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The Red Papers:
Is this the end for Batman and Robin? Tune in next week
The willing
suspension of
disbelief
Stories also have an inbuilt method of making you pay attention. When
watching a PowerPoint presentation or similar sequence of slides, it is easy
for your attention to wander, to drift off, even for you to nod off. Not so
with story. The master practitioners of the art worked out thousands of
years ago how to prevent that, how to keep the viewer glued and totally
attentive. There are many tricks in the storyteller’s arsenal, but the chief
one is curiosity. All stories are, at heart, founded on a simple premise:
tantalize the reader. Ask questions and don’t answer them, or at least
not immediately. If one phrase could sum up story it would be “delayed
gratification.” When you arouse curiosity you put the recipient in a state of
tension, with an overwhelming need to have the answer. When it arrives it
triggers a little burst of pleasure. By that time, of course, the skillful taleteller
will have set up other questions. The trick is simple but powerful.
Ask questions, delay the answer, and in the meantime ask more so that the
reader is kept riveted to the final curtain.
Thanks for the memory
Story is persuasive, immersive, pleasurable, gripping, and somehow
manages to bypass our skeptical defenses.
That’s already a pretty good tally. But there is one other vital area in which
it outperforms a more analytic approach to presenting information. It’s
more memorable. Professional memory artists have long known this.
When faced with the daunting task of memorizing a list of random facts
and figures, they generally turn the facts into a narrative such as a mental
journey to a familiar place. This might be to their local high street, in
which they visualize the journey with the facts to be remembered placed
at specific locations along the journey. Science has shown that facts
remembered in isolation get lost in the memory whereas those contained
within a narrative framework are more readily remembered and more easily
retrieved. One reason for this is the abundance of sensory detail. Details,
it seems, are the handles that the mind uses to retrieve memories, and the
more handles there are, the easier they are to grasp. A mass of detail is one
method that storytellers use to create their fictional worlds. And heartfelt
emotion is the tool that the storytellers use to fix their stories in memory.