Years ago, when my marketing work began gaining traction and outperforming previous sales standards, I naturally began to wonder why. Since a good part of my job involved analyzing the strengths and weaknesses in previous campaigns for the same client I was taking on, I began looking at my own work the same way.
I concluded that human beings look for and respond to patterns. In the arts, we look for familiar patterns (attractive because they comfort and self-assurance), overly-familiar patterns (cliches – usually ignored), incomplete patterns (an important, powerful tack that engages our primal puzzle-solving instincts), and alien (unfamiliar, possibly unsettling) patterns (not so engaging as 'incomplete' patterns, but often similarly attention-getting). These patterns can be shapes and colors, or they can be concepts within a story, and combining the two (as a movie or comic book does) is powerful.
When I began creating political messages I combined my visual/textual pattern theories, and the effect was startling. My underfunded candidates, many of whom were the same folks who had been drubbed in previous elections, quickly moved to the front ranks and began winning.
The GIF shown here describes a pattern (the cylinders in disarray) moving to an expected completion (lining up), in much the way people expect a story to move to a completion. It is, as the commentator notes, a 'satisfying' process. In a book, people look for minor pattern completions (the end of a paragraph 'completing' the beginning, the end of a chapter closing out the premise of its opening) and of course major completions (commonly called the story arc, carried out over the course of the book).
This series of interlocking, or interwoven, patterns was carried out better in the first Harry Potter than in any book I have ever read. That is not to say Potter was 'the best book ever', but merely that it conformed to our brains' hardwiring better than anything I ever read. The subsequent books did more or less the same thing, just not quite as fully or well. (This is truly a Herculean and maybe impossible task over a long series of books, and would more or less necessitate writing the entire series at once. For many pragmatic reasons, this has never to my knowledge been done.)
Stories and song are more or less vital to our mental health, but we are bombarded a lot of 'fast food' stories (written for profit, serving a commercial agenda rather than serving a purpose) in our diet today, and that is a problem in our society. It has lead to a great deal of the social disconnect, alienation, depression, suicide, and so-called 'mental illness' that we see in abundance all around us today.
Not that a writer working for profit cannot also fulfill the more important and satisfying niche that storytelling fills in the human heart. Indeed, I would guess that the more of this need a story addresses, the more commercially-successful it is apt to be. For example, take Charles Dickens – as 'commercial' a writer who ever lived. He understood the nature of patterns in his commercial success, once observing that his audience did not care how far-flung and convoluted his plots became, so long as he bound them up with a neat bow at the end.
When Dickens wrote Christmas Carol (in about 6 weeks, and he self-published it, too), there was no such thing as a 'white Christmas', and in fact, Christmas was not widely celebrated. (When Scrooge grudgingly asked Cratchitt if he expected Christmas off, he wasn't being such an outrageous curmudgeon for the era in which he lived. Probably many employers at that time were on the fence about it.) But Dickens, probably subconsciously, had caught wind of ideas that had been building in the public's mind for some time. There had been a quiet trend towards growth in Christmas as a holiday of meaning and significance. What Christmas Carol managed to do was embody a spirit, if you will, that existed at the time, but which had no commonly-accepted cultural reference point the public could access. This is the most noble and socially-vital goal of all storytelling and art.
Christmas Carol filled an an important social need. Dickens, though, did not entirely grasp what he had accomplished. He thought Christmas Carol's broad acceptance meant he ought to turn out a new Christmas story every year, which he did faithfully for a number of years after. But nothing came close to Christmas Carol, precisely because that story captured and gave voice to something that was already in the public consciousness. That is the real power of such a story.
To a degree, even a purely commercial jingle can tap into the public ID in a manner similar to a Christmas Carol. 'Where's the Beef?' became shorthand for a widespread and deeply-felt dissatisfaction with empty (usually corporate or political) promises.
More recently, the author Lisa Cron took the same idea from a somewhat different POV (for me it was spirit, pschology and art, for her it is 'science'). Her book is a worthwhile read, and a further exploration of these ideas.
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