But then what? Imagine if Doc managed to harness the power of lightning, get Marty home, and the movie just ended. Stories can’t just end on a high point, or they’re as unsatisfying as a cliffhanger. Once Marty gets back to the future, he still needs to actually get home. For that, you have the falling action or denouement.
Falling Action or Denouement
Have you ever listened in frustration to someone having a conversation on her mobile phone? If you had to listen to the entire conversation in person, with both participants audible, it wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating. You could probably tune the conversation out or listen and just not care. It turns out that the main reason why these conversations are so frustrating is that your brain naturally wants to complete the conversation. Just hearing half triggers an automatic, unsatisfying response that leads to frustration. Researchers call this phenomenon a halfalogue: half of a conversation that your brain naturally and uncontrollably tries to complete.1
Humans, it turns out, need closure. Stories, likewise, need closure so that humans can feel closure.
Imagine if The Wizard of Oz ended after Dorothy had defeated the wicked witch. Goal met. The end. You’d be frustrated. Your brain would jump into overdrive as you wondered what then? What about Kansas? Your mind would jump full circle as you started to remember the exposition of the story and wanted to know not just how evil was defeated, but how the story ended. What happened to Dorothy after she defeated the witch? For this reason, stories need not just to resolve their conflict and show characters meeting their goals, but also to have a fancy ending called a denouement, a word derived from the French meaning “to unknot.” This is the part of the story when the conflict is resolved and the action starts slowing down in pace and excitement toward the closing scene. It’s how everything in the story gets wrapped up.
The line between the climax/resolution, falling action, and ending can be blurry and happen so quickly that it’s hard to discern the difference between one and another. What matters is that the climax is exciting, and it resolves the major conflict or problem—the falling action leads to closure. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly goes home (see Figure 2.9). This is the falling action for many adventure tales: the hero goes home.
Tension releases. Ah…all is good in the world.
And…it’s important that home is better than when the story started and where the character left it. In this case, it’s much better. Marty’s parents are successful. Biff is his family’s servant. Marty got the truck he always wanted. Not bad.
Ideally, the falling action or denouement should happen as quickly as possible. As much as humans need closure, they’re also impatient beings. Once the action has died down, there is only so much that can keep your attention. Just because you want closure, doesn’t mean it needs to be dragged out with a 10-minute long ticker-tape parade. (I’m looking at you, George Lucas.)
FIGURE 2.9 After his adventure through time, Marty lands back home in his present-day Hill Valley.
End
Quite literally, the end is the end. Characters grow throughout a story and should be changed by the end. Remember that big goal established in the exposition? How did it all work out? At this point, the character should meet her goal and hopefully learn something along the way. Along the same lines, just like your cave-dwelling ancestors, you should be changed and have had a new experience, or have learned something by the end of a good story.
In Back to the Future, the story ends with Marty’s girlfriend asking him if everything is OK. “Everything,” Marty says, “is perfect.” They embrace (see Figure 2.10). Now, if this were a classic Hollywood film, the two would kiss, the screen would fade to black, and the credits would roll. The end.
FIGURE 2.10 All is well. Marty and his girlfriend embrace.
But as you may remember, this is the first installment of what would become a trilogy. Before you get too comfortable in your plush movie seat or sofa, you see a flash and Doc running up the driveway. Something’s not right. There’s a problem and Doc needs help. Where does he want to take them? To the future! And so a new story is kickstarted…a sequel. Just because a story has comes to an end and has closure doesn’t mean it can’t lead to another story…and another. We call those serial stories. Serials keep us engaged episode by episode. Serials are fun.
Building Products with Story
“…in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby.”
—Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Let’s face it: you probably don’t make multi-million dollar epic movies like Star Wars; instead, you make websites, software, digital or non-digital services—all things that people don’t just consume, but actually use. Just as with a movie, story flows through how people find, think about, use, and recommend your products.
Consider this photo for a moment (see Figure 2.11). It tells a story of an Apple product that comes installed on every iPhone. You can probably guess what product it is.
FIGURE 2.11 A still image from an Apple commercial showing two people using a built-in iPhone app.
Assuming you guessed FaceTime, you are correct. If you guessed “Tinder for seniors,” that’s not an Apple product. But, as some of my past workshop attendees have demonstrated, a product like that also has a compelling story to it: a story that you can easily use to prototype to test out a design hypothesis. What we see in this still photograph is an entire story encapsulated in one simple frame. Rather than spell it out for you, I want you to take a moment to consider this narrative within the framework I’ve laid out so far.
What do you see?
How do you know that these people are using FaceTime?
Well, they’re older, so maybe they’re grandparents. They’re smiling. What makes grandparents smile? Grandchildren? And? Maybe their grandchildren are far away, and they want to see them. Why can’t they see them? It’s too expensive to fly and not realistic to do that on a regular basis. Why not call them up? They already have an iPhone or an iPad and use it to play the crossword puzzles all day. And so forth…they are calling them up. Just with video. Using FaceTime is as easy as using the phone. It is a phone. But with video. You just look at it instead of holding it up to your ear…like magic.
This is the type of computational math that your brain makes during a series of microseconds when you look at a photograph like this and try to understand what you see. Your brain seeks out a story in the data it consumes. And that story has a structure to it, whether you realize