Every story is about how the hero changes. In most cases, the hero changes into a better person but in tragedies, the hero changes into a worse person. In either case, stories must show change.

However, no hero changes drastically from one type of person to another. Instead, heroes must change gradually in four stages:

• Fear
• Success
• Temptation
• Danger

The reason why every hero starts off in a dead end life is because they hold a limiting belief about themselves. Luke in “Star Wars” initially lacks confidence in himself. Rose in “Titanic” believes she has no choice but to marry a man she doesn’t love just for his money. Initially, what holds the hero back is their own fear.

The hero wants to change, but he or she is too afraid to even try.

The second stage occurs when the hero summons up the courage to try, and suddenly finds themselves in a new, unfamiliar world. At this point, the hero still clings to their limiting belief, but also acts like they’ve embraced a more empowering belief.

The end result is that the hero manages to achieve initial success despite not giving up their limiting belief. This initial success tempts the hero into holding on to their limiting belief because they’re actually getting what they want.

In “Legally Blonde,” the hero still thinks she needs a man, but she starts doing well in law school. In “Tootsie,” the hero still treats women poorly, but he’s become a successful actor masquerading as a woman on a popular soap opera.

Fear tries to keep the hero from changing. Success tries to keep the hero from changing because they’re getting what they want.

Suddenly, the hero’s life starts falling apart. That’s when temptation appears to keep the hero from changing. Temptation offers the hero what they want in exchange for giving up what they really need.

In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the villain offers the hero a well-paying job to tempt him away from running his savings & loan. Once the hero leaves the savings & loan, the villain will be able to destroy it and take over the town.

By offering the hero a well-paying job, the villain tempts the hero with financial success that the hero always dreamed about. If the hero takes this temptation, he can never become a better person.

In “Tootsie,” the hero has achieved tremendous popularity and success on a soap opera, playing a woman. The temptation is that if he continues hiding his identity as a man, he can stay in the soap opera and remain rich and popular, but he’ll never get to fall in love with his co-star.

Once the hero turns away from temptation, the final stage involves danger. The villain has tried to use temptation to keep the hero from changing. Now the villain uses danger to keep the hero from changing. This involves a direct threat to the hero from the villain.

In “Terminator 2,” the villain directly attacks the hero (the good Terminator). The final battle in every story involves the villain threatening the hero. By defeating the hero, the villain can keep the hero from becoming a better person.

So when outlining our story, think about these four stages to keep the hero from changing: fear, success, temptation, and danger. When your hero can overcome these four stages, he or she will finally change into a better (or worse) person than they were in the beginning.

Some stories can be exciting just by showing a lot of visual action. Unfortunately, most stories need more than endless amounts of action. With every story idea, ask yourself what’s the point of your story. That point will likely be your theme.

Study any James Cameron movie (“Titanic,” “Terminator 2”, “Avatar”, etc.) and you’ll always see lots of action but also a strong, underlying theme. Action doesn’t exist solely for visual effects but to force the hero into making a choice based on the theme.

In “Terminator 2,” the hero (the good Terminator) starts off as a killing machine, but by the end of the story, he learns the value of human life. Thus the theme is that life is precious.

That means the hero’s inner conflict is whether to embrace killing or protecting life.

Every theme defines the hero’s dilemma. In “Terminator 2,” that dilemma is whether killing can be justified or if killing is never justified. Every obstacle the hero faces forces him to make that choice.

“Hacksaw Ridge” is another movie with a strong theme of not killing. The hero of “Hacksaw Ridge” has refused to touch a gun in boot camp, yet by refusing to do so, he risks getting courtmartialed, which will keep him from marrying his fiancé.

The dilemma pulling him to touch a gun looks like the easy way out. The dilemma of not touching a gun and risk getting courtmartialed and losing his fiancé looks like the hard way out. Yet the hero constantly chooses the hard way out.

That’s the purpose of a theme, to define the two extremes of the hero’s dilemma. This singular dilemma underlies the conflict for the entire story. Once you know the story’s underlying conflict, you’ll never risk writing action that doesn’t support that conflict because you’ll know it doesn’t fit your story.

Watch a bad movie with lots of pointless action (“The 355”) and you’ll see that more action is never the answer. Then watch a great movie like “Hacksaw Ridge” or “Terminator 2” to see how action, centered around a unified theme, makes every story far more interesting.

Dilemmas are the heart of your theme. Use them to define the single inner conflict in your hero from start to finish.

Every story needs conflict. The purpose of a villain in every story is to provide that conflict. However, if the villain does nothing more than just get in the way of the hero, it creates a one-dimensional villain and a boring story (“Terminator 3”, “The 355,” or “Mortal Engines”).

Besides just getting in the way of the hero’s pursuit of a goal, the villain’s real purpose is to force the hero to change. Remember, the hero’s struggle isn’t just about achieving a physical goal, but to change emotionally.

For a hero to change, he or she must start in a dead end life and become a better person by the end. In “Legally Blonde,” the hero starts out thinking she needs to be dependent on a man. By the end of the story, she realizes she’s smart and strong enough to be independent of a man.

So the real purpose of the villain is to keep the hero from changing. There are several ways the villain tries to do this.

First, the villain tries to keep the hero from achieving a physical goal because without this physical goal, the hero can’t change. In “Legally Blonde,” the hero wants to follow her ex-boyfriend into law school to win him back. So the villain’s first task is to keep her out of law school completely, and when that fails, drive her out of law school.

Notice that all the villains in “Legally Blonde” strive to make the hero’s life difficult in law school so she’ll quit. The hero’s ex-boyfriend even tells the hero to her face that she’s not smart enough to be in law school.

Second, when blocking the physical goal doesn’t work, the villain tries to attack the hero emotionally. That often involves temptation to keep the hero stuck in his or her limiting belief.

In “Legally Blonde,” the hero thinks she’s not strong enough to live life without a man. That’s why her law professor propositions her for sex because that will help confirm her belief that she can’t pass law school without the help of a man.

Temptation represents the easy way out. The hard way is to keep striving towards the ultimate change, which in “Legally Blonde” means proving to herself that she is strong enough without a man.

Third, when temptation fails, the villain’s final threat to the hero involves death, either physical or emotional death. In “Legally Blonde,” that moment of death comes when the hero takes over the case from the sexist law professor and finally emerges as the strong, independent person she needs to be. But she must pass one final test.

That test appears to be external but it’s actually internal. The hero must finally embrace a more empowering belief and demonstrate that through a physical action.

In “Legally Blonde,” the hero finally realizes she’s strong enough on her own when she realizes how to prove her client’s innocence. When she wins her first court case, her ex-boyfriend finally wants to take her back but that’s when she finally rejects him (and her initial limiting belief that she needed a man).

So the purpose of the villain isn’t just to physically fight against the hero but to keep increasing the challenges to hold the hero back. Yet paradoxically, each time the villain tries to hold the hero back, the hero overcomes each obstacle and gets stronger.

Ultimately, the villain’s real purpose is to act like a mean teacher who helps the hero change emotionally (internally) and become a better person in three ways:

• Keep the hero from achieving a physical goal
• Tempt the hero into giving up willingly
• Threaten the hero with physical or emotional death

Every hero needs to pursue a physical goal. However, that physical goal is never what the hero really wants. Instead, what the hero really needs to achieve is an emotional dream, which the hero may not even be consciously aware of.

Think of the reason why people go on diets. Going on a diet is never about losing weight, even if that’s a physical goal. The real reason people go on a diet is to achieve an emotional dream, such as wanting to look more attractive, wanting to feel better about themselves, or wanting to find love and hoping being more attractive will help them find someone to love.

In other words, the physical goal always (yes, always) has a hidden emotional dream behind it.

This is crucial because once you know your hero’s physical goal and why they want to achieve that goal, you also know their emotional motivation. By knowing a hero’s motivation, you know how to challenge that emotional dream to make it as hard as possible to achieve.

In “Rocky,” the hero’s physical goal is to fight in the heavyweight championship, but ask yourself why? One reason might be for revenge. Another might be to prove himself the best. Still another reason might be to see if he can do it. Notice that if you choose any of these reasons, the entire story changes dramatically.

If Rocky were out for revenge, his actions and obstacles getting in his way would be wildly different. Instead, Rocky’s motivation to fight is to prove to himself and the world that he’s not a bum.

Knowing Rocky’s true motivation makes it easy to define the rest of the story. No matter what happens, Rocky must prove to others that he’s not a bum. That means all the obstacles Rocky faces must make him feel like he is a bum:

• When Rocky flirts with Adrian in the pet store, the pet store owner dismisses Adrian, which indirectly makes Rocky feel like a bum.
• When Rocky loses his locker to another boxer, he confronts Mickey, who makes Rocky feel like a has-been.
• When Rocky works as a strongman for a crime boss, having to threaten people makes Rocky feel like a bum.

Whatever your hero’s physical goal might be, you must identify the real motivation behind pursuing that physical goal. Just as people go on a diet for different reasons (such as for their health or to look more attractive so they can find someone to love), heroes in every story want to achieve a physical goal for a specific reason.

Too many writers focus just on the physical goal to create an intriguing plot for their story. However, you must define and understand the underlying emotional motivation for why your hero wants to achieve that physical goal because that motivation must shape everything else in the story.

The biggest mistake in writing a screenplay is to write boring scenes. What makes a scene boring is when nothing happens, such as two characters stopping at a gas station to buy water or looking for a parking spot.

That type of information can be useful if it’s relevant to the story, but too often, novices simply write trivial dialogue and action where nothing happens. To make something happen, one technique is to shatter the expectations of the audience and/or the characters in the scene.

In “Pulp Fiction,” there’s a scene between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson where they’re driving in a car and talking about fast food differences in Europe. From the audience’s point of view, that information seems tame and trivial. However, the end of that scene shatters our expectations by suddenly revealing the two men are hit men.

Once we know the two men are hit men, that seemingly trivial scene takes on a whole new meaning because their dialogue sets up future action. While they were talking about fast food in the car, Samuel L. Jackson’s character confronts a roomful of young men in an apartment and starts eating their fast food burger. That helps tie in the discussion about fast food.

During that same car scene, the two hit men also discussed the dangers of taking the boss’s wife out and getting too friendly with her where one man gave her a foot massage and got killed as a result.

So the entire discussion about fast food in Europe foreshadows future scenes. The sudden revelation that the two men are hit men makes that scene far more memorable than if it was just about two men talking about fast food in Europe.

In a scene from “Erin Brockovich,” the hero (Erin Brockovich) is in a conference room when a new lawyer enters the room. The hero’s expectation is that this lawyer will help her. However, it turns out this lawyer thinks little of Erin Brockovich and the work she’s done so far. The lawyer’s expectation is that she’ll have to take charge because Erin Brockovich didn’t collect the evidence correctly. Erin Brockovich’s expectations are shattered because she thought this lawyer was going to be an ally but instead turns out to be dismissing her and all the hard work she’s done so far. You can watch how this scene plays out below:

Shattering expectations means when characters enter a scene, they expect one thing to happen but something else happens instead. It can also mean that as an audience, we watch a scene expecting one thing to happen, only to be surprised at something else occurring instead.

The bottom line is that by shattering expectations, you can make any scene far more interesting and useful in moving a story forward.

Every story can teach you something new. However, by focusing on specific genres, you can sharpen your storytelling skills in specific ways.

Dramas and comedies are best for learning the importance of emotional change. Watch a drama like “Titanic” or a comedy like “The 40-Year Old Virgin” and you’ll see that at their heart, the stories are about a hero yearning for a better life but not knowing how to get it. Their struggles are less about physical battles against others and more about mental struggles within themselves. The outer physical conflict simply makes their inner turmoil even worse.

In “Titanic,” the hero feels trapped into marrying a rich man just for security, but she doesn’t even like this man. What’s really leading her to a loveless marriage isn’t just the pressure from her mother and the temptation of a life of luxury, but her own unwillingness to stand up for herself and take control of her own life.

In “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” the hero wants to lose his virginity, but he wants to lose it to a woman he loves. His challenge is finding a woman to love and overcome his own fears about being in a relationship.

While dramas and comedies are always about emotional change, action thrillers are always about plot and physical conflict. By studying action thrillers, you can learn how to create physical obstacles that get increasingly more difficult.

When you just focus on mindless physical action, you wind up with duds like “The 355” or “Terminator 3.” When you create an intriguing physical conflict with an emotional story, you wind up with great movies like “Titanic” or “Die Hard.”

Action thrillers work by constantly changing the obstacles facing the hero, forcing the hero to keep fighting even harder to overcome the constant stream of obstacles blocking their way. Every good superhero movie is about the hero learning about their own powers and using those powers to defeat a villain.

Action thrillers emphasize plot twists and surprises. A straightforward plot will always be boring. An unpredictable plot will always be interesting. By studying action thrillers like “Mission Impossible” or any good superhero movie such as “Ironman,” you can better understand how to tell a compelling physical story.

Horror stories are best at emphasizing villains. The more terrifying the villain, the more greater the horror. Many mediocre action thrillers are bad because the villains aren’t that threatening. Horror stories rarely make that mistake because they make the villain as terrifying as possible. The greater the threat of the villain, the more intense the story.

Finally, don’t overlook mysteries because mysteries focus on intellectual challenges, plot twists, and character interaction. The hero must confront multiple suspects and their interaction is rarely physical but more mental conflict through dialogue.

In a mystery, every character has a goal so their dialogue clearly shows how their speech strives to achieve a specific goal. The hero’s dialogue is always meant to uncover the truth from the other hand, the other characters’ dialogue either tries to mislead the hero or provide more information for the hero.

So study different story genres and you’ll learn the following:

• Drama and comedies – emotional change
• Action thrillers – plot and physical conflict
• Horror – villains
• Mysteries – plot twists and dialogue

Every writer has their strengths and weaknesses, but you can always learn more. Even if you hate a particular genre (such as horror) study it anyways. You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn by watching the type of movie you thought you would hate.

Every story changes the hero. In the beginning, the hero starts out as one type of person in their own self-created dead-end world. By the end of the story, they’ve changed for better (happy endings) or worse (tragedies).

All change comes through emotional change, which is why more action, special effects, and car crashes are never the answer. Here are two ways the hero can change:

• Embrace a new mindset
• Admit a character flaw

The key to the hero’s emotional change is similar to an addict’s eventual change. At first, the addict is in denial and blames everyone and everything else for their problems. Finally, the addict (hero) must realize that they are the source of their own problem.

In “Star Wars,” Luke lacks confidence. Gradually he learns about the Force. However, embracing a new mindset is never easy because that requires giving up the old mindset with no guarantee that the new mindset will work.

That moment occurs when Luke turns off his tracking computer and trusts the Force completely, even while the commanders at the base questions if everything is all right. Not only Luke must trust the Force with no second chance if he’s wrong, but he must also deal with others wondering why he turned off his tracking computer.

For the hero to fully embrace a new mindset, he or she must risk everything and have everything working against them.

A far more interesting emotional change occurs when the hero admits that they are the fault of their own problems. In “Die Hard,” John McClane finally admits to Officer Powell that he was the one who broke up his marriage.

In an interesting movie called “All Square,” a neighborhood bookie blames his life on everything but himself. Finally, he admits that he was once a professional baseball player but quit when his dad ran over someone and he came back to take care of him.

Only later does this hero finally admit his character flaw. He was a pitcher in the minor leagues and found it harder than he thought. Rather than keep struggling to get better, he actually gave up and used his dad as an excuse to quit baseball and run his dad’s bookie operation.

The hero’s emotional change follows this outline:

• Hero stuck in a dead end life due to their own character flaw.
• Hero given an opportunity (a Symbol of Hope) that offers a chance for change.
• Given a choice between changing or not changing, the hero starts changing and gets success.
• Because the hero hasn’t fully changed, he or she starts experiencing adversity.
• The hero must lose something and realize he or she must change.
• The hero finally admits his character flaw and takes responsibility.
• The hero takes a huge chance to change, and achieves a better life.

In “Star Wars,” Luke doesn’t really have much of a character flaw other than lacking confidence in himself. However in “All Square”, “Die Hard”, and many other great movies, the hero finally admits their character flaw. This is similar to how addicts can only start to change by admitting they’re an addict.

This is how the hero changes in “All Square”:

• The hero is barely making money running a bookie operation.
• He meets a 12-year old Little League pitcher and teaches him how to pitch.
• When this 12-year old starts doing well, the hero realizes he can get people to bet on Little League games, which brings in massive amounts of money.
• The hero’s bookie operation on Little League games is causing parents to lose money and take it out on their kids. The Little League commissioner threatens the hero to stop his bookie operation or the police will get involved.
• The 12-year old kid sees how gambling is hurting other kids and wants the hero to stop taking bets. When the hero refuses, the 12-year old kid loses a game to make the hero lose a lot of money.
• The hero finally admits to the 12-year old that he didn’t quit professional baseball because of his dad, but because it was too hard and taking over his dad’s bookie operation was easier.
• The hero goes to beat up a man who caught the 12-year old kid breaking into his home and beat him up. Then the hero decides not to fight this man and risk going to jail.
• The hero gives up his bookie operation and gets a real job. Then he pays back his debts to others to show he’s changed. However, he leaves open the possibility of still taking bets on professional sports games, but he has changed into a better man who has finally taken responsibility for his life.

The main way heroes change is to start out selfish and gradually become selfless as they start caring about others rather than just themselves.

Before plotting an intricate story, start by plotting your hero’s emotional change first. Once you know how your hero must change emotionally, then you can better shape the physical events to force your hero to constantly struggle between their old ways of life or a new way of life.

All emotional change is a dilemma between two choices. Either Luke lacks confidence in himself or he trusts the Force. Either the hero in “All Square” takes responsibility for his actions and how it hurts others, or he doesn’t.

A compelling log line may grab the attention of Hollywood, but a compelling log line plus a solid emotional change outline will help create a great story.

Every story is about a hero who changes. In rare cases, such as “Being There,” “Forest Gump,” and “WALL-E,” the hero remains largely the same from start to finish but their interaction with others drastically changes everyone around them for the better.

In most stories, the hero must change and that involves forcing your hero into an emotional dilemma from start to finish.

In “Hacksaw Ridge,” the hero refuses to touch a gun. Now the dilemma is whether he can be safe without a gun or will he live a better life without touching a gun?

This emotional dilemma creates the physical conflict in the story. First, the hero joins the army, but during basic training when he refuses to touch a gun, he’s forced into a dilemma. Should he take the easy way out and touch a gun? Or should he take the hard way with no guarantee of success and refuse to touch a gun?

By refusing to touch a gun, his problems get worse. He might be courtmartialed, and if he’s courtmartialed, he can’t marry his sweetheart. Finally, the army lets him finish basic training but they send him to a vicious battlefield (called Hacksaw Ridge) without a gun to protect himself.

Now the dilemma is can he live without a gun or should he take the easy way out and grab a gun?

In every great emotional story, the hero must constantly force this dilemma between the easy way out and the hard way out. The easy way out offers less conflict. The hard way out offers more conflict with no guarantee of success.

The easy way out is always the most tempting choice. By forcing your hero to constantly face this difficult decision, your story will always be interesting because such a dilemma creates interesting physical conflicts.

Watch any bad movie that focuses solely on physical conflict and you have a boring movie. Watch any great movie that has lots of action and chances are good, it also has a hidden emotional dilemma that’s driving the physical conflict.

Always focus on the emotional dilemma of your story. Once you know the only two choices your hero must face, keep forcing your hero to face this dilemma over and over again with increasingly dramatic stakes. That’s the secret to telling a great story.

When writing a scene, use specific details that paint a distinct picture of the setting. Far too many writers settle for generic settings by simply describing slug lines like:

INT. DINER – DAY

First of all, focus on making a scene unique and memorable. Why would characters visit this particular diner? In “Thelma and Louise,” there’s a scene where the two women stay at a motel and eat in the motel coffee shop. That’s when Louise realizes Thelma left all their money in the room and the hitchhiker they had picked up earlier is now alone in the room with their money.

Yet that diner says a lot about the two women. The diner is in a cheap motel because they’re trying to save money. More importantly, it’s also just a run of the mill diner because both women still think of themselves as ordinary.

Imagine if that same scene were placed in a five-star resort. The exact same scene would no longer work because it wouldn’t fit in with the women’s personalities. Now imagine if that same scene were placed in a rat-infested, filthy diner. Once again, that location wouldn’t work because such a location would seem too dangerous to the women, and that would distract from the action where Louise realizes Thelma left the money in the room with the hitchhiker.

You can see that the details of a location can be crucial, but how you describe that scene can paint a visual picture in the mind of the reader, and the reader is the first person you have to impress. Look at the way “Pulp Fiction” describes a unique 50s diner:

EXT. JACKRABBIT SLIM’S – NIGHT

In the past six years, 50’s diners have sprung up all over
L.A., giving Thai restaurants a run for their money. They’re
all basically the same. Decor out of an “Archie” comic book,
Golden Oldies constantly emanating from a bubbly Wurlitzer,
saucy waitresses in bobby socks, menus with items like the
Fats Domino Cheeseburger, or the Wolfman Jack Omelet, and
over prices that pay for all this bullshit.

But then there’s JACKRABBIT SLIM’S, the big mama of 50’s
diners.

Either the best or the worst, depending on your point of
view.

Describing a location with specific details is the key to making each scene stand out. In the book, “Visual Intelligence,” the author uses famous works of art to train people to look at a scene objectively with clear eyes and sharp observational skills. By studying how intelligence agents and police officers notice specific details to describe a scene, you can use those same techniques to describe memorable scenes in your own screenplays.

Specific, memorable, and visual details make a scene distinct. Use the techniques from “Visual Intelligence” to improve your screenplay.