Why are some stories universally beloved? Why do they seem to suck in any viewer that approaches the screen? Why do they have that magnetic, inexplicable vibrancy to them? Why should it be so puzzling and random that they may be this popular?

There are already plenty of excellent books about story structure that cover just about anything. This isn’t one of them. What I hope to offer instead are compelling diagnostic tools and opportunities to transform one’s perspective on narration altogether: a set of lenses through which to consider a story, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and notice some of the laws and regularities governing what makes it captivating and compelling.

Appeal is the magnetic force that attracts our minds and makes our brains know to care. It determines the level of engagement with a given thing: how much that object compels us to attune mind, body, emotion and attention to its state or changing states.

Appeal does not mean liking. Dread, disgust, horror, anxiety or morbid curiosity can possess enormous appeal. Something can repel you and still make disengagement difficult. What matters here is the force of engagement: the degree to which something captures you and makes you care about what it is, what it means, or what happens next.

Appeal can also vary because of personal relevance or aesthetic inclination. Something you have never encountered before can strike a resonance with your already existing setup for reasons that may be difficult to predict from one audience or reader to the next. Universal appeal is separate from individual appeal, and one can override the other. It is not a zero-sum game. You do not need to lose personal appeal to gain universal appeal.

The specific can be universal. The universal can be specific.

I call the five dimensions of Appeal its five mythical faces: Spice, Bedrock, Fluid, Web and Death. They are dimensions of very different character, almost as personalities. They are not ingredients. They are not mechanisms themselves. However, each contains mechanisms. Each directs and affects the ingredients in play. The faces naturally contain rules and recurring behaviours, very similarly to physics.

The faces do not create those laws. They make some of them much clearer and easier to notice. Looking at a story through one face changes the angle of perception enough that certain forces, consequences and relationships become legible where before they may only have been felt.

If I give you something to be curious about, to be obsessed about, you are naturally inclined to give not only your attention, but to actively try and solve the puzzle of the story.

If I give you a clear referential frame where you can orient yourself, set expectations, and have those expectations broken, then you can have enough consistency in the context to experience a thing with clarity.

If I orchestrate time and space, masterfully build up pressure, acceleration and slowdown so that every moment leads into the next, you will be sucked into the flow of story like a magnet to a fridge.

If I give you comparisons, ideas and counterpoints, thesis and synthesis, novelty, conflict, opposition and tension, you will be involved at a limbic level and at a higher cognitive level. You will think. You will reflect. You will cohere. You will oppose. You will agree.

If I give you the fear of God, if I make you feel like things must resolve, like characters must survive, if I make you feel immense stakes, if I engage your human experience and reflect back to you your very human nature, I will have you whole.

The five faces

Spice — Spice jolts attention through novelty, fascination and discovery, producing exhilaration and focal salience.

Bedrock — Bedrock gives the work weight, continuity and trust by creating a stable referential field that can be accepted, assimilated and largely forgotten.

Fluid — Fluid carries us through the work by orchestrating time, space and pressure so that emotion can build, land and carry us into what comes next.

Web — Web is the total thematic and intellectual dimension of a work: everything in it that carries, produces, questions or organizes meaning.

Death — Death engages our primal relation to survival, loss, pain, constraint and irreversibility, making a story feel existentially human and forcing what matters into focus.

How do I actually use this?

When something feels wrong, dry, confusing or strangely inert, stop treating the whole work as one problem.

Ask what experience the moment is trying to produce, then look at the faces separately. Is the work failing to stimulate? To feel grounded? To carry us forward? To give us something meaningful to think about? To make the situation feel like it fundamentally matters?

The value of the framework is not that it gives one automatic answer. It gives us better questions.

Are the five faces mutually exclusive?

No. The same scene, character, object or device can participate in several faces at once. A dinosaur can be Spice because it is extraordinary, Death because it is dangerous, Web because of what it thematically represents, and Bedrock once the world has normalized its existence. The point is not to assign things to boxes, but to notice what role they are playing.

The faces are not factions that cut up the fabric of a movie. They are dimensions, lenses, ways of looking at the work that reveal underlying dynamics useful to a writer.