I don’t know about you, but for me, my goal as a writer is to move people emotionally. I want to find the core emotional truths in beats and in characters that ring so true that anyone can relate to them—and to the imaginary people I’m putting in these situations.
I’m a crier in movies. Yes, I know that nothing happening on the screen is real, but isn’t the thought so beautiful that you can tell a story so human (no matter if the actual characters are humans or aliens or Hobbits or whatever) that you cry for them?
But how do you do this? How do you make a viewer or reader care?
Caring is something a story builds on purpose, not luck that lands on some characters and skips others. Brian Williamson at Plot Luck breaks down his frame of "emotional onboarding," or a sequence of moments that bring us inside a character. These are five deliberate moves a filmmaker can build into the story.
We've broken down what makes a character work before, but this is specific to making a character we care about.
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Why "Relatable" Is the Wrong Goal
With today’s limited media literacy, the masses seem to think that characters (especially main characters) should be “good” and “relatable.” As a writer, you might get told to make the character resemble the audience.
But then you hand the hero a normal job in a normal city, and the character still doesn't land… because similarity isn't connection. Plus, that can be kind of boring. Williamson's examples of the opposite are a green ogre in a swamp, a disgraced prince, or a rat who cooks. None of those circumstances resembles our lives. What carries over is the feeling.
"It's a recognizable feeling underneath completely unrecognizable circumstances," he says.
Your characters don't have to be likable, but they have to be interesting.
Recognition
The first moment is to make us feel something when the character feels it, triggered by something specific we recognize in ourselves. His example is Coco. Miguel hides his guitar, watches de la Cruz, aching to belong to something that won't claim him back—and nobody has died yet.
What does the character feel in this moment? Is it a feeling you’ve had, too? Picking something big, and yes, recognizable, can be helpful here. Rejection, shame, joy, etc.
A big point for writers and filmmakers is that the emotional truth has to live in what a character does, not what they say about it, which is where blocking, behavior (not exposition), and a well-composed shot do the work that dialogue can't.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Credit: New Line Cinema
Understanding
Recognition is pretty fragile. The instant a character makes a choice we can't follow, audiences will ask, "Why would they do that?" And that pulls us out of feeling and into judgment. Williamson's fix is counterintuitive.
We don't need to agree. We just need to trace the internal logic and understand why. Walter White turns down the money. Peter Parker lets the robber walk, then loses his uncle. When we can see where a choice is heading before the character does, that's dramatic irony doing the emotional lifting.
Again, understanding doesn’t mean we endorse a character. Good villains, for example, should be built so that we can see their motivation. But we probably aren’t on their side, right? Still, we can understand what would lead them to villainy.
"You don't have to make us agree with your character,” Williamson says. “Agreeability doesn't mean connection. You just have to make us understand."
Affection
This is a fairly simple one that quietly sinks otherwise strong characters. Do we feel affection for the character? We have to want to spend time with this person. This is different from admiring them. Williamson breaks likability into a few sources, including humor, sincerity, a certain energy, and one he keeps returning to, a sense of safety.
The video’s example is Samwise Gamgee. He’s a loyal Hobbit with cooking pots packed for a journey toward Mount Doom. He just really loves potatoes. He provides light and humor in the story's darkest stretches. So when he’s sad, I’m sad. I’ll cry through most of Return of the King to this day.
For filmmakers, the takeaway is casting-and-performance adjacent, but it starts on the page. Give the character a quality only they could have. Learn more about building characters people actually want to follow.
Investment
If we care about a character, good or bad, see their goals and what they’re doing to reach them, then chances are we’re invested in that journey. Investment is the difference between watching a character want something and feeling gutted when they don't get it. Their want should drive the whole arc.
The video’s example is Rocky, whom most people misremember as the underdog who wins. But Rocky loses that fight. It doesn't matter, because the film spent 90 minutes making us want one specific thing with him. He can go the distance, and he can stay on his feet. When a desire is rooted deep enough in who someone is, that investment means we feel every low alongside the character. Cue tears, because next is…
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Grief
The payoff of the first four is real grief for an imaginary person.
The last time I really cried for media, and I mean sobbed, was during the finale of Hacks. It’s a comedy, sure, but they did some things in those final episodes that really had me concerned about how things were going to end for these comedians.
Through the whole series, but especially in the last season, the writers kept finding ways to tell us that this show was a love story between two unlikely friends who were about to be devastatingly ripped apart in a darkly comedic way that gave both agency and closure. And then they hit us with that last-chance twist—the power of love and of jokes. Keeping them together.
Then that song that plays over the end credits? Masterful. Catharsis.
You can probably think of your own examples. And these land not because the scene was written to be sad, but because, by then, the character had stopped being fictional to us. Grief is the sum of recognition, understanding, affection, and investment, all cashed in.
So remember these elements the next time you’re building a character.
