Screenwriting & Writing Advice — Part 3

Let Characters Make Stupid Decisions

One thing I want to emphasize is that characters don't always have to make the logical decision.

People do stupid things when they're scared.

Panic can make an intelligent person do something completely irrational. You can have a character who is normally extremely intelligent suddenly make an awful decision because they're frightened, desperate, angry, or overwhelmed.

That's realistic.

Your character can make the correct decision in one scene and then make an absolutely terrible decision in the next because the circumstances have changed.

Don't be afraid of that.

If your character is panicking, let them panic.

If they're terrified, let them make a decision they probably shouldn't make.

If they're in pain, let that pain interfere with their judgment.

That doesn't mean you should make an intelligent character stupid for the sake of the plot. Their bad decision should come from their emotional state.

Your Villain Can Understand Their Victim

This can also work in reverse.

If your villain is intelligent, he might understand that his victim is going to panic.

He may know that fear will make her behave irrationally.

That gives him something to exploit.

However, this is one of those areas where you should be careful about how specifically you portray real-world methods. You can establish that a villain understands someone's vulnerabilities without turning the screenplay into an instruction manual for hurting people.

The important part is the character psychology.

The villain knows how she reacts under pressure.

She doesn't behave perfectly.

He knows that.

That creates another layer of conflict.

Watch True Crime to Understand Human Behavior

If you're trying to write villains, victims, or complicated situations, true crime can be useful—not because you should copy crimes, but because real cases show how unpredictable people can be.

Shows such as Evil Lives Here can be useful for studying how people describe warning signs, relationships, manipulation, fear, and the behavior they noticed before realizing something was seriously wrong.

True-crime interviews can also show something fiction sometimes gets wrong:

People don't always recognize that someone is dangerous.

A person can seem perfectly normal to their family.

They can be charming.

They can be helpful.

They can have friends.

They can have children who genuinely love them.

Then something happens that completely changes how those people understand them.

That can be powerful material for character writing.

A Villain's Family Doesn't Have to Know They're Evil

Imagine a character whose father is secretly a murderer.

His daughter doesn't know.

She thinks he's a good father.

He might bring people into the house and tell her they're friends.

She might spend time with them.

She might even become extremely close to one of them.

Then one day, he kills that person.

Suddenly, the daughter has to reconcile two completely different versions of her father.

The person she thought was kind and loving is also capable of something horrific.

And she doesn't necessarily become loyal to him just because he's her father.

She might be terrified.

She might turn against him.

She might contact the police.

She might ask:

"What the hell did you do?"

That's an interesting family dynamic because love doesn't automatically override fear or morality.

You Can Make the Villain's Actions Personally Horrifying

Imagine the daughter spends an entire summer caring for a little girl.

They become extremely close.

The daughter sees this child almost like a younger sister or daughter.

Then her father kills the child.

That changes everything.

The daughter isn't simply learning that her father is a murderer.

She's learning that the person she trusted is capable of murdering someone she personally loved.

That's a much stronger emotional conflict.

It also gives the daughter a reason to act.

She isn't betraying her family for no reason.

She has just discovered something she cannot accept.

Break the Trope Instead of Following the Obvious Route

This is really the larger point:

Break the trope.

Don't automatically choose the easiest possible route.

If the obvious story would take five minutes to resolve, challenge yourself to find a more complicated version.

For example, if the villain is supposed to be caught immediately, ask:

How could he realistically avoid being caught for longer?

Not by inventing impossible police behavior.

Research how the police would actually respond.

Look up real procedures.

Look at government sources.

Look at police protocols.

Research the laws and jurisdiction involved.

Then figure out how your fictional character would have to maneuver around those circumstances.

That gives you a more complicated story without requiring the characters to suddenly become incompetent.

Research the Law Before Writing Police Scenes

If you're writing something involving police, don't just guess what the police would do.

Research it.

Different jurisdictions have different procedures.

If you're writing a story set in a particular state, look up that state's laws and government resources.

You can also use AI to help you locate information, but verify important legal details with reliable sources.

The goal isn't to make your villain magically smarter than every police officer.

The goal is to understand the system well enough to create believable obstacles.

Then your villain has to deal with those obstacles.

Eventually, he might get caught.

He might get arrested.

He might be killed in self-defense.

He might face consequences.

But the journey toward that outcome can still be complicated.

Give Your Characters Problems They Actually Have to Solve

Don't make the villain's plan:

"I'm evil, therefore I win."

Give him an actual problem.

Then make him solve it.

Then introduce another problem.

Then make your protagonist figure out how to survive it.

That's where the story becomes interesting.

The conflict doesn't have to be one giant confrontation.

It can be a series of increasingly difficult situations.

The protagonist should have to maneuver.

The villain should have to maneuver.

Both characters should have to react to what the other one does.

That creates movement.

Don't Save Every Climactic Moment for the Ending

This is another point I want to emphasize.

Yes, your story should have a major climax.

But don't save every exciting sequence for the final act.

You can have a huge, stressful, high-intensity sequence in the middle.

Then the story continues.

Think of it like an action movie.

You can have an enormous action sequence early in the film, another one in the middle, and another one toward the end.

The same principle works in thrillers and horror.

A scene can feel like:

"This is the climax!"

while actually being the midpoint.

That's much more interesting than spending most of the movie slowly building toward one confrontation and refusing to let anything equally intense happen beforehand.

Break a Few Film Rules

You don't have to break every storytelling convention.

In fact, you probably shouldn't.

Instead, deliberately choose a few rules or tropes to break.

For example, you could have one character follow the expected formula while another character completely breaks it.

That contrast can make the unusual character stand out.

You don't have to make every character weird.

One character behaving differently can be enough.

Make a Character Become Unrelatable

Here's another way to do that.

Imagine a character starts out as extremely relatable.

The audience understands her.

They understand her problems.

They understand why she makes certain decisions.

Then, gradually, something changes.

She starts developing beliefs that the audience doesn't understand.

Her thought process becomes strange.

Her behavior becomes increasingly unusual.

Eventually, the audience realizes:

"I don't understand this person anymore."

That can be extremely effective in horror.

You can make the character increasingly uncanny.

Maybe she joins a cult.

Maybe she develops a strange belief system.

Maybe she starts behaving according to a completely different set of values.

Maybe she's experiencing an emotion nobody else understands.

The other characters can even acknowledge it.

They might say:

"I don't know what's happening to you anymore."

Or:

"You're acting completely different."

It doesn't have to become a huge argument.

Sometimes simply acknowledging that the person has become strange is enough.

You Can Use Unrelatability in Any Genre

This isn't exclusive to horror.

A science-fiction character from another planet might experience emotions humans don't understand.

An alien might understand happiness, but experience it completely differently.

A character could develop an emotion that nobody around them has ever experienced.

That creates intrigue.

The audience doesn't necessarily know what the character is feeling because you don't necessarily know either.

You're discovering something new alongside the audience.

That's a good way to create mystery.

Horror Can Go Even Further

If you're specifically writing horror, you don't necessarily need to make your character relatable at all.

You can make them completely uncanny.

Something that looks human but doesn't behave like a human.

Something whose motivations can't be understood.

Something that doesn't follow ordinary emotional logic.

That's where horror can become particularly effective.

The audience isn't thinking:

"I understand this character."

They're thinking:

"What the hell is this thing?"

That uncertainty creates fear.

Your Villain Doesn't Need a Tragic Backstory

This is another trope I'd like to break.

Not every villain needs a tragic childhood.

Not every villain needs to explain:

"I became evil because someone hurt me."

Sometimes the villain is simply dangerous.

Sometimes you don't know where they came from.

Sometimes you don't know why they behave this way.

Sometimes the lack of explanation is what makes them frightening.

Lovecraftian entities are a good example of this kind of approach.

You don't necessarily need to understand the creature's entire history.

You just know that it's there.

It's powerful.

It's dangerous.

And you don't understand it.

Mystery can be more frightening than explanation.

You Can Make an Evil Character Evil on Purpose

A villain can also have been deliberately created to be evil.

Maybe someone raised them that way.

Maybe someone engineered them.

Maybe they were specifically created for destruction.

Maybe they were fashioned into something dangerous.

You don't always need:

"They were abused, therefore they're evil."

That's one explanation.

It isn't the only explanation.

Bring the Villain's Creator Into the Story

Another way to break the formula is to introduce the person who caused the villain to become who they are.

That person could be:

• someone the villain fears

• someone the villain hates

• someone the villain wants revenge against

• someone the villain still feels attached to

• someone the villain is forced to confront

And here's the interesting part:

The villain doesn't necessarily have to defeat them.

Your protagonist might become involved in that conflict.

The villain might be hunting the person who created them.

The protagonist might accidentally get caught between them.

Or the villain might inadvertently protect the protagonist because they're more interested in getting revenge against the person who made them.

Now you have a situation where the traditional villain hierarchy becomes complicated.

The person who created the villain might actually be worse.

The villain might still be terrible.

The protagonist might still be in danger.

But suddenly the story isn't:

"Villain versus hero."

It's a much messier conflict involving several competing motivations.

Tropes Are Tools, Not Laws

Ultimately, that's what I mean by trope aversion.

You're not breaking a trope simply to be different.

You're taking a familiar structure and changing one important element.

You can follow the formula when it works.

You can break it when breaking it makes the story more interesting.

You can even have one character follow the expected pattern while another completely subverts it.

The important thing is that the change has to work within the story.

Don't randomly make something different just so you can say you broke a trope.

Make the audience think:

"I expected this to go one way, but this actually makes more sense."

That's the sweet spot.

Break the formula intelligently, complicate the conflict, and let your characters behave according to who they actually are rather than whatever the genre says they're supposed to be. (scriptschool.org)