Cinema of the Mind (Also Known as “Where the Hell Are You?”)
I’ve talked about movies a lot so far. Perhaps you’ve noticed. There’s a good reason.
A great storyteller creates a movie in the minds of the audience. Whether your audience is a theater full of storytelling fans, a boardroom filled with potential clients, a classroom bursting with apathetic high-school students, or a group of friends around the dinner table, the goal of every storyteller should be to create a cinematic experience in the minds of every listener.
This is important. You may think it’s obvious, but if it were, storytellers would do this all the time. They would obsess about the idea of maintaining an unrelenting, uninterrupted movie in the minds of their listeners.
But they don’t. Often, instead of making the story the center of their performance, storytellers make themselves the center of the show. They crack jokes. Insert amusing or observational non sequiturs. Step outside the story’s time line. Ask rhetorical questions of the audience.
These are all terrible ways to start stories. Rather than presenting a fully realized cinematic experience, they present bits of the movie. They give a scene here or a scene there, intersected by unnecessary or poorly formatted exposition that ruins the flow.
Even worse, they open stories by pontificating and proselytizing:
Love is a beautiful thing when it isn’t killing you.
There are two kinds of toddlers in this world: those who raise your hopes for humanity and those who belong in a cage.
I used to think that I understood my mother better than anyone in the world, but now I know that mothers are like oceans: deep, dark, and full of secrets.
These are not the beginnings to stories. These are sentences that supposedly state some universal truth that the story will then illustrate. But this is not how stories work. Stories are not supposed to start with thesis statements or overwrought aphorisms.
Let me say it again, because it’s that important: A great storyteller creates a movie in the mind of the audience. Listeners should be able to see the story in their mind’s eye at all times. At no point should the story become visually obscured or impossible to see. As the title of this chapter suggests, effective storytelling is cinema of the mind.
In order to achieve this lofty goal, storytellers must do one thing, and happily for you, it’s exceedingly simple:
Always provide a physical location for every moment of your story.
That’s it. If the audience knows where you are at all times within your story, the movie is running in their minds. The film is cycling from reel to reel. If your audience can picture the location of the action at all times, you have created a movie in the mind of your listeners. Hopefully it’s a good one.
If the audience can’t see your story in their minds, the film is no longer running. You have failed to achieve cinema of the mind. Instead of visualizing the past, perhaps even forgetting where and when they even are for a moment, your audience is now staring at you in the present. Their imagination has been disengaged. The movie has stopped.
This is no longer storytelling; it’s lecturing. If you’re making the audience laugh, it might be more akin to stand-up comedy. You may even sound as if you’re reciting an essay. Whatever you are doing, if the movie has stopped in the mind of your audience, it’s no longer a story. Let me give you an example. Here are two versions of the first few lines of a story that I tell about my fraternal grandmother.
Version #1
My grandmother’s name is Odelie Dicks, which probably explains why she is who she is. She’s a crooked old lady in both body and mind. She wears only dark colors and likes to serve food that has stewed in pots for days. I like to imagine that there was a time in her life when she smiled — or at least didn’t scowl — but if that time existed, it was long before me.
Version #2
I’m standing at the edge of my grandmother’s garden, watching her relentlessly pull weeds from the unforgiving soil. My grandmother’s name is Odelie Dicks, which probably explains why she is who she is. She’s a crooked old lady in both body and mind. She wears only dark colors and likes to serve food that has stewed in pots for days. I like to imagine that there was a time in her life when she smiled — or at least didn’t scowl — but if that time existed, it was long before me.
One of these versions is the beginning of a story. The other sounds more like the beginning of an essay. Can you see the difference? Can you feel it?
If a director were filming the first version of my story, the movie would probably open on black. The description of my grandmother would be conveyed via voice-over. There’s nothing for the audience to see, because no location is ever identified. It’s almost impossible to imagine my grandmother, because there is no place to imagine her in. At best you might picture an ethereal image of her floating in space. More than likely, you’re not picturing anything at all. You’re probably staring at the storyteller, waiting for him or her to engage your imagination more fully. There is no movie running in your mind. It’s merely a series of anecdotal descriptors.
In the second version, an image is instantly formed in your mind. A director would know exactly where to point the camera.
Can you see it? The lens pans across a garden on a summer day. You see me standing on the edge of the garden, staring at an old woman who is crouching somewhere between rows of vegetable plants. As I describe her, you see her bending over, pulling a weed, bending again. There is action. Specificity. Setting. You don’t know what my grandmother’s garden looks like, but that’s okay. Your mind instantly fills in those blanks for me. You place your own idea of a garden into the scene, and because the dimensions and size and general appearance of my grandmother’s garden are not relevant to the story, I allow this to happen. I allow you to populate my story with your details. With very little effort, your mind formulates a fully realized scene, with depth, color, and texture, and all I did was give the moment a specific location.
One extra sentence has changed the story entirely. Actually, it made it a story.
In truth, this moment in the garden has nothing to do with the actual story, which is about the cruel way that my grandmother would pull my loose teeth when I was a little boy, and as a result, I wasn’t sad when she died. I’m not even sure if she was working in the garden on the day or week or month that she pulled the particular tooth in question. It doesn’t matter. I need you to get to know my grandmother before I can launch into the story, and the garden is a good place to start. It’s where my grandmother spent a great deal of her time, and I can use the way she pulled the weeds to foreshadow the way she would eventually pull my teeth.
Rather than describing my grandmother in essay form or cracking a series of jokes about her, I set the moment in a location, and therefore I create a scene. I start to make a movie in your mind.
One version is a story. The other version is an essay. The only difference is that I provided a location for one but not the other.
That’s it. That’s how you maintain a cinema in the mind of your audience. You give every scene a location, just as you would in a movie. Do this, and your stories will instantly improve. In fact they will be transformed. They will become captivating and memorable and visceral for your audiences simply because you set every moment in a specific location.
It sounds easy, and in many ways it is, but it can also get tricky at times. Look back at “Charity Thief” in chapter 6. There’s a moment in that story when I have to provide a great deal of backstory for my audience. Before I get to the point where I formulate my plan to beg from the gas-station employee, I need my audience to know that:
1. My mother is living on welfare with my pregnant teenage sister.
2. My brother has joined the army and has been out of touch with us for a year.
3. I haven’t seen my father in ten years.
4. I’m making $7.25 an hour as a McDonald’s manager, and I’m the richest person I know.
5. None of my friends has a car that can make the round-trip journey to pick me up. None of them have credit cards or even checking accounts.
6. My only hope is Bengi, my roommate and best friend, and he is away at a college retreat, unreachable by telephone.
7. Telephones in the precellular era were inefficient means of communication.
8. I feel alone.
9. I fear that I will be alone for the rest of my life.
10. I find my situation terribly unfair.
It’s a lot of information to dump on an audience. A whole bunch of backstory, which can often derail a story if it is not told well.
But did you notice what I did just before I started explaining my backstory? I tell the audience that I’m parked in the lot of a Citgo gas station in New Hampshire, sitting behind the wheel of my car, hands still gripping the steering wheel. I give this moment of backstory a place. I make it a scene.
Even though I’m covering an enormous amount of terrain, including information about my family, friends, and my own internal struggle, the audience can still picture me behind the wheel of my car as these thoughts race through my mind. I position my body clearly in a space that my audience can imagine. They can see me sitting in the front seat of a 1976 Chevy Malibu. They can see the parking lot. The red-and-white Citgo sign. The gas pumps. The highway. Since I identify the state as New Hampshire, they are probably picturing trees and maybe even mountains in the distance or a hardscrabble road.
Halfway through this bit of backstory, I intentionally reset my location. I mention it again, just in case the audience has forgotten where I am. Still behind the wheel, still looking out at a field of yellows and reds and oranges.
No real action is taking place as I provide this backstory, but that’s okay. There is something to look at because you know exactly where I am. You can see me. I’m a young man sitting behind the wheel of a motionless vehicle, staring into a future that is bleak at best. The story never goes off the rails. The film never stops. You never wonder where I am.
In the movie version of this moment, the camera would cut between interior and exterior shots of the car. It would focus on my hands, still clutching the steering wheel in desperation. There might be a slow pan of the Citgo station to create an establishing shot. A close-up on my Massachusetts license plate in order to accentuate my distance from home. A long shot of the gas pumps to suggest the distance between me and the gas I need to get home. A still shot of the two large numbers indicating that gas is eighty-five cents a gallon. You’d see mountains in the distance and cars filled with gas zooming by on the nearby highway.
Even with all that relatively inactive backstory, it’s still a movie. You can see it. It has place and sound and detail.
Many storytellers introduce backstory like this with sentences such as these:
You have to understand what was going on in my life at the time . . .
Let me tell you about my finances in 1991 . . .
There were many reasons why I couldn’t call home for help that day.
It would have been nice to be able to call friends and family for help that day, but I couldn’t. Here’s why.
I hear setups for backstory like this all the time, but none of these approaches are effective. This is not how movies work. Narrators do not appear on-screen to fill in backstories or provide pertinent details in the midst of a scene. Instead movies use flashbacks. Purposeful dialogue. Voice-over. Awful dream sequences.
Regardless of the method, it’s still a movie. The camera is still pointed at a specific place. The audience can still see the movie. By placing this backstory in a specific location, I am able to convey this information from the perspective of my 1991 self rather than my present-day self. I stay within the context of the story. The place and time frame remain constant. It’s the twenty-year-old version of myself explaining the backstory rather than the modern-day version standing on the stage.
This process allows the movie to continue rolling in the audience’s mind. They are still listening to the version of me from the past, so they remain in the past with me.
A similar problem occurs when a storyteller needs to provide historical or technical information that the audience may not possess. I once worked with a storyteller who needed to ensure that his audience understood photosynthesis in order for the rest of his story to make sense. His original plan was to say something like, “Okay, before I continue, I need to give you a quick refresher on photosynthesis. If you remember your freshman biology class . . .” and then proceed to explain the process to his audience.
At that moment, his story stopped being a story. It became a science lecture within a story. The only thing the audience could see during that explanation was the storyteller, standing on the stage, discussing a scientific principle. The movie had stopped running. The filmstrip had snapped in two.
I advised the storyteller against this approach. I explained why it wasn’t working. I told him that his science lecture was not entertaining and destroyed the flow of his story. It cut off the cinema of the mind.
“Then how am I supposed to teach them about photosynthesis?” he asked.
“Why not tell the story of the first time you learned about photosynthesis?” I said. “Or a time when you taught photosynthesis? Instead of stopping the story completely to explain the process, why not offer a scene in the form of a flashback that also explains photosynthesis? Just keep telling a story.”
If I had to explain photosynthesis, I told him, I would probably insert an anecdote from my tenth-grade biology class. I would describe Mrs. Murphy, my biology teacher, standing at the chalkboard, explaining with crude drawings and hastily scribbled labels how plants took in sunlight and carbon dioxide and produced oxygen. Mrs. Murphy was so excited about the way photosynthesis worked that she could barely contain her enthusiasm. She admired the efficiency and symbiotic nature of the process, and she couldn’t wait for us to understand it.
At the time I was less excited about photosynthesis than I was about Heather, the girl who sat across from me. You’ll remember that Heather was the girl whose love I tried to win in Mrs. Murphy’s class back in chapter 10.
In many ways, I might explain, Heather was the sun and carbon dioxide to my oxygen. She was what I needed to be happy. If only she could provide me with these essential ingredients. Sadly, that never happened. Heather started dating Greg, and the couple remained together throughout much of high school.
See what I mean? Rather than stopping the story to explain a scientific principle, I allow the story to continue with a little bit of anecdotal backstory. I provide the necessary scientific information while also providing an amusing scene that reveals something about my character.
Depending on the needs of the story, I could easily have replaced the Heather part of the story with Sean, a redheaded boy who was also in my biology class that year. Sean was a bully who made my life hell for several years before we finally found a grudging respect for each other. I might explain that Sean was the opposite of photosynthesis. Lacking any hint of symbiosis.
I also could have replaced Heather with Jennifer Glose, a girl in that same biology class. I once tortured her by adding a new element to the large periodic table of elements that hung in the front of Mrs. Murphy’s classroom: GloseGrossium.
I did such a precise job adding the element to the table — making it look exactly like the other boxes on the chart — that when Mrs. Murphy pulled the chart down, it took her fifteen minutes to notice the addition.
I might tell my audience that I spent more time crafting that new element for Mrs. Murphy’s periodic table than I did studying photosynthesis.
All of these anecdotes reveal something about my character and also allow me to explain photosynthesis to anyone in the audience who doesn’t understand it already. Most importantly, they all allow for the movie to continue in the minds of the audience. I provide setting and action and character rather than lecture.
That’s the trick. A simple one: Make sure that every moment in your story has a location attached. Every moment should be a scene, and every scene needs a setting.
It’s the simplest, most-bang-for-your-buck strategy that I have to offer.