Storyworthy Summary (C11): Cinema of the Mind

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Employing the techniques discussed so far in previous chapters will make you a very good storyteller.

But to become a great storyteller, you must obsess over the idea of maintaining an uninterrupted movie in the minds of the listeners.

Cracking jokes, inserting observations, stepping outside of the story's timeline, and asking rhetorical questions are just some of the ways to ruin the movie.

They ruin it because they interrupt the visual scenes. At no point should a story become impossible to see in the mind.

In order to create a movie in the listener’s mind, you just need to do one thing:

Always have a physical location for every moment in your story.

This is simple to do, and it works.

When your listener can place the characters of the story in a physical location, they will do so in their mind.

If there is no location, the mind has nothing to visualize and it will come back to reality.

You don’t have to get very specific about the location. There’s no need to describe every detail. Saying something as simple as, ‘I’m running along the beach,’ can aid visualization. The listener’s mind will fill in the rest.

If you need them to visualize something more specific, add it. For example:

“I’m running along the beach. The clouds are dark, the waves are crashing, and lightning strikes in the distance.”

Sometimes you will need to provide a backstory to your audience in order to put current events in context.

There is a right and wrong way to do this.

You should also compress geography if your story allows it.

Here are some examples of how NOT to introduce a backstory:

• You have to understand what my brother was going through back then …
• Let me tell you about the state of my life in 2003 …
• There were many reasons I couldn’t go to work that day …
• I would have loved to be able to drive that day, but I couldn’t. Here’s why …

The reason the above doesn’t work is because it breaks the movie in the mind. It’s like the narrator coming on screen in a movie.

Instead, use a flashback.

Another way people break the movie is when they need to provide historical or technical information that the audience might not know, but is important for context. Again, use a flashback that will explain the concept at the same time.

Read the next chapter here.

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