This Doesn’t Make Sense!
Ambiguity moves your story forward
Hi friend,
How are you? I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.
In the spirit of the holiday, I’d like to thank you for stopping by and spending time reading my stories every week.
It’s not obvious. I get it.
Not only do you have other publications to choose from, but a million other things to do.
So, thanks again. It means a lot to me 🙏
Speaking about unobvious things, did you know they work great in storytelling?
Just think about movies where the first few scenes left you either scratching your head to figure out the WHY behind the protagonists’ motives, or you were led to believe a specific reason for their actions that on the surface didn’t make sense.
Either way, you find yourself on the wrong path.
Since a story is nothing but a string of events, you can keep your plot’s true root cause under cover and gradually reveal it, while letting your protagonists try and fail to figure it out.
For extra sizzle, sprinkle a decent dose of miscommunication, and you’ll have them spiral down even faster.
Why look at movies?
As the protagonist in your life story, you can easily relate.
Look at your past experiences, you’ll likely find incidents that left you clueless. You said to yourself, based on the little information you had, “This doesn’t make sense!”
Your storytelling mind then starts to come up with potential explanations that, in hindsight, were all wrong until the hidden reason finally made its grand entrance.
This is all part of our survival instincts as we’re all creatures of habit who always seek to maximize predictability to keep our lives running smoothly.
How can you use it in your stories?
Meet a nifty storytelling formula
In Media Res, the Latin for “in the middle of things” is a storytelling technique that does just that.
You start your story in the middle of the action or conflict while your audience still lacks pertinent information.
Then you use flashbacks and dialogue to reveal the rationale, gradually boosting suspense and attention.
A good example is the opening scene in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), featuring the wild chase of a band of motorized derelicts after the hero’s car, brutally capturing him, to set the stage for his narrative: “a man reduced to a single instinct - to survive.”
Consider this formula for your next brand story or presentation.
To boost engagement even further, research real customer frustrations to plant into your opening scene, so they’re super relatable, and gradually “open the kimono” about the true backstory.
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Founder, Visual Storytelling Institute
story > visual > emotion > experience
shlomi@visualstorytell.com
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