Make your audience travel farther, and they’ll love you for it.

I believe the farther you get your audience to travel emotionally the more likely you are to get the story to resonate with them.

What do I mean by emotional travel? 

Emotional

In simple terms, I mean getting them to feel any of the core emotions. Joy. Fear. Anger. Sadness.

Travel

This is better visually explained. I’d do this with string, but I’m not there with you so I’ll do this with 3 digital lines. 

Which line is the shortest?

If you straighten Line 2 and Line 3 they will both be longer than Line 1 when straightened. If you were to run your finger along the three lines you would travel the shortest distance on line 1. You would travel more on lines 2 and 3 than you would on line 1.

The three lines start at the same point and may end at the same point, but when you straighten them you see that the lines with more ups and downs means more length than a string without ups or downs.

Try it yourself by cutting three pieces of string. One short and the other two long. Then bend the long ones until they are the same length as the short string.

Now, let’s assign an emotion to each line:

Line 1: Indifference or Contentment.

Line 2: Contentment with moment of joy then back to Contentment

Line 3: Contentment with moment of sadness then back to Contentment

Do you see where I’m going with this?

The more ups and downs in your story (or the higher the ups and the lower the downs) the further your audience will have traveled emotionally even if the distance (i.e., storytime, run time, number of pages) is the same as a story with emotional indifference (i.e., Line 1).

So what?

Well, combine all that with what I read from Matthew Dicks: “Make them laugh before they cry.”

My mind exploded when I read that. It was an aha moment where things clicked into place and my Story String Theory fell into place (I know I’m the only one that’ll ever call it Story String Theory, but let me have this moment in the shadows of history).

If the curves in the lines are like emotions in a story... then if I get the audience to a high point (e.g. happy/laughing) and then take them to a low point (e.g. sad, crying) then they will have traveled much further emotionally than if I only make them laugh or cry or feel nothing at all!

Laugh before cry

Why does the order matter? It doesn’t. You can make them cry first and then try to get them to laugh and that works too. But for me personally, if I connect to a character, like them, and laugh with them first, then the pain they feel after the joy feels even more poignant and personal.  

Let’s look at two examples:

• Finding Nemo. They do it right away. They get a lot of emotional travel out of us in less than 3 minutes. Watch it and think about the emotions they get you to feel.

• Far and Away (Spoiler). This scene does the opposite. Tom Cruise has just been crushed by a horse, says his last word, dies, and Nicole Kidman weeps. By the time you get to this point in the movie you’re sad too, but then after he dies she confesses to loving him and he comes back to life with a line of humor. We emotionally travel from grief to joy and thankfully so because that movie has a lot of ups and downs and it feels good to be done.

So, in your next story, try getting your audience to travel farther emotionally. Make 'em laugh before they cry. They'll love you for it.