These thematic associations, once found and identified are the symbols that you can use to create pattern, a thematic rhythm, running through your story.

This pattern of visual and aural symbols provide a subliminal reinforcement of the message – as in a dream. 

They also enable you to provide your story-world with a depth, within which your audience can discover recognisable clues - this gives your audience intellectual satisfaction and binds them to the dream - it engages them.

7. What does your character do? 

That is, what are they doing during your story?

Identifying this ‘doing’ can be a good way to find your way into the story, as a ‘real’ place to inhabit, and it gives you objects and actions to plunder symbols from.

In my own writing for Harder I have had characters ‘doing’ the following:

The Mother - Cooks with Iron Skillet - Steak for her Man

The Man - Eats - Steak

The Son - Warms Frozen Pizza -  Doesn’t eat - Eats Cold Pizza - Kills Man with Skillet

I also used the same process for a subsequent film, Halfway.

The Hunter - Stalks - Rabbits - Guts Rabbits - Attracts flies

The Body - Decomposes - Attracts flies

It is also essential to give your actors something, in every moment, to do.

David Mamet (p.13, 1998) cites an un-sourced quotation by Bertolt Brecht:

‘Nothing in life is as interesting as a man trying to get a knot out of his shoelace.’

The person with attention directed outward becomes various and provocative.”

No-one 'does' nothing, in every moment we are doing, we are in a state of ‘being’ - 

You have to identify what the nature of that 'being' is, 

in order to bring your character to life...give your character/actor a life to ‘live’.