[DIGEST] Home, work, and play

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Hi friends,

I don’t talk about craft much, but there is one thing I learned as a screenwriter that I don’t ever see mentioned in writing prose.

If you want to get empathy for your main character, or yourself if you’re writing memoir, then you need to show them in three places.

Home, work, and play.

Three scenes as early in your piece as possible where they interact with people in those three ways and you’ll magically have empathy for any character.

If you want to go deeper, then these scenes should additionally show how the protagonist and antagonist are mirror images of each other. We do this by showing the protagonist “save the cat” and the antagonist “kick the puppy”.

Very early in your piece, readers need to see your protagonist risk themselves to save somebody less fortunate than themselves, thus “saving the cat” if we want the audience to bond with them quickly.

Conversely, we need to watch the antagonist, given the same choice, “kick the puppy”, or add unnecessary cruelty in a simil…