Guest Column: “Rescuing a Cat or Killing Me Softly”

Guest column from screenwriter Tom Benedek (Cocoon) who co-founded Screenwriting Master Class:

I love our cat. I resisted adding another animal to the household and then she came to the house and hung out with the dog for 30 seconds. Mimi is part of the family now. To me, saving the cat does mean something important. Taking how we need to pull the reader into our characters and story, I will refer to the great song, Killing Me Softly. Whenever I hear it, I think about the depth of emotion to pull people into a story — that magic when the emotions of a character’s fundamentals reach the reader or audience.

Here are the lyrics that always talk to me about what happens when readers are truly hooked:

I heard he sang a good song
I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him
To listen for a while
And there he was this young boy
A stranger to my eyes

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

I felt all flushed with fever
Embarrassed by the crowd
I felt he found my letters
And read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish
But he just kept right on

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

“I felt he found my letters and read each one to loud” speaks so well to that chord of recognition we always seek to evoke for our characters in our scripts — A true sharing of emotions from our words to reader. Every time I listen to that song, I think about that transfer of emotions, the magical empathy.

In the first pages of our scripts, we do our best to connect the reader, to get them to turn the pages, to connect with characters and story. We want them to feel a familiarity, an intimate connection of mind and heart. If we offer truth and empathy through our characters, if we demonstrate their sensibilities thoroughly and compassionately as we introduce them, we have the opportunity to kill them (in a great way) with our script.

I will be running a one week online class starting February 1: The First 15 Pages. It’s critical to grab the reader in your script’s first set of pages. That’s the focus of this course providing strategies and tips how to do precisely that.

For more information, go here.

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