FROM BLUR TO BULLSEYE: USING STORY SCIENCE TO TRANSFORM YOUR WRITING AND PRODUCING.
- Modern Rituals
- Feb 18
- 10 min read
Why you should stop trying to please everyone - and start writing and creating for one
Around many executive meetings for film and TV there are usually thoughts and conversations about how to broaden the audience for a project, in order to maximise revenue. Appeal to a wider audience and you should be more profitable.
This can backfire when we start out developing our projects. Getting clear on clarity of our audience, which is 1 and 1 (explained below) improves storytelling across film, TV and theatre.
Lets start off with two examples. When The Walking Dead launched in 2010 and became a juggernaut, it was averaging 12-15m live (!) views per episode during seasons 6 and 7 (2015+2016). The show started out tightly focused on an audience composed of fans that loved survival horror, the lore from the graphic novels, following Ric Grimes’ deep character arc (remember when his pregnant wife died and he came back to find a zombie had eaten her dead body?) and the constant high stakes zombie threats. You never knew which character was going to survive from episode to episode. Whether to keep the show going or to take it in a different direction, in later seasons there was less of a focus on what made the show popular with fans in the beginning, and an adjustment to serve “everyone”. The ratings dropped significantly and it lost the edge that it started with.
This year’s BAFTA nominee for Best British Film, Best Screenplay and Best Actor, I Swear, is a great example of a different experience to The Walking Dead. Writer and Director Kirk Jones and his wife sold their house to help finance the budget, adding it to a bank loan (for the reported £2.8m budget). They had an early conversation with a sales distributor about the film, and Kirk was worried about all the swearing in the film (the film deals with a man with Tourette's Syndrome):
“I was told how much the budget was going to be, and my key worry was that because there was so much swearing in there, if we went a traditional route to finance the film, someone would start saying, ‘Guys, listen, you’ve got to bring it down. You’ve just got to bring the C-word down and the F-word down.’ And we only had one informal conversation with one UK sales agent and they said exactly that..”
Jones instead opted to focus on his vision and audience. He wasn’t trying to chase a wider audience, he kept all the authenticity from the source material (the screenplay was based on a book I Swear: My Life with Tourette’s by John Davidson). As a result the film has so far earned US $ 8.55m off it’s $ 3.84m (£2.8m) budget. Referencing the sales executive, Jones said:
“They basically said, ‘Look, we love it, but in its current form, we don’t think we can take on because people are going to have trouble with the swearing.’ And by then I was so invested in Tourette's and John, I knew that the swearing wasn’t an issue. And the film, if you look online, there must be thousands of people who have commented on the film. Luckily, most people like it. I haven’t seen one single comment about the swearing, because as soon as the film starts, you understand that it has no meaning at all. It’s not said in malice, it’s not vicious, it’s not violent. It’s a medical condition.” (Read the article with Kirk here)
Defining our audience is important. Because that audience will see the story, and through their passion, word of mouth will bring others. Rather than making a film for everyone in order to attract the largest possible audience and end up making it for no one.
In practice this can be similar to creating an audience avatar, like in traditional marketing. The usual questions they ask include:
1. Hyper-Specificity
Detail age, job, income, location, family status, hobbies, values, and media habits (e.g., "Sarah, 42, London day trader, loves DOW scalping and home renos, follows Next Home on Instagram"). Base it on real data from sales, surveys, or analytics, not assumptions.
2. Pain Points and Goals
Identify daily struggles (e.g., "risk management in volatile markets") and aspirations (e.g., "systematic trading profits"), then craft messages solving them precisely.
3. Psychographics Over Demographics Alone
Go beyond "35-44 female" to values, fears, and influences—ensuring content resonates emotionally.
4. Ideal, Not Average
Focus on high-value repeat buyers who refer others, not casual purchasers.
The above is taken from the pages of a marketing textbook and is a bit dry. But the marketing teams in the studios and streamers around the world are thinking like this.
How can having them in mind help to unconsciously steer us in the right direction with the narrative and character arcs of our stories?
Part of it involves having these ideas in mind and intention. If we are not thinking about this then we can’t be influenced by it. Another way to use it is to sense check our audience against the developments in our narrative: are we chasing a mass audience and diluting our story, or does this next movement of the story target our one viewer and their experience? We are always in service in storytelling, and having our audience in mind helps to keep us aligned with this. And it’s not limited to screen. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton targeted history buffs and hip-hop lovers, blending eras with laser focus. He didn’t try to focus on or please everyone, and as a result created a widely appealing play.
Target one viewer. Their clarity sharpens every plot turn, dialogue, and beat across mediums.
I mentioned earlier about focusing on a 1 + 1 audience. The first 1 is our core audience, detailed above. The second 1 is…yourself.
Denis Villneuve in an interview for Dune said:
"I make films for me"
It reflects his deep personal connection to his work, especially in the case of Dune. He made the films to please the fan of the book he was as a teenager. It emphasizes a passion-driven, authentic approach rather than chasing trends or mass appeal, focusing on creating an immersive, personal vision that resonates deeply with him and aims to honor the source material's spirit. If in doubt about your audience, follow your intuition, you can’t go wrong. As a great example of this check out Denis’ early short film Next Floor, where he focused on making a film for himself and his peers, not a mass audience. It was selected for a multitude of festivals including Cannes and Sundance, winning many awards and setting him off on the next stage in his career. Watch the film below (well worth it) and the 2nd video after, which takes you through his filmography.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING
- WILL STORR
Following on from our Learning of the Month on audience above, our book of the month deepens our understanding of the science and the how of what makes a story connect with an audience.
If you manage to weave the spell from the start, you can take an audience on the journey of the narrative. If you don’t then it’s an uphill battle given the amount of distraction in modern life. It’s a regular occurrence for audiences to be on their phone while watching a film or TV series.
When we are crafting screenplays, as well as producing, there are three core things that we have to deal with:
1. How to construct a story arc that sits logically and well with the audience (remember when someone in a cinema blurts out in words or reaction something to the effect “WHAT! That doesn’t make sense”)
2. Creating 4D characters that have believable motivations, intentions and lives
3. Capturing and investing the audience’s attention in our story
Storr’s book helps us to unlock the workings behind these core dilemmas by getting at the science of storytelling that has existed since humans began. He argues that stories work because they mirror how the human brain constructs reality: as cause and effect narratives centred on a flawed heroic self. This is strongly linked to the Hero’s Journey paradigm of Joseph Campbell.
There’s a reason for the classical 3 Act structure in Film and TV, including 5 Acts in theatre. It is based on his core idea above: it takes time to set up the world and character and then to introduce the cause and effect of the narrative, so that the flawed hero can overcome internal and external battles in order to arrive a new place of understanding.
Storr argues that we don’t just enjoy stories as humans - we are storytellers all the time, constantly turning the lives we experience into narratives. We become the moral protagonist trying to exert control in a constantly changing world. This is one of the basis of religions and spiritual traditions (for example in Buddhism, to let go of suffering and recognise a lack of control)
Storr has a lot of interesting things to say in meeting the three challenges above to ultimately grip and affect an audience:
1. Character over Plot
a. Compelling stories start with character - not with an abstract plot template
b. In creating our characters, remember that each has a ”theory of control” - a set of beliefs about how the world works and how to get what they want and avoid what they fear. For eg Michael Corleone in The Godfather - His “theory of control” could be summed up as: “The world is dangerous and disloyal, so the only way to protect my family and get what I want is to consolidate power, anticipate betrayal, and strike first.”
He believes loyalty can’t be trusted on sentiment alone; it must be enforced through fear, obligation, and calculated deals.
To get what he wants (family safety, respect, power), he takes over the family business, eliminates rivals, and even removes threats inside his own family structure.
To avoid what he fears (vulnerability, humiliation, loss of family), he becomes more secretive and ruthless, cutting off personal attachments that might weaken his control.
c. At the core of a character’s “theory of control” exists a “sacred flaw” - a central wrong belief that shapes their behaviour and which our narrative will challenge. This is so a character can grow, and vicariously the audience, through watching. Taking our eg of Michael Corleone, his “Sacred flaw” is
“If I gain enough power and make ruthless choices in the name of ‘family,’ I can keep the people I love safe without losing them.”
That wrong belief drives him to:
Equate protection with domination and preemptive violence, justifying murder and betrayal as necessary “for the family.”
Sacrifice his own moral compass and emotional connections (Kay, Fredo, eventually his children) while still insisting it is all to protect them.
Miss the central contradiction: the more he controls and eliminates threats, the more isolated and loveless his life becomes, until he has destroyed the very family he was trying to save.
In story terms, the narrative keeps challenging Michael’s sacred flaw by showing that his strategy “works” in a very limited, narrow and tactical way (winning the war, eliminating rivals) but it utterly fails at his deeper goal of preserving a loving, intact family. This is where the tragedy of his character lies.
How invested are you already in that discussion about Michael Corleone above? Does it make you want to see the film? I do, and I have already seen it again recently. This is part of the science of hooking an audience that Storr is getting at.
2. Change, curiosity and cause-effect
a. Stories begin with an inciting change that disrupts the character’s world and triggers an unexpected reaction. This is the basis of the three act structure, with Act 1 (set up) introducing us to the world and moving us along to the inciting incident, an event that sets the character on a 180 degree path change and the rest of the narrative.
Taking our Corleone example, the inciting change/incident is the attempt on Vito Corleone’s life. Up to this point in the narrative Michael lives in a separate world where he is a war hero and with Kay. The shooting blows this separation up, so the “unexpected reaction” is that Michael (who was supposed to stay clean) is brought into the centre of the criminal world the family inhabits. He volunteers to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey, something no one expected from the “civilian” son, and crosses a moral line he can’t uncross.
b. Human brains find sequences of clear cause and effect easiest to follow and also the most engaging. That’s why stories are stronger when they move in very clear causal chains, rather than loose and illogical events. The latter is why an audience will groan in the final act because something illogical has happened to suit the plot and get the audience to the next place that the writer wants to get to.
c. Every scene should open an “information gap” (a question about what will happen or why it happened), keeping the audience curious. In The Godfather and the restaurant killing scene, gaps come around:
Will Michael really go through with the killing, or lose his nerve at the last moment?
Has the gun been planted exactly where Clemenza promised, or is something going to be wrong?
If Michael succeeds, what will this do to his place in the family and with Kay?
3. Conscious Plot and inner world
a. Storr gives us an already understood distinction between the outer “Landscape of action” (visible events) and the inner “landscape of the mind” (thoughts, feelings, secrets)
b. Good stories show how external events steadily crack the character’s inner model of reality, forcing them into crisis and change. Michael is an example of this, as he gets deeper into the web of crime that the family is involved in, his innocence is shattered, becoming a different person to who he once was.
c. As the character’s old model fails, repressed parts of their self surface leading to drama and transformation or a tragic refusal to change. Note the final scene in The Godfather when Michael tells Kay to leave, and the door closes as she watches Michael consult with his consigliere as he has become The Godfather.
How can we use this in storytelling?
Define a characters sacred flaw and theory of control and make sure the plot is set up to repeatedly test and break it.
Use change, information gaps and tight cause-effect to keep attention. Make sure as with the point above, you are connecting external events in your narrative to the character’s inner struggle.
Read through the example of Michael Corleone from The Godfather with the script. Learn by reading through the plot and narrative set up and choices.
The book is well worth reading for the science behind stories affecting us as they do and a guide to developing stronger character driven narratives that approach truth and realism.
Listen to Will’s TED talk below for more into his insights.
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