How to hook a teenage audience and keep them watching
Ten screenwriting tips
By Ian Masters
As screenwriters, how can we persuade a teenage audience to switch off their quick hit, 15-second TikToks, and concentrate on one long-form movie or TV show?
During the various lockdowns of the past two years, I’ve had the experience of watching my teen daughter consume all manner of content. I’ve gained a few insights into the TikTok generation and their apparent attention deficit – which has got me thinking about how we, as long-form storytellers, need to embrace different screenwriting techniques to compete with “always on” digital intrusions and distractions.
These are not necessarily new lessons, but rather screenwriting principles that have been around for ages – but now need to be religiously enforced more than ever before.
I’ll start by stressing one thing: my 13 year-old daughter is able to consume long-form TV content. It’s not that TikTok has made her incapable by diminishing her attention span to a few seconds. She’s binge-watched all of Superstore, Brooklyn 99, and even Criminal Minds (she wants to be a homicide detective when she grows up). She sat enrapt in the company of Enola Holmes. She hoovered up all seven episodes of The Queen’s Gambit in one sitting. But she didn’t like Winx Saga at all, or other projects which target her demographic, if they fail that all-important test: is there enough in the story to hold her attention and stop her from switching back to TikTok?
Here are the ten screenwriting lessons I learned watching my daughter watch.
World-building won’t hook them
World-building in sci-fi and fantasy shows isn’t as important as you’d think. It’s not about how realistic your story worlds are either – teenagers are perfectly happy to immerse themselves into the block reality of Minecraft over jaw-dropping, more lavishly-designed 3D games. Setting the scene, the extent and rules of the world, and the character map isn’t as important as getting the smallest unit of story moving quickly.
The teenage audience doesn’t necessarily care in the first moments where they are: it could be a superstore, the 60s chess world, or an anime of a volleyball team in Tokyo. Don’t get bogged down in world building on page one. Get that story moving.
They might be expressed in a different way, but teenagers are on the money when it comes to spotting story conventions and patterns.
Don’t serve them sloppy seconds
Teenagers today are much more film- and media-literate than we were at that age (well, certainly much more than I was).
They devour YouTube channels – and TikToks – about television shows, films and filmmaking techniques and have an inbuilt knowledge of all the things we as screenwriters seem to agonise about – archetypes, the hero’s journey, structure. They might be expressed in a different way, but teenagers are on the money when it comes to spotting story conventions and patterns. They’ll pull apart every cliche, every tired structural trope or lazy character reversal in your writing.
So don’t expect the TikTok generation to be wowed by sloppy story seconds. They want you to serve them something fresh, exciting and decidedly delicious.
Create a character dilemma on page one
The competition for the attention of a teenage viewer takes place in the first fifteen seconds of your movie or TV show.
It means that there has to be a puzzle, or a conflict or dilemma for an interesting character from the get go. (Even with ensemble casts). We don’t need to know anything about the character or their world, other than what they need to do to navigate this first dilemma or conflict. It’s about establishing that initial story momentum.
Check out for example the first scene of Superstore: we’re introduced to a character facing an immediate choice – buy the $8 ring or the $10 one. We know he’s going to propose, and his reaction to the choice sets up his character and gives a binary outcome (with a witty response from the main character) -- and plants the episode expectation of a pay-off of the proposal itself. We want to keep watching to see how this will play out. But we know nothing about either character here except what they express in that scene – and how.
My daughter can invest in a character immediately and wholeheartedly, without knowing anything else about them, if that character faces an immediate problem or choice.
On one condition…
Introduce a character worthy of their time
You need to set up a single character on page one who:
Deserves our attention.
Has an explicit, immediate goal or choice (it could be a short-term, inconsequential goal, not the overall story goal, but it must be clear what that goal is).
Has a goal that is binary: success or failure, with no grey areas.
Immediately finds themselves in an impossible dilemma or conflict about achieving that goal.
I would strongly suggest you not interrupt that narrative momentum and cut away to parallel plots or characters too soon.
Don’t baffle them with parallel plots
This initial character dilemma or conflict ideally sets up an immediate consequence for the character to grapple with in the next scene. If you want to keep a teenage audience hooked, I would strongly suggest you not interrupt that narrative momentum and cut away to parallel plots or characters too soon.
Make it funny or subversive
Tonally, the first scenes should have characters who are either funny, quirky, subversive or transgressive in some way.
Expose the character’s morality
What I’ve noticed with my daughter is that she’ll make snap decisions on whether a character is worthy of her attention based on whether she sees them to hold certain qualities in the first moments of a story. So that first problem must reveal something crucial about the character’s morality, to answer the question: is there something deserving about them, or their worldview, no matter how flawed they might be on the surface?
Ditch the obvious character arc
I’m not convinced teenage audiences are as wedded to the idea of character arcs and change as the guru storytellers say we should be. The notion of characters having an arc has been lampooned on YouTube channels and TikTok to the point that the teenagers can sniff in the first ten pages of a movie where a character is supposed to land in the third act. This is particularly true for the big character reversals – the bad boy with a good heart, the snobby girl who’ll get her comeuppance, the BFF who only has her own interests at heart.
Greater importance should be placed on surprising the audience with engaging character moments, rather than building grand and obvious character arcs.
Cold openers leave them cold
Big action sequences at the beginning of a movie are less engaging than setting up a meaningful character moment, so maybe lose that James Bond-inspired opener. The same holds true for the hackneyed fashion forward opener – coming in somewhere around the end of the Act Two mark and flashing back. The teenager yawns, and is back to TikTok. Unless that opening scene shows why a character deserves our attention, action by itself isn't enough to hold the audience’s attention.
Pull the rug from their feet
One key narrative device on TikTok videos is the rug pull – the moment when a video, which seems to be going in one direction, flips to the opposite. I listen to my daughter watching TikTok videos and she howls out loud when that rug pull goes down. This is the hook of most TikTok videos – a sudden switch in tone, action, or dialogue, that creates what I’ll call here the “jump-laugh”, which performs a similar but opposite function to the horror movie jump-scare.
The key takeaways: if you want to get a teenage audience invested in your story, there’s no need to expend pages on setting up big worlds, action sequences, or confusing complexity in the character setup. On page one, you need to get straight into a character’s instantly identifiable problem, then build it from there.
And once you lock them into your story, they could be in for the duration of it.
Ian Masters
Ian Masters is an award-winning scriptwriter who has worked across Africa and Asia for the past two decades. He is now based out of the UK with his writing partner, Jon Smith.
You can connect with Ian on LinkedIn, contact him through his agent or his website, and find out more about his work here.
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