I write for TV. A few years ago, I had a pitch meeting with a network executive. It was a typical meeting. It began with the usual chitchat, talking about a mutual friend. Then she asks the line they always ask.
“So, what have you got.”
I describe a few TV ideas I’ve been thinking about. A comedy cop shows. A comedy law show. Some others. I’m trying to sound spontaneous, although I’ve got a version in my bag where it’s all written out, with lovely matching graphics, just in case I have to leave something behind.
But I can see today’s meeting is going nowhere. She asks polite questions, but she’s bored. When a person listens to pitches for a living, it’s amazing how fast their eyes glaze over when they hear one they don’t care about!
I mention another idea. This one was about an once-successful stage magician who’s trying to resuscitate his career. For some reason, that one caught her imagination. Now there’s a different look in her eyes. It’s a trance. Staring, interested. Exactly the same you get from a child when you read them a bedtime story.
What really struck me, in that meeting, was how powerful an effect that “story trance” has on us.
Here’s a woman whose job is to listen to dozens of stories every day for a living, sifting through the good, the bad and the awful. But even for someone in the story business, stories have power of them. They can be entranced and transported just like the rest of us.
We’re wired to be fascinated by stories. We’re programmed to be sucked into a story trance. Why does it happen? How can you make it happen?
That’s what this blog is about.