Attempting Mystery: Why Less Is Addicting
“Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. A story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposition, posing questions and opening situations.” – Robert McKee
There is a story the classic screenwriter Nora Ephron tells from her journalism days in high school, also discussed in the book Made To Stick, that positively proves the result of leaving ambiguous, interpretive holes in our work’s narrative. The story revolves around Ephron’s first news writing assignment, where the eager students, including Ephron, approached with the instinct to report strictly who, what, where, when, why–and then to connect.
The class assignment included a series of situational facts about a high school, describing how the entire faculty would be out of their classrooms for an educational conference the following Thursday. The aspiring journalists were supposed to transpose the facts, then write the respective report. The students wrote their leads, many describing a similar situation regarding the conference, each written to portray where the teachers were going, when they would be gone, who would be speaking, etc.
After the teacher collected the assignments, which were all stylistically alike, he paused, stared and gently proclaimed:
“The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’ “
Ephron’s story, with the zinger of wisdom being the teacher’s response regarding what the lead should have been, portrays the “less is more” principal.
Effectively using “less” should not have a direct intention to mislead, nor should any information actively be removed. But, by stating an initial fact that leaves holes to be filled, it forces an audience to question not only what will be stated next, but also to ponder the intent of the writer. When an artist, a writer in this case, becomes more interesting than the work itself, it creates a sense of mystery, even urgency, surrounding the product.
And that, in a sense, becomes an addictive narrative.
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