Framing narrative drive as debt lends insight about credibility

Summary: To keep your audience engaged, don’t make a huge promise and then require your audience to sit through your whole story to get to the payoff. Instead, build credibility by paying off open loops all along the way.

This year, writer and entrepreneur Nathan Baugh wrote a post on his Substack introducing an excellent metaphor for narrative drive: debt. I love this metaphor. It perfectly describes how narrative drive works. When you introduce an “open loop” you make a promise to your audience. It’s like taking out a loan and pledging to pay it back. Your audience expects you’ll make good on that agreement.

If your payment is late or less than the amount of the loan, you’re in trouble. Your payoff fizzles, and your audience loses confidence in you. If, on the other hand, you pay earlier and better than expected, you place yourself in good standing. Your audience will “lend” to you again.

Establishing credit and credibility

Think of your audience as a bank. A first-time debtor won’t be able to go to a bank and ask for a hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans. Without proven credit history, a bank would be — quite reasonably — hesitant to take that risk.

Rather, the debtor needs to first take out a smaller loan and pay it off according to the bank’s terms. Once they can do that, the bank will be willing to give them a slightly larger loan on slightly longer terms. And again, if they pay that debt off and the next and the next, they can eventually work up to the place where they can ask for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, and the bank will gladly loan it to them. They have a history of making good on their debts.

It’s the same for storytelling. I can’t ask you to read my stories and say, “Believe me, it’ll be worth it. You’ll get a Brandon Sanderson level payoff!” Audiences may be willing to read a thousand pages of The Way of Kings, but that’s because Sanderson has already established credibility. He’s paid back lots of loans, so the banks are ready to lend. As an unknown author, I don’t have that history with the banks yet. It’s kind of a long shot to even get you to read a single one of my stories.

Steve Jobs, Suzanne Collins, and first lines

In his post, Nathan uses two examples of narrative debt: Steve Jobs’ famous iPhone introduction and Suzanne Collins’ introduction to The Hunger Games.

Jobs’ example only further underscores my point about credibility. Jobs implies a huge promise at the beginning of his pitch, claiming to have a product that will “revolutionize” the world. That’s a big loan he’s asking to take out. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If I walked in off the street in San Francisco and told an auditorium full of tech people I was going to do that, they’d rightly laugh me off the stage. But Apple had already proven that they could deliver compelling products. Was Jobs “selling it”? Of course. He was a consummate marketer. But also: He had credibility.

Nathan’s example in Suzanne Collins is a great counterpoint. Collins starts off by taking and paying small debts. Little loops she opens and stacks and closes. She establishes credit and builds it up slowly, proving to her lenders that she’s good for it.

Lastly, this is one reason why “zinger” first lines are so compelling. They demonstrate, right from the start, that a storyteller can take a debt and pay it off. As audiences, it gives us a sense we’re in good hands. We can sit back and relax. This loan is less risky; this debtor knows what they’re doing.

We can expect to be paid.

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