St. Louis Arc by Fernando De la Torre

You need to invert your narrative arc

The old way of structuring stories is rendered useless by modern media consumption. You now need to start with the best bits to bait the viewer, and end with some good bits to hook them into continuing onwards.

When we used to make TV (and content for almost every other medium) we would create a build up like this:

A classic narrative arc.

I hate to break it to you, but this seems only to work when a viewer/reader/consumer of your content is guaranteed to go through the whole thing, as in someone in a cinema, someone set on reading every article in the newspaper and, in some sense, someone watching television. This is hardly ever the case in modern media consumption.

First impressions matter

If you make video for YouTube or articles on Medium, you need to first convince people to watch your video. The first 2 seconds of your video are the most important. These seconds are what gets a YouTube viewer excited and focussed, and they are what gets someone seeing a video in their Facebook feed not to scroll on.

The inverse narrative arc works like this:

1. You get people to watch your video or read your post; you make them interested and excited.

2. You tell them what you think they need to know.

3. You get them to crave more; this is where they continue their path through your content, subscribe, etc.