Keep the audience guessing

Audience engagement is not just about what you show them, but – much more powerfully – what you strategically keep back. Selectively withholding or concealing information is one of the most potent tools writers have for creating profound engagement.

In real life, we rarely possess the full story. That uncertainty triggers our hardwired compulsion to take whatever scraps of information we glean and instinctively fill in the blanks. Good storytelling exploits this to the hilt.

So, ‘Don’t explain, reveal.‘ But not immediately. First, make ‘em care. Then make ‘em wait.

Hold fire. And then, reveal just enough, step by step, to ignite your audience’s compulsion to complete the story.

Selective withholding as a tool

A key tool for strategically withholding information is what I call the ‘Ambiguous Narrative Ellipsis’ [A.N.E. for short.] An ambiguous narrative ellipsis is a jump forward in time in the story to an unclear action that gradually becomes clear.

Here is how it works:

1. Take it to the Edge. You take the story in real time to the edge of a crisis. Often this is a point where a character has just realised a key piece of information that changes things. This piece of information creates a new Dramatic Question for the character and for the audience. The character must decide their next move; the audience speculates about what the issue is, what the character will do, and what the consequences will be.
2. Cut Forward, Strategically. But instead of playing out the crucial scene conventionally, you deliberately cut forward in time to something ambiguous – usually one of the key characters in action.
3. Two caveats: you can sometimes even cut to someone completely unknown, as long as the resolution ties to the central character and their dilemma; and being ‘in action’ can include focused stillness.
4. Create Intriguing Uncertainty. But their action is ambiguous. We can see that the character is pursuing something, even if they are stock still. But we don’t know what they are pursuing.
5. Though With Some Clarity. Conversely, unless you’re deliberately withholding a revelation about time and space, you generally want to give the audience a quick sense of whether we’re in the same general time and place. Most of the time, you want the audience to be questioning what’s happening and what it means, NOT where we are and whether it’s two days later or a decade later.
6. Gradual Revelation. Gradually, the character’s actions peel back the layers of the story. We begin to work out what happened in the last scene and to understand what the character has chosen to do about it.
7. Audience contribution. We haven’t seen how the character got to this point, so we supply emotions and motivations from our own lives. We project our own life experience onto the character’s actions, creating a stronger bond with them. Up to now we’ve been trailing the character, following the breadcrumbs, trying desperately to catch up. Then suddenly we have a moment of realisation and catch up. We were behind the character; now we stand beside them, but with all their emotions and motivations that happened in the gap filled in. By us. But not for long.
8. But… A.N.E.s can also become a cheap story fix. Beware filling in the gap with meaningless window dressing that doesn’t eventually add up to anything. Do it a couple of times, and the audience will start tuning out.
9. Then…, don’t stick around to explain what the audience has worked out for themselves. Let the moment happen, then move on. Put the audience in pursuit again.

An Example

THE SETUP

 

Late at night. A beautiful woman in a stunning ball gown sits at a vanity, taking off her jewellery.

Behind her an expensively fitted-out bedroom. Easy wealth.

Something about the jewellery she’s taking off catches her attention. She pauses, stares at herself in the mirror. Apprehensive. Perhaps sad.

The bedroom door opens, and a man in a very classy tuxedo enters, taking off his hand-tied bow tie and undoing the top button of his starched shirt. On top of the world.

He throws his jacket on the bed, next to her mink. He’s a bit drunk.

He puts a hand on each shoulder, kisses the top of her head.

MAN

You were magnificent. Are magnificent.

Before he can turn away, she takes his hand, stops him. Their eyes meet in the mirror.

WOMAN

Can we talk?

We – and the man – suddenly have a new dramatic question. What does she want to tell him/us?

As a writer, the temptation here is to write a long dialogue scene, with emotional ebb and flow, peaks and troughs. Accusation and counteraccusation. Tears. A chance to let the audience sit back and watch the actors perform.

But what if, instead, we cut to sometime later?

POSSIBLE Ambiguous narrative ellipses

VERSION 1

 

A city street, daytime. A cab pulls up outside an old-fashioned office building.

The man, dressed in casual day clothes, gets out, carrying a full briefcase. He enters the building, scans the list of tenants, crosses to the old lift, pushes the button, and waits.

Inside an old-fashioned office, a middle-aged woman sits at the reception desk typing. The door behind her is closed. She looks up to see the man enter, hesitantly. She says his name. He nods. She points to one of the shabby chairs in the waiting area, and he sits.

Briefcase on his lap. Fingers tapping on top of it.

The door to the inner office opens and two men exit. One of them is crying.

The other man is wearing a suit and has a large scar above his eyebrow. He puts an arm around the crying man’s shoulder, walks him to the door, ushers him out, turns to our man, gestures for him to enter the inner office.

Our man walks in, opening his briefcase and pulling out an enormous folder of papers. The other man follows, and closes the door behind them.

The woman keeps typing.

The man with the scar sits behind an enormous old desk, covered in piles of paper, and flicks through a folder full of documents.

Our man sits on one side of the desk, fingers tapping on the briefcase on his lap, looking around the office. Shelves of legal volumes. Stacks of folders tied up with red ribbons.

Finally, the man closes the folder of papers. Sits thinking for a minute or two. Looks up.

OTHER MAN

Well, in my professional opinion, she’s got you over a barrel.

Are there any of your assets she doesn’t know about?

That’s one kind of story.

It’s a mixture of window dressing and ‘make ‘em wait’ topped with a fairly obvious reveal. It also probably goes on too long – though it is remarkable how long you can make people wait, if the unanswered question is intriguing enough.

You could cut into this short sequence at a number of places, and it wouldn’t make any difference. You could start with the man in the lift. You could start with the woman typing, then reveal the man in the waiting room. You could even start with the OTHER MAN flicking through all the papers at his desk. All perfectly workable choices, which says that the other stuff doesn’t really matter.

Or you could add a line of dialogue from our man, which sheds a different light on what seemed to be window dressing:

OUR MAN

I’ve heard that you can… arrange things?

Here’s another version.

This reveal is, I think, slightly less obvious. More importantly, it’s a journey, with each step giving us another clue towards the final reveal. Not only that, it’s a journey for both characters. He’s getting a series of new insights, and she’s vitally concerned about how he reacts to each of those insights.

Unlike the previous version, I wouldn’t want to leave out any of these steps.

VERSION 2

 

Daylight. The country. A fence. A large gate.

An expensive car pulls up at the gate. The woman from the first scene gets out of the car, pushes a button by the side of the gate, says her name, shows her face to the camera. A buzz and the gate opens.

The car drives slowly down a long driveway towards a large house. The man, driving, looks about. Lawn and trees. Children playing, supervised by women in nurses’ uniforms. A couple of men stand around, keeping an eye out.

He glances at the woman. She glances back, looks away nervously.

A corridor inside the house. A nurse leads the man and the woman around the corner, down the corridor towards us. A child runs past screaming, hands and face covered with food, pursued by a nurse. The child grabs the man’s legs, clings on. The nurse calmly disentangles the child, soothes him, picks him up and carries him away.

The man watches them go. The woman kneels and apologetically brushes food off his trousers. ‘It’s OK,’ says the man.

Inside another room, a nurse plays with a severely handicapped six-year-old child. They are trying to stack blocks, but the child knocks them over clumsily.

Feet approach – the nurse, the woman, the man. The nurse squats next to the child.

NURSE

Hello Arabella. You’ve got visitors.

It’s your Mummy.

The Wrap

All writing manuals, fiction or non-fiction, tell you to start your story as late as possible and get out as early as possible. ‘In media res’ they say. But it doesn’t just apply to the whole story, it also applies to steps within the story.

We see a character in action, but we don’t know what that action means. We might not even know who the character is. But, as long as you have earned the audience’s trust as a storyteller, their instinct will be to look for a connection. They’ll trust that this storytelling choice is deliberate and means something, so they’ll be hooked.

You keep them on the hook by revealing the information bit by bit, step by step. With each step saying something new, that they have to add to the story they’re writing in their heads. Until it finally comes together.

A.N.E.s are a great way to do scene-setting exposition. Instead of feeling like they’re being told things, the audience will believe they are discovering things for themselves. And, as a result, will care much more.

A.N.E.s are also a great way to raise the stakes and keep them raised without descending into overt conflict. The character’s energy tells us that this new hidden objective must be very important.

As a bonus, they can also help you reveal dangers and obstacles without overt exposition.

Take the interaction with the child in the corridor. By now we’re starting to catch on. And now we’re seeing through the man’s eyes what it means to have a profoundly disabled child. And through the woman’s eyes, the man’s struggle with that concrete realisation. Just as we’re about to meet her child.

You could have written a loaded exchange between them back in the bedroom where he’s trying to work out what this news about her secret child means, and she’s trying to work out whether he can cope, and whether the relationship is over.

Instead, we experienced it for ourselves, through the eyes of each of them.

Key Takeaways

There is a place for long speeches and lengthy dialogue scenes. But give them more impact by using them sparingly.

The rest of the time, see if you can keep your story moving, and keep the audience on the hook, by trusting the audience to do some of the work. And find the satisfaction in working things out for themselves.

Related Essays:

• Don’t Explain, Reveal.
• Who’s Got the Problem Now? On aligning story focus with character conflict.
• Subjective Storytelling and Audience Connection. How audience perception shapes meaning.