![]() ![]() We rarely see stories in which the Mystery Box is used properly from beginning to end. How to Write a Mystery Box Story… or Notįirst, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Let’s take a look at the impact of the Mystery Box on pop culture, and then consider one tweak to the formula that could fix nearly everything that’s wrong with it. The problem is the way it’s been used, and the troubling effect it’s had on audiences. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with using the Mystery Box as a storytelling tool. Audiences do love mysteries, and they enjoy trying to piece hidden clues together in order to see if they can figure out the ending before everyone else does.īut: a mystery is not necessarily a story. To be fair, in the case of Lost and other stories that have used this model - including Game of Thrones, Westworld, and nearly every Christopher Nolan film - he’s mostly right. ![]() This means the audience will keep coming back to scratch their intellectual itch, and spread the word about the mysteries in the process. In the Abrams formula for storytelling, more mysteries = better stories, because every new answer creates more new questions. In the case of Lost, those myseries were compelling questions like: Who are all these people? Where are they? Why are they there? ( When are they there?) How did their plane crash? How will they survive? What unseen force is behind all of this? Who can we trust? ![]()
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