Storytelling isn’t so much about what you reveal or don’t reveal – it’s about ensuring the audience has ‘all the telling details’ they need to believe in your story, writes Dr Erin O’Dwyer
***SPOILER ALERT***
If you’ve watched Season 2 of Severance, you’ll remember Episode 17 – the one where Ms Cobel (the marvellous Patricia Arquette) inexplicably drives to a remote fishing village called Salt’s Neck.
There’s an abandoned Lumon factory, and the locals are sick and substance-addicted. She has strange run-ins with two never-seen-before characters. First, a grizzled café owner Hampton – is he brother, ex-husband or friend, we don’t know. And a raging argument with an older woman called Sissy, who may be her sister or her mother but turns out to be her aunt.
The absence of story logic
There are no other mentions of Salt’s Neck and its significance to the Lumon biotech empire in either season. No foregrounding, no backstory, no strategically placed bread crumbs. Also – and this is something I’ve wondered throughout two seasons now – why the hell does Ms Cobel, a senior Lumon company executive, drive a clapped out old VW Golf?
The Salt’s Neck scene is rich in mood and mystery, but ultimately it’s frustrating. We don’t know why she’s there, what motivates her rage or why she coaxes an old friend/lover/husband to help her.
Ultimately, she retrieves blueprints which prove her role as the inventor of Lumon’s radical technologies. But the climax comes out of the blue. The episode would have landed better had we been ‘backgrounded’ about her creation, the role Salt’s Neck plays in the Lumon story, how Hampton and Sissy were involved, and why it meant so much to her to be recognised as the original inventor.
When it comes to storytelling, lack of sense-making detail is a problem. As screenwriting legend Robert McKee writes in Story, “authenticity depends on the telling detail”. With just a few precise, purposeful details, an audience can fill in the rest. But when there’s nothing, the illusion collapses. The audience stops believing. And reaches for the remote.
With just a few precise, purposeful details, an audience can fill in the rest
Characters don’t emerge from a void
McKee warns that characters can’t appear from nowhere. Writers must give characters backstory – a sequence of meaningful events that reveal why they do what they do. The Salt’s Neck episode offers none of that. We have only a few hints about Cobel’s past, and none of them explain her erratic and irrational behaviour. There’s no sense of how this detour fits the narrative. It’s a pretty interlude unmoored from context – a red herring with no payoff.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have mystery. Or in the case of Severence, a mystery that runs from season to season. You can also be sparing with details, asking the audience to draw on their imagination. But audiences need something to work with. As McKee says, the struggle in storytelling lies in crafting “authenticity, not eccentricity”.
(Side bar: Severance is fabulous, watch it. The actors, cinematographers and set/costume designers work to the edge of their limits to produce memorable small-screen storytelling. But the S2 writers and directors seem so enamoured by their own success in S1 that they have forgotten some of the basics of their craft.)
Storytelling lies in crafting “authenticity, not eccentricity”
The power of internal drivers
When I teach storytelling, I emphasise the law of internal drivers. Every character, every event, must deepen our understanding of the central themes and help propel the plot. The same goes for every subplot, snippet of dialogue or beautiful description. Otherwise, you’re breaking the law – Chekhov’s Law, that is.
The basis of Chekhov’s Law is not to introduce anything that isn’t significant to the plot. That is, if you show a gun in Act I, it has to go off by Act II or III. Every element must serve a purpose.
Ms Cobel’s cronies in Salt’s Neck may have meaning in later seasons. But when they get so much significant screen time in Season 2, we need to understand who they are in Season 2. To fail to do so is taking the audience for granted.
Lessons for storytellers
The law of internal drivers applies whether you’re writing memoir, fiction, screenwriting, podcasting or brand storytelling.
So if you’re writing a story – for screen, page, stage or brand – ask yourself:
1. Does this character, location or scene connect to the story’s central question?
2. Will the audience understand its significance by the end?
3. What meaning is lost if this element is removed?
Meaningless mystery isn’t mystery. It’s noise. And it erodes trust in the story you’re trying to tell.
