How to Hook Your Audience with the World of Your Story

The world of a movie or TV show is more than just where it takes place. It's part of the reason your reader gets invested in your script in the first place. Here's how to grab them with it.

Welcome to my Weekly Email Newsletter! Every week, I do a deep dive into an aspect of the craft and business of screenwriting from a (former) literary manager’s perspective.

Today’s post is for subscribers only. If you’re new here, I recommend checking out the free posts at this link to sample what this newsletter has to offer.

Otherwise, keep reading for my insights on how to leverage the world of your story.

---

Back in the Golden Age of Film, literally the only thing Americans had to do for fun was go to the movies every week.

Capturing an audience’s attention these days¹ is a lot harder.

Movies and TV shows have so much more to compete with than ever before.

Cinema-quality video games, social media algorithms, multi-hour podcasts, online shopping, hell, even books (they’re back!) are all vying for the public’s attention.

Streamers, studios, networks, cable companies, and theaters are all keenly aware of this problem. So their demands for how entertaining, how attention-grabbing, how noisy a script needs to be are going up.

Plus, the executives themselves who are supposed to be reading and buying scripts are all equally distracted by the aforementioned emails, social media algorithms, etc.

Even if you win the lottery and your show gets made and distributed, it then needs to compete with the thousands of other options available on streaming, which audiences can scroll through endlessly with the click of a button.

And let’s be real: 99% of the time they’re just going to rewatch The Office. Again.²

What’s a writer to do?

You need to have a unique, attention-grabbing concept.

You need to execute it with a plot question that gets your audience invested from the beginning and holds their interest until the very end.

You need to hook them from the first moment.

As a literary manager, I’ve read thousands of scripts over the course of my decades-long career. Most failed to get me on board by the end of the first act. But a select few actually managed to pull me in and capture my attention. Those are the writers I signed and took out to introduce to the rest of the industry. Those are the writers I staffed on TV shows and got hired for Open Writing Assignments.

Some of those pilots were sold, and a few of those scripts were made into movies.³

Now as a writer and script consultant, I spend my time breaking down successful scripts in order to figure out what works and why.

Three components pull a reader into your script from the first page: