AUDIENCE MOTIVATORS

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Storytelling Telling stories is the oldest human social activity known to mankind.  It has been with us always, and always will be with us. Why? By the time each one of us has reached adolescence, we have experienced loss, pain, death, bereavement and minimal reward.  More than anything else, we have come to realise that the only thing that is certain in life, is that change will happen. The problem is that change is rarely rewarding, even though we may look forward to it with the adventurous eyes of innocent childhood As we enter adulthood, and we start going through the pain of relationships, we come to learn that there is a possibility, or maybe even a probability, or maybe a certainty, that relationships will come to an end. We will dump or be dumped, no matter how many "and they lived happily ever after" stories we read. We come to learn that what we have to do to cope with the great and fearful unknown is to build up in a our minds a personal library of strategies to deal with change. We build up those strategies by listening to stories, reading books, watching films and TV, listening to the idle gossip of other people in a by queue. (Copyright Howard Thomas 2002) Fear and Hope Change, and the fear of it, seems to meld together many of our complex emotions into just two simple ones.  The whole process is complex and is related to our compulsive "divining" of the future (illustrated by the need to read "Horoscopes"), but we have this overwhelming need - to know what is going to happen. this leads us to approach many of our social and actualisation activities with two basic emotions: FEAR that something awful will happen, and HOPE that something nice will happen. Looking at it this way makes it very easy to understand audiences.  the come to listen to and watch our stories with fear and hope.  They like our stories even more if they leave feeling hopeful. But If you are going to make the science of entertainment that simple, then you are in for big trouble. How on earth can entertainment be that simple?

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