DON'T FINISH THE SENTENCE

Foundation IV of storytelling is narrative architecture. It begins with controlling when information arrives.

There was an envelope on my desk this morning.

Consider that line for a moment... There's not much there. And if we try again:

There was an envelope on my desk this morning with my name handwritten on it.

Something small has happened now. But if we try once more:

There was an envelope on my desk this morning with my name handwritten on it. I recognised the handwriting immediately.

Let's stop here. Your mind has already moved forward before you even realised. Whose handwriting? What's going on over here? Even though nothing dramatic happened. There's no threat, crime, or revelation. What those eleven extra words created is an information gap: you now know enough to know that there is something you don't know.

That's the most important point from this whole foundation. Curiosity begins at the point where you know enough to know you don't know. And it’s worthwhile getting good at fostering curiosity if you want to tell better stories. 

But there's a subtle distinction sitting underneath this, that became clearer to me on this part of the storytelling journey..

My son came running out of shul on a Friday night a few weeks ago and told me (rather than asking me), that he was sleeping at Natan. By the way, he's 9 years old.

What Alex wants is obvious. He wants to sleep at Natan's house.

But what you want, dear Reader, after having read that sentence, is something very different from what Alex wants. You want to know my reaction. You want to know if I let him.

You see, desire belongs to the person in the story. Curiosity belongs to the person reading or listening (or watching).

Most people trying to communicate well are trying to be complete. The instinct is to get the information across as cleanly and fully as possible, because completeness feels like competence. "She wrote to say she was leaving the company," is a miniature story that is received, and understood. But compare it to: "I recognised the handwriting before I picked up the envelope." There's a different energy now, because something is still owed to the audience.

Storytelling is less about delivering information than about deciding when it arrives. You have the whole thing. The audience doesn't. So you choose what they know now, what they don't know yet, what they're allowed to suspect, what question they're carrying while they wait, and you choose the moment you answer it.

The part that's genuinely hard is the boundary, because curiosity has a twin that looks similar and kills attention dead.

Let's try this:

He put the thing there because of what happened before.

You don't know what I'm talking about. But you're not curious either. You're irritated. You can't even form the question, because you don't have enough to build one from.

Confusion is not having enough to form the question. Curiosity is having just enough that you need the answer. The distance between them is much narrower than it looks, and both failures produce the same result. Too much information and the question never forms, because it's already been answered. Too little and it never forms either.

And let’s point out a quick clarifying point about tension, because tension is a separate thing: Curiosity asks what the answer is. Tension asks what is going to happen. OK, now you’re good to go.

Here’s an exercise you can try:

I’m giving you three beginnings. Add one sentence to each (one only), whose entire job is to make a reader need to know something. No murders, no mysterious phone calls, nobody vanishing. Ordinary life only.

Every Sunday morning, the same old man sat at the same table in the coffee shop. 

Halfway through the meeting, I realised the client hadn't spoken for nearly twenty minutes.

There were six glasses on the dining room table when I went to bed.

The constraint is what makes this useful. Whoever reads your sentence should be able to tell you the precise question it put in their head. If all they can say is that it's interesting, then nothing really has happened.

I've found this foundation harder than the three before it, and it took me a while to work out why. I think the reason is because those were about perception. That means noticing what's in front of you, finding the meaning inside it without inflating it, seeing what people want. All three ask you to take more in.

This one asks you to put less out. And the instinct that wrecks it is the same one that wrecked my early attempts at meaning: the urge to hand the whole thing over, finished and explained, so that nobody has to do any work. Leaving something out feels like failing to do your job. It feels, while you're doing it, like the sentence isn't finished.

It's a good idea to get used to that feeling.