I was stunned when I got back. The restrooms had been tagged as “unsafe” by some governmental authority and locked shut. People were sleeping in the mud between the buildings. Valuable equipment was missing, and the people I had left in charge were nowhere to be found.

I called my partner: “Have you seen what’s going on down here?”

She said, “What’s wrong?”

“You had better get down here. Like now,” I told her.

The situation seemed to be unrecoverable and without explanation. How the hell could this have happened, and so quickly?

I woke up, panicked.

When I eventually managed to get back to sleep, I found myself in an exquisite coffee shop, elevated above the street. It went on for most of the block, open to the outside air and beautifully finished with sanded maple beams and panels.

At the end of the shop, I was delighted to find my longtime friend Katy as the owner and proprietor of this magnificent space. She looked happier than I could remember having seen her for many years. She was at peace and in her element.

When again I woke, I remembered that the Katy I knew in this “real life” had been dead for several years now.

But who is to say that I hadn’t been able to visit her in a realm different from this one, in the “better place” we so often wish for those who are recently departed?

Who’s to say that what we choose to believe isn’t as real as any other belief - as real as any other life?

————

Tell A Story

The excerpt above is a brief story about dreaming. In the story are two different situations with very different emotions. Each has details that help describe the scenario, and each ends with a question to be pondered by the reader.

Humans are story tellers and story consumers. It’s in our DNA. Many of the earliest artifacts that evidence our creation are stories. Hieroglyphs and steles long predate writing in the modern sense and each relates a tale.

The stories are not that different from those told today: epic hunts, great battles, revered leaders, powerful deities. As story tellers, creators have one necessary component and many available tools.

It’s All About the Emotion

Emotion is the element that must exist for any story to have impact. The intent of the story is irrelevant. Are you a “content creator” in search of exposure for your personal brand? A professor trying to express the massive impact and importance of music to humanity? A writer or filmmaker hoping to hold the attention of your audience? Maybe you just want to create an effective :15 jingle for a podcast or radio station.

Minus emotion, your story is sure to fall upon the proverbial “deaf ears” (and eyes, and hearts…) of your audience.

This emotional predilection is not accidental. Deep within our brains lies the limbic system, a primitive and powerful part of our brains that exists to alert us to potential danger, a potential mate, a desirable resting spot.

We spend our lifetimes and define our maturity in terms of our success in taming this formidable beast. We learn to delay our gratification, to work for decades toward a desired goal, to avoid certain situations altogether. To succumb to the raw, unchecked power of the limbic system is to invite banishment, incarceration, death.

The limbic system connects emotion with action. And all of your creative efforts contain a call to action, whether implicit or explicit.

I’ll have a great deal more to say about emotion in future Parts of this series, but know that all the gimmicks and “techniques” in the world will have minuscule effect without a call to emotion.

Pick the Mystery

Once you identify and successfully convey the emotional tone of your creation, there are many other creative factors to consider. One of the most compelling is mystery.

Imagine a spectrum of explicit detail. On one end is the purely educational, the purpose of which is the delivery of facts. On this end of the spectrum you find Wikipedia entries, poorly written textbooks, operating manuals and mathematical formulae.

The other endpoint of this spectrum evinces paintings by Dali, John Cage compositions, and films like Inception and Jacob’s Ladder, which evoke strongly held and diametrically opposed interpretations on the part of audiences worldwide.

You, as creator, get to decide where to place your masterpiece on the spectrum of mystery. Contrast two versions of an advertisement about a movie:

“Bad guy comes to town. Local guy becomes a hero and kills bad guy.”

“No information in INTERPOL or NCIC, no known military records. A ghost with a considerable skillset. Why is a reclusive high school English teacher in a small Midwestern town a target for an international assassin?”

There is an implicit and powerful call to action in the second version, courtesy of emotion and mystery. “What is going on?” “Which one is really the bad guy?” “Who will prevail?”

Even if you strongly suspect you know the ending, you will watch (or read or listen) to see how the story unfolds, to experience the emotion. (More John Wick or The Equalizer or Saw, anyone?)

Beyond Words

Emotion and mystery can exist in any medium. Whether you create wordy, detailed novels or more abstract works of music, paintings and graphic art, your ability to move someone is critical.

The life of a creator is dedicated to expressing the numinous in such a way that you capture the audience’s imagination.

As Walt Disney put it: “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”

Start your story with an eye to emotion and mystery.

This article is dedicated to Katy, my long-time real-life friend, never forgotten and sorely missed.




I am a creator (musician, writer, live-streamer and podcaster), entrepreneur, educator and counselor.


To learn more about how to use these concepts or to inquire about working with me, you can contact me through my website, the comments section on my Substack or Medium accounts or The Authentic Life Blog page. If you have found value in this article, follow my Instagram account for daily insights, or my X account for occasional tweets. To support this community, you can Buy Me A Coffee or donate through my Patreon account.

Subscribe to my River of Creation podcast - The Podcast for Creators, coming later this year, wherever you download your podcasts, and my associated YouTube channel.

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- JWW