that same company, you can show how everyone admires them, kisses up to them, courts their approval. They are so used to this praise that they have become arrogant, disassociated from reality.
By the way, “job,” is relative in that, if your character is 15 years old, their “job” is going to school. So you’d substitute showing them at their job with showing them at school. Then again, you could do both. Maybe they have a job bussing tables after school every day. What you’re trying to do with any character is build someone who’s interesting, who isn’t your Average Jane. A high school kid who’s forced to work a job after school is a lot more interesting than a high school kid with a cushy privileged life. So look for those opportunities whenever you create a character.
Family – We can look at family in two ways. Either as the wife/husband and kids. Or the parents and extended family. What you’re going to want to focus on here is the status of these relationships, as they will have a huge effect on how your hero approaches life. For example, if your hero is like Lester Burnham in American Beauty, he lives in a family where both his wife and daughter are embarrassed by him. Every night he walks into that house, he’s emasculated. This has turned him into a sad frustrated man in all aspects of his life.
Probably one of the most important relationships you’ll establish is that of your hero’s relationship with their parents. Since there’s a lifelong desire for children to seek their parents’ approval, all you need to do to create conflict is establish some resistance from a parent, and now you have that unresolved relationship that adds complexity to your hero. If you haven’t seen Peacemaker, a central theme in the show is Peacemaker’s Alt-Right father who’s always thought Peacemaker was worthless. So Peacemaker is constantly balancing his disdain for his father against his need for his approval.
And it doesn’t just have to be parents. You can create unresolved conflict with siblings as well. There was this silly Christmas romantic comedy on Netflix this past December called Love Hard about a guy who catfishes a girl, who then surprises him by showing up at his house for Christmas. In the movie, the main guy is a loser who still lives with his parents. Meanwhile, his brother shows up for Christmas and it turns out he’s married to the perfect girl. Has the perfect job. He’s annoyingly successful at everything he does. That contrast between the two brothers led to the best laughs in the movie.
Social life – Your hero’s social life will consist of who they’re dating (or not dating), their friends, and what they do for fun. Unlike family, a hero’s friends will be more of an extension of them rather than a source of conflict. That’s because your hero chooses his friends but does not choose his family. Of course, depending on how involved the friend is in the plot, their “conflict” status may change over the course of the movie. We saw this with Annie in Bridesmaids. She starts off as having the perfect friendship with Lillian. But then, as jealousy takes over, their friendship deteriorates.
If your hero has a girlfriend or boyfriend, there will almost always be some level of conflict in their relationship. One of the most common ones is, are we going to get married? One of the two is reluctant to take that step. Another one is, are we going to have kids? Or, depending on the movie, it could be simpler. It might be that one person in the relationship is too selfish. Or they’ve been offered a job in another city and they’re thinking of taking it, putting the relationship in jeopardy. Or maybe your hero isn’t involved in a relationship at all. Maybe they’re an incel, like The 40 Year Old Virgin. And their “setting up your hero’s world” scenes are more about them *trying* to get a girlfriend than having problems with a girlfriend.
The reason you’re showing us all these things isn’t just to create contrast between the ordinary (first act) and adventure (second act) worlds. You’re doing this so we get to know your hero. The more we know your hero, the closer to them we’ll feel and, therefore, the more we’ll root for them. I’ve seen writers skimp on setting up their hero’s life and there’s a noticeable dip in our interest. We just don’t care as much because we never felt like we knew the guy in the first place.
Now that you know what to do, let’s talk about application. Because while it would seem you just tackle these issues one by one, that, unfortunately, isn’t the case with screenwriting. You will often have to set MULTIPLE THINGS up in the same scene.
Let’s take a look at a recent Disney film, Jungle Cruise, as an example. In Jungle Cruise, we meet Lily (Emily Blunt) trying to steal a map from an old governmental building. The writers could’ve stopped there. They could’ve said, “This is our hero. We’re going to dedicate an entire scene to setting her, and only her, up.” But anybody can do that. One of the things Hollywood pays writers to do is combine scenes that do multiple things, and therefore move the story along quicker.
Therefore, they had this other character namedMacGregor, who’s Lily’s brother, lobbying a group of potential investors for an expedition, in the same building. During his lobbying, Lily sneaks off to find the map. But the writers didn’t stop there. At some point in the story, they needed to introduce the primary villain, Jochaim. They could’ve done this by giving Jochaim an isolated introduction. But instead, while Lily is sneaking through the building, she bumps into Jochaim, who is very suspicious of her behavior. And, boom, just like that, the writers have set up three of the primary characters in a single scene, established what Lily does for a living, and set up the plot (follow the map to the treasure).
An interesting thing about that scene is that it’s around ten minutes long, which means the writers decided to write one big scene to set up Lily as opposed to a bunch of smaller ones. I tend to like this approach because it allows the writer to create more of a “mini-movie” with the scene, with its own little beginning, middle, and end. But, ultimately, that decision is up to you, and will be dictated by the type of story you’re telling.
How many of these “setting up your hero’s world” scenes you’ll write depends on a) if you wrote a teaser or not and b) how long your scenes are. We can figure this out with some simple math. Your inciting incident is going to come somewhere between pages 12-15. Let’s say you didn’t write a teaser. That means you have 12 pages before the inciting incident. The average scene is 2 and a half pages long. Therefore, you will write about 5 scenes that set up your hero in their world. That may drop to three, maybe even two scenes, if you have a long teaser.
Let’s not forget that this is a creative endeavor and, therefore, you can attack your story however you want. But whichever direction you choose, try to set up your hero’s job, family, and social life if possible. The more we know about your hero, the more we’ll care about them, which has an enormous effect on how invested we’ll be during the adventure (the second act).
Next First Act Post: Tuesday, March 8
Pages to write until next post: 8
