In our screenplays we always strive to avoid confusion that could alienate the audience. But creating a question in the reader or viewer’s mind can be a powerful way to grab their attention and pull them into your story.
So how do you spark curiosity without causing confusion?
It can be a tough thing to do, and might be made even more tricky (ironically) the more thoroughly you know your story.
The curse of knowledge
You’ve probably heard this term before – “the curse of knowledge” – although perhaps not in reference to screenwriting. Harvard Business Review explains it like this:
“The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind.”
We all contend with this cognitive bias or something similar pretty often, actually. Storytelling, and communicating in general, requires being aware of what the audience knows and needs to know in order to get what you’re trying to convey.
And it definitely comes up when we try to create some kind of mystery, whether in one scene or at a story level. You know so much more about your story than a reader coming to it with fresh eyes. But that makes it difficult to put yourself in their shoes and see the story as they do – without all of the additional information you’ve accumulated while creating it.
Without that perspective, it’s hard to know when you’re creating curiosity, and when it’s confusion.
So today let’s take a look at a scene from Apple’s new series, The Crowded Room, which I think offers some hints about how to approach it if you find yourself wanting to create curiosity (while avoiding confusion).
Micro case study: The Crowded Room
The scene we’re looking at is the teaser from the pilot episode of The Crowded Room, written by Akiva Goldsman. Based on “The Minds of Billy Milligan,” by Daniel Keyes.
It’s pretty common to see teasers built around a bit of mystery or curiosity. Which makes sense since a teaser’s job in large part is to hook us in, and curiosity is great for that.
But there’s that fine line between curiosity and confusion. So how do we know how much to hold back and how much to convey?
An open loop creates curiosity
Going into any scene or story, there’s a sort of contract between the reader and the writer. The reader expects that the writer will provide relevant information that adds up to a coherent big picture.
So the reader mentally assembles that big picture as they consume the details provided. If the writer has chosen their details effectively, then the picture comes together easily and clearly.
Part of creating curiosity is making sure you know what you want the reader to be curious about.
Be specific and deliberate. Because when too many of the details are missing or ambiguous, confusion results. The puzzle pieces fail to create a clear big picture for the reader.
In the teaser from The Crowded Room, we can see that the writer creates specific questions for the reader to latch onto. Those open loops create curiosity, but they can really only do that because the rest of the picture is firmly in place. (Too many open loops mean you have no picture at all.)
If you’re trying to create curiosity or mystery to intrigue the reader, think in terms of one specific question – even if it’s one question at a time that creates a chain of questions.
That’s what we see in this teaser. We follow one question to the next:
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- Why does he have a gun?
- To stop (likely kill) someone, but who?
- Why is Billy so surprised to see who they’re actually attacking?
- And finally, what’s going to happen to him next?
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The right details show us the way
For as many questions as the teaser leads us through, the moment-to-moment action is always clear and easy to follow.
That’s key. The scenes aren’t trying to create wall-to-wall mystery. Instead, it’s very deliberate about which details we can’t yet know, and everything else is pretty straightforward. That way, we can still track the story.
Because the situation and story are clear, the details that remain a mystery are obvious. We know exactly what we don’t know. And that means we can be curious about those questions and eagerly await the answers.
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