Science of Story Building: Create Space for Your Audience

We remember great stories by their rich details: a pair of sparkly red shoes, a jagged scar, a dress of a particular shade of blue topped with a white pinafore, a wardrobe whose back fades away to reveal a new world to explore.

But the most compelling stories force us — intellectually — to do some of the work. Filmmaker Andrew Stanton said in his iconic 2012 TED talk that what draws people into a story is the “the well-organized absence of information.”¹

There are two ways that this absence or empty space plays a role in better storytelling. The first is that we engage our audiences by leaving critical details out of the story that force them to put things together themselves. Andrew Stanton describes this as giving your audience 2 and 2, rather than 4. This concept is referred to in psychology research as “causal bridging inference.”² There is research to suggest that piecing information together in this way provides readers with deeper insights and a stronger memory for what they’ve learned.³

The second is that leaving some details out of a story allows us to insert our own experiences and interpretation. Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov experimented with this idea in 1918 by cutting together film of an expressionless man, a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a beautiful woman. Our brains combine the two images and add a layer of interpretation: hunger, sadness, lust, though Kuleshov uses the same footage of the actor throughout.⁴ The Kuleshov Effect is still used by filmmakers to create deeper emotional responses to film.

Painter Frida Khalo used this tool to make images of herself compelling by remaining expressionless in virtually every photo and self-portrait, knowing that viewers would layer in their own interpretation of what she was feeling. In the exhibit “Mirror, Mirror” at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art, the exhibit’s curators reflected on this:

“By revealing little emotion in these, or her own, compositions, Khalo understood the notion of “transference” (she was familiar with psychoanalysis). We, the viewers, transfer on to her implacable countenance — what Surrealist André Breton described as ‘a ribbon wrapped around a bomb’ — what we see within ourselves. Kahlo evoked a powerful, shared human condition, inclusive of desire, suffering, imagination, and loneliness; she made it palatable, even valiant.”⁵

More recently, we witnessed this phenomenon in relation to two viral images, one heartbreaking, the other amusing.

When Aylan Kurdi’s tiny body washed ashore in September 2015, the world’s attention shifted to the Syrian refugee crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean. A now-famous image of Aylan’s death mobilized the world’s hearts. As a result, Google searches on the Syrian crisis spiked and donations to organizations serving Syrian refugees increased. Three other children drowned in the same crossing, but it is Aylan’s image that is burned into our minds.

What makes this particular image so moving? Paul Slovic, director of the Decision Institute at the University of Oregon, and Scott Slovic, professor of literature at the University of Idaho, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “The Arithmetic of Compassion”⁶ in which they explains why we so often check out of stories that overwhelm us, but are moved by the stories of individuals.

Our compassion fades when we we try to stretch it beyond just one person. One paper by Slovic and his colleagues shows that potential donors are less like to give to a cause when they are confronted with a story of two people rather than one.⁷

But maybe it’s not just Aylan’s solitude that moves us. In the two most shared images, the little boy’s face is hidden. He’s dressed as any child might be, in a t-shirt and shorts. And it is painfully easy to imagine a child we love in his place. It’s possible that his story was so compelling because we saw our own experience in his. If that’s true, it is certainly possible that his obscured face and simple clothes make it much easier for us to see him as a child who is familiar to us. Maybe this closes the distance between us or makes us more curious about his life and the crisis that forced his family to flee.

In March 2017, Robert E. Kelly’s live interview with the BBC was interrupted by his two small children appearing in the background. Also known as BBC Dad, in a video that quickly gained millions of views, we see Kelly futilely attempting to shoo them away as he comments on South Korean politics.

“My real life punched through the fake cover I had created on television,” he said in a news conference after the interview went viral.⁸ “This is the kind of thing a lot of working parents can relate to.” We attribute this virality to not only the sheer adorableness of the Kelly children, and the juxtaposition of the reaction of their parents, but because when we watch the clip we can identify with it whether we have children and appear on the BBC or not.

What can we take from these stories? It’s possible that the most important character in any story is the audience. The best stories have space for us to insert what’s familiar to us, or to make our own connections. Just as we remember our own challenging moments as parents when we watch the Kelly video, or connect our personal experience to abstract notions of family or school when we encounter them in a story, leaving space in your story for the audience to insert detail from their own memory will make your story feel more relevant to them.

Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez used an empty space to great effect during her address at the March for Our Lives in Washington last March. During her address, she stopped abruptly and stood in silence. When she resumed speaking, she said, “Since the time that I came out here, it has been 6 minutes and 20 seconds,” Gonzalez said, breaking her silence. “The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”⁹

Her approach to storytelling — leaving us the space to imagine the scene for ourselves, after she had just listed the names of the victims — forced us to imagine a horror we could not have understood simply from a description.

In other situations, it’s equally important to give audiences rich details in our stories. Including details allows our audience to imagine and empathize with the characters, and create vivid images in their own minds. Providing those details as plot elements may also create a path to rewriting implicit biases or prejudice, and to replace what a reader might assume with details that rewrite their presumptions.

Being deliberate about a story’s empty spaces (where the reader or listener inserts what is familiar to them) and full spaces (where rich detail overwrites bias and prejudice) may be story’s most underused advantage. For example, when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation took on the social determinants of health, finding stories that helped policymakers understand this complex and abstract issue became critical. Research showed that conservative policy makers saw health as primarily a result of personal responsibility and decision-making. But research also showed that poor health is a result of complex social factors and systems that include education, transportation and availability of fresh fruits and vegetables.¹⁰

So the RWJF communication team worked to identify stories in which people worked against infrastructure to improve their own health. One story of a young man named Kenyon¹¹ showed his decision to improve his health by joining a running club and eating healthier. By showing the context of his decisions, this story fills the empty space of the reader’s understanding of the issue by providing details that may have been missing from their previous understanding of health. When they watch his story, they have an opportunity to connect with a young man who is deciding how to use his last five dollars to feed himself a nutritious meal, and his commitment to running in a neighborhood that is hardly conducive to physical activity.

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Citations:

1. Stanton, A. [Ted]. (2012, Febuary). The Clues to a Great Story [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story
2. Kim, S. I. (1999). Causal bridging inference: A cause of story interestingness. British Journal of Psychology, 90(1), 57–71.
3. Sedivy, J. (2013, March 15). Why Less is More When it Comes to Movie Special Effects. Retrieved from http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/03/15/why-less-is-more-when-it-comes-to-movie-special-effects/#.WuoJqWaZPyi
4. [esteticaCC]. (2009, March 10). Title of video [Kuleshov Effect / Effetto Kuleshov]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc
5. Mirror, Mirror … Portraits of Frida Kahlo. (2017). Retrieved May 02, 2018, from http://harn.ufl.edu/fridakahlo
6. Slovic, S., & Slovic, P. (2017, December 21). Opinion | The Arithmetic of Compassion. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/opinion/the-arithmetic-of-compassion.html
7. Slovic, P. (2010). If I look at the mass i will never act: Psychic numbing and genocide
8. Mullany, G., & Rich, M. (2017, March 15). ‘BBC Dad’ on Going Viral: ‘This Is Now the First Line in My Obituary’. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/world/asia/bbc-interview-kids-professor-robert-kelly.html?mcubz=0
9. Lopez, G. (2018, March 24). Watch: Emma Gonzalez’s incredible moment of silence at March for Our Lives. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/24/17159916/march-for-our-lives-emma-gonzalez-silence
10. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Carger, E., & Westin, D. (2018, March 26). A New Way to Talk about the Social Determinants of Health. Retrieved from https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2010/01/a-new-way-to-talk-about-the-social-determinants-of-health.html
11. [Commisiononhealth]. (2009, June 15). Meet Kenyon McGriff [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue2TQ25hH2c