Chapter 1.8. Where Screenwriting Leaves Off and Emotioneering Begins

Approaching emotion logically.

Approaching playing seriously.

Make things

interesting and make them deep.

Over the course of a decade, as I created and distilled screenwriting and story techniques for "Beyond Structure" and elsewhere, I found that they all fall on one of the two axes of this grid:

The arrow across the top represents techniques to make things interesting unique, imaginative, original, etc.

The vertical arrow represents techniques to make things "deep" to give them the feeling of emotional depth or to make them emotionally layered, poignant, soulful, emotionally complex, psychologically complex, etc.

These two categories making things interesting and making them deep apply to five areas of writing:

• Dialogue

• Characters

• Relationships between characters

• Scenes

• Plots

Any of these five can be interesting, deep, or both. Techniques that cause any of the five to be deep are what I call Deepening Techniques.