Narrative Drive: What Happens Next?

As playwright David Mamet puts it,

“[Storytelling] is not… the communication of ideas but rather the inculcation in the audience of the instincts of the hunt.”

What keeps us engaged when consuming content is our brain’s constant desire and struggle to piece everything together to figure out what happens next, a phenomenon Robert McKee named “narrative drive”.

This process lies at the heart of dramatic writing, being why you just can’t put a good book down and why you binge whole seasons in one go.