Steven Pressfield says nobody wants to read your shit. And in many ways that sounds very true.
As an aspiring storyteller, the audience question is something that’s always on the mind. It seems almost impossible to predict if a story would succeed or fail. The lamest stories told on the silver screen have gone on to become blockbusters and the best stories told on the same screen have flopped utterly.
I have theories that I will get to test in the future years.
One of them is the “One Single Way” which I’ll probably write about much later. Right now, as I read Pressfield’s “Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit”, I’m thinking about another theory.
There are two kinds of stories:
- Stories that need to be told - these are the stories close to your heart, your passion but stories that you are not sure people might like or want to see/hear/read about.
- Stories that people want to hear - remember the commercial flicks with all the elements of what we Indians call “masala movies”?
Over time of course, the stories people want to hear changes hue and color but the “commerciality” of it remains pretty much the same. Entertainment > infotainment > information.
So, if I want to tell stories that need to be told, nobody is going to want to read/see my shit. But in some way, the story that needs to be told can be made into a story that people want to hear. Without losing the values to blatant commercialism.
I’m thinking of a story.
A story set in a village whose border brushes with a forest that’s being eroded by human expansion. A story where two jungle leopards stray frequently into the village and hunt the goats. Then one of them turns a man-eater and is brutally murdered, limbs amputated, hanged at the center of the village as a mark of human superiority overcoming the fierce jungle animal.
The other one turns man-eater too - quite naturally now that I think of it - and now starts another hunt for the man-eater. And this hunt is what reveals the many faces of our greed, our ego and our love.
You see when I say it this way, nobody is interested in this story (naturally; I didn’t mention any human character at all in what’s obviously not an animated short about animals). But even if I did mention the human protagonists involved in the story, it’s a story nobody wants to hear.
I theorize that this is because there’s nothing in it for the average Joe in the city. He’s far removed from almost every aspect of the story.
If I want Joe to see my story, I must make him want to see it on his own. And the one way to do that is to put him in the story. Make the story his. It’s his story — in some way.
A majority of the cinema audiences are now in the cities. A story like the one I described above has no bearing / connectivity to a lot of the folks even if they’ve read about human-animal conflict and encroachments and poaching and whatnot. Not many know that Jim Corbett was a hunter who hunted man-eaters (and was specifically called to do so). In fact, not many know that a man called Kenneth Anderson existed in South India and was popular for many hunts. And nobody gives a shit.
Not till it’s their story somehow. Not till they realize that they are part of it in a very visceral way.
So, if I want to make John Doe want to hear the story, I have to find a way to make this story his. (There’s a huge difference between making the story his and making the story about him. Two very different things, sir.)
In restrospect, I think it’s all about creating something and handing over the ownership to the people that you want to be your audience.