David Baboulene - Story Consultant

The aircraft was almost unbearably loud. A Chinook with the ramp half open and a loadmaster in a helmet with a mirrored visor staring wistfully into the desert. Engines that made any sort of conversation impossible. Ten of us on canvas seats, breathing the heady smell of fuel, thighs touching, rifles between our knees. The man across from me was reading a letter from home for the third time. Another was asleep. How he slept I do not know. We were 90 minutes into a two-hour flight plan to Mosul. The devastated city had fallen strangely quiet recently. Quiet in the particular way that areas go quiet when something is being prepared. What was clear was that quiet did not mean safe. I remember the colour of the light. The way a water bottle rolled with the movement of the helicopter and no one moved to stop it. I remember registering, with absolute clarity, that the conversation I had cut short that morning before we left might be the last one I would have with that person. Not as a thought. As a fact that arrived without announcement and declined to leave. Twelve hours later we were back on the ground. Nothing had happened. The General had his meeting and nobody was any the wiser as to why. American food beckoned and, later, sleep came without difficulty. But the clarity of that morning's flight stayed with me. Writing tutors talk about stakes. Raise the stakes, they say. Make the reader care. It is good advice imperfectly understood. Invented stakes — the ticking bomb, the threatened child, the terminal illness dropped into act two — are visible from a distance. The reader senses the mechanism. They can feel the writer's hand on the lever. Real stakes feel different. They arrive in the body before they arrive in the mind. They make a water bottle rolling across a floor unbearably significant. They make the light a specific colour you can recall twenty years later. They make you register, mid-conversation, that the person you are talking to may be talking to a version of you that will not exist by morning. You cannot manufacture that. You can only have been there, and let it be in the sentences whether you intended it or not. David Baboulene told me early on that readers do not respond to events. They respond to consequence. I understood the words immediately and the meaning considerably later. The book I am finishing knows the difference. I am not sure I had any choice in the matter. More on that next time. JDV

What compels a reader is a knowledge gap. A question the story has opened without answering. Your brain – wired by evolution to resolve uncertainty – treats this as urgent. Not metaphorically urgent. Physiologically urgent. You are not choosing to read on. Your brain is pursuing the resolution of a question it cannot leave unresolved. This is the actual mechanism. I proved it in a PhD and have spent twenty years applying it. It is learnable. It is a cheat code. The Story Book is the starting point.

And subtext is the knowledge that goes into the gap. It's as simple and as beautiful as that. 🙂

What compels a reader is a knowledge gap. A question the story has opened without answering. Your brain – wired by evolution to resolve uncertainty – treats this as urgent. Not metaphorically urgent. Physiologically urgent. You are not choosing to read on. Your brain is pursuing the resolution of a question it cannot leave unresolved. This is the actual mechanism. I proved it in a PhD and have spent twenty years applying it. It is learnable. It is a cheat code. The Story Book is the starting point.

What compels a reader is a knowledge gap. A question the story has opened without answering. Your brain – wired by evolution to resolve uncertainty – treats this as urgent. Not metaphorically urgent. Physiologically urgent. You are not choosing to read on. Your brain is pursuing the resolution of a question it cannot leave unresolved. This is the actual mechanism. I proved it in a PhD and have spent twenty years applying it. It is learnable. It is a cheat code. The Story Book is the starting point.

There is a moment when the research meets the real world and you discover which parts of the theory survive the contact. I won the Euroscript Film Story Competition in 2003 - Europe-wide, European Film Commission. What I discovered was that the mechanism I had identified was not just academically interesting. It was immediately, directly, visibly useful. That was the beginning. A PhD in Narrative Theory at Brighton (2017). More than twenty years consulting on film, television, and fiction. Working with film producer Bob Gale (Back to the Future), novelist Lee Child (The Jack Reacher series), stage and film writer Willy Russell (Shirley Valentine; Blood Brothers), television writer John Sullivan (Only Fools and Horses), and actor Mark Williams (101 Dalmatians; Shakespeare in Love; the Harry Potter movies). At every level, the same problem: writers given tools that describe the shape of a story without explaining what makes it work. What makes it work is the management of what the reader does not yet know. Knowledge gaps. This is the engine. It holds at every level. The Story Series. The Story Book is Book 1. "A game changer for writers." - Kris Mole. "Everyone who works with story needs to know what David knows." – Alex Marx. What question about story would you most like answered? #StoryScience #Storytelling baboulene.com/bob-gale-back-…

Understand knowledge gaps, and you understand story.