Gold, Silver and Bronze Information
If the key to Audience participation is new information keeping the Active Story Question alive, then how do we judge what to believe?
This post refers to ‘Keep the Audience Hungry to Know’
I suggest reading that first.
How Audiences Judge What to Believe
New information is the engine of dramatic engagement, but not all information carries the same weight. Characters judge information based on who delivers it and how they discover it. Audiences do exactly the same.
We all know words can deceive, and we all believe that actions speak louder than words. And we all believe that people who share our values are more trustworthy than people who don’t.
The characters in a story are constantly looking at the people around them and deciding what’s really happening under the surface. Especially if there’s something at stake, when they become hyper-alert to the perceived difference between what people are saying and what they really think and actually intend to do.
People don’t give much weight to things they are told by someone they don’t trust, unless they believe they can see through the lie to the truth beneath. In which case, they give a lot of credibility to their own perception that it is a lie.
They give more weight to things they are told by people they do trust. But they give the most weight to things they work out for themselves. Or believe that they have worked it out for themselves. See perceived lie above.
The skill of being a good writer, much like the skill of being a good liar, lies in giving just enough information to allow the listener to join the dots, so they feel that they worked it out for themselves.
I think in terms of three tiers of reliability:
🟤 Bronze Information
Something told you by someone you don’t fully trust.
⚪ Silver Information
Something told you by someone you do trust.
🟡 Gold Information
Something you work out for yourself — using what psychologists call Theory of Mind: our ability to infer people’s thoughts and feelings from behaviour.
You can apply this framework equally to:
- Characters inside the story
- Audiences watching the story
Except that the audience has one more ‘character’ to worry about – the storyteller.
Does the Storyteller have my Trust?
Whether they consciously realise it or not, audiences spend the first ten minutes of any story asking themselves three questions:
- Does this writer know how to tell a story?
- Can I trust what I’m being shown?
- Am I being told this, or am I discovering it myself?
Writers (and directors) have to earn the audience’s trust. At a craft level, the audience has to feel that we know what we’re doing, and if we deceive them or confuse them, it’s deliberate and will eventually pay off. They have to believe that the driver (you) knows how to drive this vehicle and knows where you are going.
But they also have to believe that we haven’t put our thumb on the scales, tilting the story towards the point we want to make. Of course, all stories have a point, but there’s a difference between meaning that emerges naturally from the story and meaning that feels imposed upon the story.
If the audience sees the creator’s hand at work (i.e., you), their trust will depend on whether they already agree with you.
If they already agree with you, everything in your story gets upgraded to gold. If they already disagree with you, they will distrust everything in your story, in case they get deceived by something they didn’t notice and hadn’t guarded against.
Forget bronze, if the storyteller loses the trust of the audience, your story is tin.
The perils of Window Dressing
But the audience doesn’t have to feel manipulated by you to lose their trust – they only have to feel that you don’t know the difference between Real Information and Window Dressing.
Window Dressing is drawing the audience’s attention to something that turns out to be irrelevant to the story.
- Real information changes things. It affects characters’ decisions, feelings, risks, and actions.
- Window Dressing is decorative detail that draws attention but has no real consequence in the story. Often it’s your desire to make a larger observational point about the characters or their world, without integrating it into the characters’ immediate needs or wants. It’s the ‘Have you noticed that Volvo drivers wear hats in their car?’ syndrome.
If the audience feels the detail is part of the character’s world and relevant to their choices, you keep their trust. If they feel you only put it in to make a point, or show off research or, worst of all, underline your meaning, trust fades away.
Once trust goes, everything becomes tin, not bronze, silver, or gold.
To maintain trust, every piece of information should feel:
- Integrated.
- Character-driven.
- Consequential.
- and if it isn’t immediately consequential, clearly building to a payoff later, and delivered.
- Discovered rather than told.
- Not agenda-driven.
The more information the audience feels they’ve figured out themselves, the more deeply they invest in the story.
