How to Use Your Audience’s Imagination to Tell Your Story — Less Is Definitely More

Rule 1: Never tell the audience what they already know.

Rule 2: Knowing what to leave out is as important as what to leave in.

The crux of this blog is “Never dramatize what the reader can imagine for themselves”; at least for on-screen drama. Novelists may need to give this some thought. But for screenwriters letting the audience fill in the blanks of the on-screen story with their own imagination is infinitely more effective and powerful then walking them through something they have already anticipated and essentially written in their own minds.

Case in point, here’s an example from Downton Abbey by master story-teller Julian Fellowes. Warning, spoiler alert from Season 2, Episode 7.

After returning from the war Thomas buys a shed full of flour and baking supplies to capitalize on the post-war shortage. He sells a sample to Mrs. Patmore, the Abbey cook, for use in the kitchens. She tests the wares by baking them into a cake. After it comes out of the oven she and Daisy (her assistant) taste the cake but both spit it out in disgust — it’s inedible! Mrs. Patmore takes a pinch of the ‘flour’ directly from the package and discovers its not flour at all, it’s plaster dust!

Fellows then cuts away. The next scene is another story thread concerning other characters. But our anticipation is already building as to what is going to happen next between Thomas and Mrs. Patmore…