5 Precise Ways to Reach Your Audience: Dramas

At Ignite Story Lab, we talk a lot about connecting with your audience. This series shows you five different precise ways to do just that. Think about your target audience and how you want them to feel at the end of your story. Each week, we’ll explore a different Kind of story and the predictable emotional response it elicits.

Part one: Inspire with Dramas

We identify with the underdog in a Drama and that underdog, against all odds, takes down the system. This is an appealing, powerful dynamic. It inspires us to try to beat the odds in our own lives. Bobette Buster, a professor of film at USC and consultant to Disney/Pixar and others said,

“Stories prepare us for the change that is coming.”

And speaking of Pixar, in Ratatouille, Remy’s dad tells him that humans will always be out to destroy rats. “You can’t change nature,” he says. But Remy retorts, “Nature is change, Dad, the part that you can influence, and it starts when you decide.”

The rat sums it up perfectly. Dramas show us that change is possible. They get us to consider new possibilities and inspire us to decide to make a difference.

Use a Drama to empower your audience—
to pump them up to create change.

“It is not our abilities that show what we truly are … it is our choices.”
~Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”
~John Keating in Dead Poets Society

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”
~Galadriel, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring