Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

Part 11:Using Emotional Draws

USING EMOTIONAL DRAWS

In Hollywood, while studying green-lighting for films, I learned that we can predict how well a screenplay will perform based upon its emotional appeal.

The movie studios found that by creating short trailers and testing how well they drew in an audience in the first two weeks of release, we could eventually predict how well a film will do.

Of course, every viewer is an individual, and their tastes will vary.

Overall, we can predict how well an audience will respond to a film based upon several criteria—the viewer's age, the viewer's sex, and the type of emotional appeals that the trailer creates.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let's analyze an audience by age.

When you're a child—between the ages of 0 and 11—you're in what I will call the "discovery" phase of life, a time when much of the world seems strange and new to you. In some ways, the world seems boundless, because every time that you turn around you learn about some new wonder or some new region of the world that you have never heard about. So children in that age are predisposed to what I, and a few others, call "wonder literature."

In wonder literature, the main emotional draw (outside of the essential story itself) is typically that it arouses a sense of wonder. Hence, stories set in fantastic settings are extremely interesting to children. But when you encounter something new—say a new animal— there is more than one possible outcome to the encounter.

              Wonder—The encounter can in some way be more satisfying than you had imagined. (In which case a sense of wonder is aroused.)

              Humor—The encounter can twist away from your expectations in a way that is neither wondrous nor terrible. (In which case a laugh is usually evoked.)

               Horror—The encounter can be more painful or traumatizing than you had imagined possible. (In which case terror or horror are aroused.)

Because of this, young readers, by virtue of age alone, are biologically predisposed to be drawn to works of wonder (fantasy or science fiction), humor, and horror. Those are the largest draws for them.

Statistically, those are the strongest draws. How strong are they? Ninety-eight percent of children are drawn to wonder. Ninety-six percent are drawn to humor. Ninety-two percent to horror.

As a child reaches puberty, testosterone leads boys to become more combative and competitive than the girls. Hence, young men become attracted to adventure by the age of five or six, and by the late teens it becomes a primary draw. Sexual interest (pornographic element) also becomes a powerful emotional draw, reaching the height of its power during the middle and late teens.

Young women on the other hand begin to develop a strong interest in romance just before puberty, at the age of eleven through thirteen. Sure, the young women may be interested in having their romances placed in fantastic settings—witness the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean—but the romance and sexual angles are as important as the fantasy.

By the mid-20s, the draw for fantastic literature is no longer overwhelming, and people in that age range may quit reading fantastic literature and watching fantasy films altogether. Men may begin picking up thrillers instead of science fiction, while women lean toward straight contemporary romances.

As your audience ages, the sexual draws gradually stop interesting the readers at all. In part, it's because of the failing hormone levels in adults. A woman at 40 is nearing menopause, and the male at 50 is reaching a hormonal crisis of his own. They lose interest in sex to a great degree. Instead, adults who are raising their own children are confronted with a myriad of problems—how do I teach my child to get along with others? Why doesn't my husband ask for directions when he gets lost? And so on. Older readers tend to be more thoughtful, more grounded in reality, and more interested in stories that have practical applications to their own lives.