Trust

In yesterday's post, I ended up talking about trust. As the storyteller, you are the leader of the story. You are tacitly promising to your audience that they will receive a reward for following you from the beginning to the end of your story. The reward is either the sum of experiences or a great twist at the end or some great thought to ponder and consider beyond the story and into life.

But trust has to be earned. It also has to be maintained. One may give you the benefit of the doubt because you are offering a story and they do not know you. They are not taking a huge risk, just the investment of their time. But if you do not give them a rewarding story, you have lost their trust. They will not want to hear any more of what you've got.

As I said yesterday, when I lead somebody down a path that promises to be sincere, but ends up being a joke, I am taking advantage of that trust for the sake of humor. One might ask why people will continue to talk to me if I continue to violate their trust. There are two answers to that.

The first answer is that my jokes are their own reward. Although they come under false pretenses, my jokes are funny. People tend to grumble or groan, but they do love a good bit of wit.

The second answer is that I continue to earn my trust back. For every time that I sound serious and end up making a joke, I have a dozen times where I sound serious and actually am. I will have long, in-depth conversations about all sorts of subjects. A good conversation makes one quickly forget that a silly little pun may be around the corner at any moment. If I only ever cracked jokes, people would come to expect it and they would be lame. But by making them an accent within conversations, they keep people on their toes and keep them light-hearted when they start to get heavy.

So, the last two days simply put: You want to make your readers follow your lead when you tell your story, but beyond the benefit of the doubt, you have to earn and maintain their trust by giving them rewarding stories.