By Tom Vaughan in Emotion — Sep 16, 2025

How do you want the audience to feel at the end?

"I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

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“Begin with the end in mind” is the second of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I’ve discussed this approach before from a business standpoint, and knowing what would define success for your project before you start.

This week, however, I want to focus on what this means regarding the emotional impact of your screenplay.

The subject came up twice in the last few days: first with a member of Story and Plot Pro Community, and next with the screenwriter of a project I am producing.

Both screenplays have high-impact scenes in the third act.

These are the kinds of scenes that exhilarate, linger, and define a movie, and every film should have them.

I don’t start outlining until I know I have at least five of them.

These scenes, in particular, were even more impactful because they are how each story ends.

My advice to both authors was the same:

“This is what you are working towards. This scene. This moment. Write the whole screenplay with the goal of making sure the audience feels the full impact of this scene right here.”

These scenes highlight a key tool that will help you in development:

Know exactly how you want the audience to feel at the end.

What emotion do you want the audience to leave the theatre with?

Make that decision.

And work towards that.

Stories are about emotion.

Stories, and art in general, are emotional delivery systems. In its simplest terms, movies are:

Great characters.
Great scenes.
The order in which we put them in.

The goal of all this is to make the audience FEEL something. Like all entertainment, that is our product. The audience pays us money, directly or indirectly, and, in exchange, we make them feel something.

The deeper that feeling, the better. The more they need that feeling, the better.

One of my favorite lines about the movies that has nothing to do with the movies is this:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- Maya Angelou

Often, the feeling we remember most is the one we walk away with.

Here is a fraction of the movies with endings that stuck with me.

Chinatown
The Rapture
You’ve Got Mail
The Shawshank Redemption
Seven
Ratatouille
Warrior
Moonlight
Avengers: Endgame
Uncut Gems
Barbie
Fresh Kills

There are even movies that I didn’t much care for, yet I find the endings terrific and emotional, and I’ve never forgotten them.

Escape From L.A.
La La Land

And a movie I loved, yet I am unable to express my affection for it without noting that I hated the ending!

The Mist

The point of all this:

The ending matters.

And when we see the emotional experience of the final few moments as a goal we’re trying to achieve, it gives us a target to aim for.

Like the story itself, of which the ending is the fulfillment, it gives us a true north. It gives us a means to determine what helps us, what undermines us, and what may be entirely unnecessary.

A story has an ending.

And writing that narrative without knowing its ending is taking a knife to a gunfight.

You might win, and you’ll brag about it if you do, but your chances aren’t good.

When you’re writing, you are either:

Trying to find the story.
Telling the story.

My advice is to always skip that first step and go to the second.

It saves you time and energy, and it’s a lot more fun.

The difference really is simply a decision on your part: what story are you telling?

That decision can come easily, or it may be more challenging, but writing your way through it, hoping you will figure it out, is the much tougher approach.

Personally, I tend to know the plot mechanics of the ending before I write, but it is not the plot mechanics that I am necessarily talking about here.

What you really need to know about the ending is how the character transforms, what choices they make, and how you want it to make us feel.

This is how to think of the ending first.

Only then do the plot mechanics have any meaning, because only then do you know what the plot mechanics aim to achieve.

Just figuring out a resolution that makes logical sense is not “the ending” you are looking for.

It is not about the plot.

In The Sixth Sense, the plot resolves when the boy figures out what the dead people want. But that is not the end of the story.

The two scenes that move us — the scenes that make it all worth it — are:

The boy finally entrusts his mother with what he is dealing with.
Bruce Willis realizes he is one of the dead people the boy needs to help.

In Barbie, the plot resolves when Barbieland comes together.

And that’s fine. The plot mechanics finish out that narrative. But the moment that genuinely moves us, the emotion with which we leave the theatre…

Is Barbie choosing to forgo perfection and become human.

Of course, the plot and the story can conclude at the same time!

This is always preferable, and the unity of it seems to move us that much more when we make it work.

It is the “Killer Ending” that Michael Arndt famously talks about in his video.

But the story and the plot are not the same thing.

Know how you want the audience to feel.

Define the transformation. This is your story.

Then determine how you want the audience to feel about it.

There are two paths there.

Go straight to the emotion.

Is this transformation tragic? Is it hopeful? Inspirational? Exhilarating? Romantic? Condemnatory?

If you know the answer, you start looking for the execution that will bring this about. It is almost always going to be in the sacrifice and the resolution.

How do you illustrate that? What choice can they make? How do you make it great drama?

But sometimes…

You already have an idea for an incredible scene.

Just the idea of the scene moves you.

It accesses emotion so strongly and in such a surprising way that it demands you put it in there. When you realize what you have, you tweak all previous emotions towards that.

THE SIXTH SENSE, for example, did not have Bruce Willis’ eventual fate in the first six drafts of the script.

Once that was discovered, the screenplay was built around that. (The trick, of course, is not to have to write six drafts to get there!)

But if you discover a scene that opens the floodgates to emotion and meaning, embrace it.

Once you figure it out, put your foot on the gas.

All roads lead to that.

What can you implant that makes that moment stronger? How do you make it more meaningful? How do you make the choice more grueling? How do you expand the emotional distance between the beginning and the end to make it more epic and surprising?

In short, how do you make it more emotional?

From the project I am producing:

One of the great scenes is when the protagonist discovers his boss is a terrible guy.

How do we make that land more? By doubling down on the protagonist’s admiration for him earlier.

This is what I mean by “increasing the emotional distance.”

Now his boss is a mentor, a father figure. A hero.

The realization of him not being worth the admiration now hits harder.

But the ending must still fit the story.

That is the whole point of the ending!

Why I love THE RAPTURE and hate the ending of THE MIST.

They both have the same ending. The protagonist decides they must kill someone they love.

But for THE RAPTURE, it is the inevitable, yet totally surprising, conclusion to that story. All the choices and emotions lead to that moment.

But THE MIST feels tacked on. It’s certainly grueling and emotional, but it feels like the work of the storyteller rather than the characters.

But why? The ending makes logical sense.

I suspect it is because it never felt as if it was telling that story. It’s as if it were telling one story, but threw the ending of another story on top of it. It felt disjointed, and, because of that, unsatisfying.

We changed the ending to BACK UP.

Earlier this year, when I embarked on rewriting a 20-year-old screenplay of mine, I realized the story I was telling did not fit well with the concept.

This isn’t shocking—I wasn’t particularly story-focused back then. (I can’t imagine such a thing happening now.)

So I re-envisioned the protagonist’s emotional journey. When I did, it was clear the old ending didn’t fit.

In the first version, he spends the whole movie looking for a killer and discovers it’s someone close to him. He arrests this person.

But the new story is about him realizing his own culpability in the crime.

So this story requires him to not arrest that person! He lets them go!

The heartbreak remains, the pain remains, but the choice is different, and hopefully, this choice increases the heartbreak because it dramatizes how much he really does blame himself.

One of our jobs in the rewrite is to make that moment more emotional.

It is the final choice of the movie, and we want to give it as much impact as possible.

I don’t think we’re doing it yet, so it’s my focus for the next revision.