Welcome back to Part 2 of my exploration of the myth of shortening attention spans. If you haven’t yet read Part 1, do so or else you’ll be a bit lost.
Last time, we talked about how attention spans aren’t actually getting shorter. Instead, competition for attention has gotten fiercer, and audiences are impatient. If a creator can’t demonstrate the value of their creation right away, viewers aren’t going to trust that they’re going to “get there eventually.”
Below, I argue that this efficiency of storytelling is actually a good thing, despite its perceived negative influence on modern entertainment.
I’ll also explain how the ability to hook a viewer in a short period of time has become a crucial storytelling skill, but - as I’ll explain in a bit - this is not unique to social media.
In This Episode
🌹 A hook by any other name - how in media res, cold opens, and teasers became hooks, and why storytelling fundamentals never changed
🤔 The curiosity gap - why humans are hardwired to chase answers, and how to leverage this primal drive from scene one
🏋️ The burden of proof is on you - how modern audiences changed the rules of storytelling (and why that's actually a good thing)
To Recap Part 1
In case you don’t remember Part 1, here’s a brief recap:
Attention spans aren’t actually getting shorter due to social media
The reason that viewers are more likely to swipe away is because they have their choice of entertainment
I introduced the concept of “Time to Interest” (“TTI”), the amount of time it takes to hook an audience into the world of your story (in general, lower is better)
Audiences are impatient, they don’t owe you anything, and they have no reason to trust you when you tell them: “I swear, this movie is worth your valuable time.”
On that last point: Just because you can’t reasonably tell them that the story you’re telling is worth their time, that doesn’t mean you can’t show it to them.
And that’s exactly why we’re here: To provide you a practical set of tools that you can use to capture audience interest right away.
But first: Why would we want to?
The Panic Over ‘Dumbed Down’ Stories
To those of you bubbling with fiery rage, I get it. I’ve been there too.
Social media is a blight on storytelling technique, reducing everything to short-lived hooks and shiny objects and spectacle and brand deals.
There’s no artistry, there’s no real stories being told. They’re just hijacking our dopamine regulation systems to farm for engagement.
And the algorithm. My God, the algorithm!
In the early days of TikTok taking off in the U.S., I shook my head, like: “Is this real? Has society really come to this?”
Certainly this signifies the death of storytelling, right?
Well, maybe not.
Maybe TikTok didn’t kill cinema. Maybe it just made bad openings impossible to hide.
Fast Does Not (Necessarily) Mean Shallow
I know that efficiency isn’t the goal of stories. I know that the goal of stories is to make people feel something, whether it be fear or heartache or hope or excitement or gut-busting laughter.
I understand that many stories need time to breathe and, for those stories, getting there too quickly is just as bad - if not worse - than getting there too slowly.
But I also understand that if you hope to entertain an audience, there’s no such thing as capturing their interest too soon.
In order to compete with the increasing abundance of entertainment out there in the world today, you have to engage in efficient storytelling: Start with something compelling that piques interest. A burning question or a tantalizing mystery or a character in a hairy situation. This is what content creators call a hook.
But this isn’t about using some viral social media hack because it’s good for your metrics.
It’s Storytelling 101.
Hooks: On Screens Large & Small
Before it was called a “hook” on YouTube / TikTok, this storytelling building block took multiple different forms in traditional media:
Flash forward
Cold open
Teaser
These have been in use since the advent of fiction and they all serve the same function as the aforementioned “hook” in social / UGC: Capture the audience’s interest without needless delay.
Of course a story can be true-to-life. Of course it can feel real. But let’s not forget what one of the greatest directors in cinema history said on the matter:
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out
–Alfred Hitchcock
You can aspire to be Stan Brakhage - my alma mater’s 3rd most famous filmmaker - and that’s a noble pursuit. Brakhage made art that explored deeply human themes like mortality, innocence and giving birth on camera.
But if you care about captivating an audience, you’d be well-advised to do as Hitchcock does and cut out the dull bits, particularly at the beginning.
That means using a hook.
And you don’t have to be a duck-lipped influencer to leverage hooks. In fact, notable film purists / luddites like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan regularly use these techniques to grab audiences from the onset.
Think of the diner robbery in Pulp Fiction or the bank heist in The Dark Knight. That sequence was compelling, not only because of the excitement of the heist, but because of the mystery surrounding Heath Ledger’s Joker.
Side note: Lest you think this technique is only applicable to mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, you’re wrong again.
See:
Mulholland Drive - Opens with the mysterious car crash and amnesia setup before diving into Lynch's surreal world
The Seventh Seal - Death playing chess on the beach - a mysterious, otherworldly hook
8½ - Fellini opens with a claustrophobic traffic jam nightmare sequence
These movies are proof positive:
You don’t need to sacrifice artistry or depth of storytelling to optimize TTI.
As a more recent example, Severance required no explosions or 6-pack abs to garner interest early on in the show.
Just an unconscious woman waking up on a conference table with a disembodied voice asking her strange questions via the PA system.
Despite the dreary office setting, the TTI of Severance S1 E1 was very, very low. That’s because they leveraged another technique prevalent in modern social content creation: The Curiosity Gap.
Kick Them in the Curiosity Gap
Human beings are naturally curious creatures. Our curiosity isn’t just about a willingness to explore and learn new things.
It’s a survival mechanism.
One developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to keep us searching for new game, new edible plants, new places to find shelter. It is primordial, inherent to everyone.
The best content creators on the internet intuitively know this about people, and leverage the fact via something they call “The Curiosity Gap.” This is something that came up multiple times in seminars when I attended VidCon.
Simply put, the curiosity gap is the space between what we know and what we want to know. This psychological tension keeps us invested in everything, from soap operas to murder mysteries to neighborhood gossip.
This is one technique you can use to lower your Time to Interest, and I’ve outlined a few others below:
Techniques to Lower Your TTI
First off: If you want to capitalize on the curiosity gap and get audiences invested in your story, you need to focus on fundamentals: People have to care about your characters and their goals before they care about your first hook.
But if you’re writing Season 1 Episode 1 Scene 1 (or an original movie), no one knows your characters or what they want. How do you bootstrap your storytelling so you can get audiences to want to know them?
This is not a crash course on script-writing, but I can give you a handful of shortcuts I’ve picked up over the years.
While this list is far from comprehensive, if you’re interested in learning more, please feel free to reach out. I’m happy to chat it out with you:
Ask a Question / Set Up a Mystery
It can’t just be “how’s the weather?”
It has to be a fundamentally interesting question. Like setting up a door to a room with a bunch of warning signs on it and asking: “What’s on the other side of this door?”
But even if you’re not writing a thriller, a deep existential question fundamental to the main character should do the trick.
Think like an audience member. Consider the curiosity gap and what would keep them wanting to know more after the first scene.
It’s not enough to tell audiences: “I swear, something interesting is coming.” They have no reason to trust you. Remember: Show, don’t tell. Set up a mystery or ask a question that they simply have to know the answer to.
Use Storytelling Tools Like V.O.
Voice over is a good way to get a lot of information out in a short period of time. Your Friends & Neighbors utilizes voice over pretty well, although since Jon Hamm does the voice over and many of the scenes take place in luxury cars, it can often feel like a Mercedes commercial.
Still, this V.O. helps set up why we should care about the main character and gets through a large stretch of diegetic time in a short - and interesting - period of on-screen time. Once the opening sequence ended, I was hooked.
And I also wanted to lease the new S-Class.
Lean on Genre
Genre conventions give you a shortcut to establishing TTI because audiences already understand the rules of the road.
They know that a horror movie is supposed to be scary, so the first few pages of the script are your opportunity to set up what’s so fucking scary about your world / your characters / the big bad. this is a great time to show the first kill.
The best horror directors will use elements of mystery to further squeeze curiosity out of the audience.
If you’ve ever seen It Follows, you’ll know the first minute or two of the movie is a masterclass in capturing interest. We’re following a young distraught woman who exits her house in a deep panic, speed-walking and escaping something the audience doesn’t see. I won’t spoil the ending to this intro, but it’s an opening sequence that has stuck with me.
You can do this in other genres too, by setting up what’s funny about your world/characters in a comedy or what’s sexy about your world/characters in a romance or what’s actiony about your world in an action movie (see the Mission Impossible movies).
Start with High Emotion
Introduce a character in a highly emotional state and you can get a couple things out of it:
It will help us understand the character, where they are in their life, and…
It will grab our attention with a small mystery: Why is the character in this elevated state?
People crave catharsis. They crave resolution. They want to understand how this character has gotten here, and they want to be there to see how things play out.
And by showing a character in an elevated emotional state right away, you give the audience a reason to empathize with your protagonist from page 1.
Keep Them Watching, Post-Hook
Now that you’ve lowered your Time to Interest and captured your viewer’s attention, you have to hold onto it.
A couple months ago, I was chatting with a writer friend from the world of literature and she mentioned a heuristic that has stuck with me:
Your first job as a writer is to capture the reader’s attention in the first sentence. If you do that, your second job is to capture their attention in the first paragraph. If you manage to do that, your third job is to do so in the first page, the first chapter, and so on.
Basically what she was describing was a cycle, and anyone who knows me knows I love me some cycles.
Audiences are willing to give you a shot, but you gotta keep delivering on your promise. And in order to do that, you have to create a loop similar to the one described by my friend:
I’m sure it seems a cynical and calculated way to look at the world for those of you who harbor a more idealistic view of cinema as art.
But, as I’ve mentioned, audiences don’t owe us shit.
They have a huge selection of entertainment to choose from and they only showed up to your movie / show to be entertained, not to witness your genius artistry play out on screen.
Perhaps Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan have earned enough credibility to tell audiences: “Trust me, something cool is coming, just wait.”
But even if that was the case, they would never tell audiences that. They would - and do - start entertaining them from Moment 1.
That’s exactly what makes them Quentin Tarantino / Christopher Nolan.
Do I have pointers on holding on to audiences once you’ve earned their initial interest?
You bet! But that’s for another time. Hopefully I’ve held onto your interest thus far. Though I suppose you wouldn’t be reading this if I hadn’t...
If you want some help capturing and maintaining audience interest, ping me below to share what you’ve been working on!
Yes: There’s more stuff than ever gumming up the attention of audiences the world over. They have their pick of entertainment, from short-form to long-form to everything in between.
These viewers have grown accustomed to stories that grab their attention in the first few seconds. Stories that are built around their tastes and interests.
And it can seem hopeless trying to compete with 30-second TikToks that are algorithmically optimized just for them.
But it’s not about length. It’s not about hacky viral tactics. And - spoiler alert - it’s not even about their interests.
Viewers are humans, just like us. And just like us, they are endlessly curious, starving for something new and exciting to grab them by the shoulders, shake them and not let them go.
These audiences are willing to go out on a limb, but the burden of proof is on you.
Grab their interest early on and they will give your story a shot. Continue delivering on that promise via deep, interesting characters and they will follow you to the ends of the earth.
So the next time you hear a friend from entertainment lamenting how our attention spans are shrinking, send them this post1.
It might just change their lives.
I’m just being dramatic, it probably won’t.
But send it to them anyway, it’s good for my metrics:
Til next time…
Stay tuned,
Jon
I am a game designer and this is exactly how I approach game making! The audience owes you nothing. You need to show them the fun straight away, and then you can drip feed new rules and systems and complex doo-dads.
My time in mobile games taught me this. Mobile gaming has its issues, to be sure, but just like TikTok, it means your best must be first. It's not enough to assume your audience spent $60 on your game, and therefore will give it 2 hours to see how they like it, you must deliver straight out of the gate.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece!