The Elements of Storytelling: The Atomic Bomb Test

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

Author, podcaster and professor Robert Prince has this thing he does when he watches a movie: the Atomic Bomb test.

“After I’ve watched about 20 minutes of the film I ask myself, ‘If an atomic bomb were to go off and destroy everyone in this film, would I care all that much?’ If the answer is no, I don’t keep watching the film,” he says in his class at the University of Alaska.

He has this test because to make your reader keep reading, they have to care what happens to the characters in the story.

This is true in real life, too, right? When we interact with people, most of us have levels of caring. We might worry and care more about our parent or child when they drop the ice cream carton on their instep than about the random guy in the frozen dairy section of the grocery store when he does it.

But, if that guy starts tearing up, maybe is standing above the ice cream splattered all across the store’s scuffed tile floor and says, “This was for my mom. She’s dying and she asked for rocky road ice cream. This is the last rocky road ice cream!”

Well, yeah, we might care a bit more.

“A key component to storytelling is getting your audience to care about what happens to the characters in your story,” Prince says. “People stick around to hear the end of stories because they have grown to care about the people in the story and want to know what happens to them. If you’ve ever cried when a character died in a movie, then the filmmakers did an awesome job of making you care about the people in that film.”

The question becomes how to do that.

According to Prince, “you can make people care about the characters in your story by describing them well enough that your audience can picture them and recognize them as a certain type of person--maybe like someone they already know. How old are they? What do they look like? What kind of personality do they have? Do they have any particularly unique traits or mannerisms? This is why written news stories about people tend to include some seemingly odd and superficial facts about them at first. Those facts are not included because the reporter is particularly superficial. The reporter included those facts because they know you will not be as invested in what happened to that person if you cannot picture them in your mind.”

Empathy, however, isn’t just built on perfection. We wouldn’t care as much about that grocery store guy with his ice cream if he’d just done the right things, expressed no emotion, and there was a clean up on aisle twelve.

Empathy builds off flaws and human worth, those virtues we love. It’s why Blake Snyder has “Save the Cat” as a trope and an inspiration. We care more about characters who save the cat or the puppy or even the zombie hamster.

“Flaws make characters relatable, more human, and feel a little more like underdogs,” Prince writes. “This is why James Bond has to get beat up in every 007 movie. That’s how the filmmakers show us he is human so we can relate better to him. It’s the same reason Superman has kryptonite. We feel for characters when we see that they have some sort of weakness.”

And that other part is the struggle. We empathize with characters that are having a hard time getting what they want.

So to help your readers empathize with your characters you want to pass that Atomic Bomb test and you do that by . . .

1. Good description and unique mannerisms
2. Flaws
3. Human worth/virtues
4. Struggles

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Be like dogs. Dogs have human worth.

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