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PACING “It’s about controlling the flow of information—


arriving at the right length and the right speed and in the right order.” ~ Tom Stoppard


When you’re telling a story, you’re managing people’s thoughts, making them think about what you want them to think about. Which is rather a lot of power.


Set your pace deliberately. An overarching storyline holds a vast area together, providing continuity.


“Then you add a lot of little stories,” Vice Presidnet Bill Castle says, “varying the scale, because the trick is, the more of them there are, the bigger the place seems.”


Make sure to pace them and vary their rhythm, mixing sweeping sagas with shorter tales and tiny slivers of story. Today’s guests want immersive multimedia narratives, and they also want vignettes that can be conveyed in half a minute or Vine’s 6 seconds. Whatever their length, your stories should stay fairly simple, grounding the audience with structure and pattern before building in surprises, novelty, and drama.


At Washington University’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory, psychologist Jeffrey Zacks studies the chunking of information. He’s found that “if you put commercial breaks in the right places, at places where it made sense to divide the chunks, people remember the story better.” Te same holds true at a destination: Pauses in the big story should make sense, and your shorter stories can be pauses that help guests absorb the entire experience.


ELEMENTS OF STORY


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