Make a Promise to Your Audience
Every story begins in mystery. The first mystery resolved is not of plot or character or setting, but in terms of expectations. The first mystery is this: what can the audience expect? Right from the title and incipit, the author begins to reveal the answer.
I just happened to drop by the website for star technology writer David Pogue, who does great video reviews and writes a blog for NYTimes.com these days. He has a sticky-note at the bottom of his personal site which says, to quote:
Pogue’s Pledge
This site is 100% free
of animations, ads,
annoying backgrounds,
java, frames, and
anything that blinks.
I love that because it has an attitude that the author has standards, cares about what you’re doing right now (reading his site), and is gently humorous. And of course, he gives it to you upfront, although after you’ve understood what the site is about.
Now, this isn’t something extraordinary he’s doing, it’s just a reflection of his taste as a discerning technologist who’s been around the block. But it’s presented as a manifesto, which gives it story weight. He promises you’re going to see this in action as you read on.
It’s important to give story weight to an audience right up front, and more so for short-form works where the audience is distracted anyway. Like, say, a website.
A short manifesto is great for this. And I love that it’s on a sticky note. When you have something titled “My promise to you,” who is not going to read that? “Whoa, I just got here and you’re making me a promise? What do I get? I’ll hold you to it!”
This brings up another point. When you talk to an audience for the first time, it’s not just setting expectations but also the beginning of a relationship. When I see David Pogue’s cute little sticky note, even if I like flashing things, I still feel like he has high standards and respect for me, the reader. How great is that?
Would the Protagonist Read Their Own Story?
That’s a vital question to answer if you want your story to resonate. Now, of course, the theme should speak to the protagonist’s needs. But does the story uniquely appeal to its main character, as a real person living that story?
Mark Haddon points this out in reference to Pride and Prejudice:
“Jane Austen writes about people with desperately restricted lives and codified by iron rules,” he said. “The first thing she does is to choose a genre, the romantic novel, which is exactly the kind of book those women would read if they were reading books.”
How great is that? Even the genre of the work itself serves the overall message and theme of the work.
It shows you how cohesive a story can be. Speaking to the relevancies of the audience places characters in the audience’s world. Stories that are relevant to the characters that drive them, however, draw people into the story’s own world.