The Curiosity Gap

One reason I recommend writers start en media res, that is, “in the middle of things,” is that it creates a curiosity gap. Readers want to know what led to the middle in which they find themselves. They want to know what happens next. It may be a ploy to capture attention, but it’s one that works without fail. I know; I’m the person caught in the aisle at Half Price Books reading the first chapter in a book because it piqued my curiosity.

I’m not the only one who seems to think curiosity is a good method for drawing people into one’s work. Luke Sullivan, in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! says:

Competition with the strong tidal pull of kitchens and bathrooms isn’t the only reason you should open strong. When you open with something that’s inherently interesting or dramatic, you create what George Loewenstein called a curiosity gap. He says we feel curiosity when there’s a gap between what we know and what we want to know, and describes curiosity as an itch. When you set up your spot with something that opens this gap, it creates an itch, and watching the rest of the commercial is the only way to scratch it.

Sullivan is referring to commercial spots on television, but his words apply to other forms of art (and, yes, I did just say  a commercial can be art). The strong opening, the creation of questions in a reader’s or viewer’s mind – these are things for which the writer should aim. They are the things that create the sense and wonder found in “I don’t know what’s happening or why, but I want to know.” They are the red apple offered by the old woman, the rabbit disappearing down the hole. How can one not reach for that rosy-hued apple despite the fear of strangers? How can one not follow the rabbit?

Sullivan and Loewenstein aren’t alone, either. Dean Young echoes the sentiment in The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction:

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes, “Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?” Our attention is drawn toward “the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing…between two edges…it is this flash itself which seduces.” Our attention is magnetized by the gap, and it is in the gap, the glimpses it allows, that our attention is eroticized, pleasured. In many ways this gap seems to be where deconstruction sticks its snout, the disjunction between sign and referent, between word and thing that germinates both a proliferation of signs, a free play as well as an exhaustion, a forever falling short and perpetual deferring of the consummation of meaning. But desire, the motivating force, is kept in play. Only through this deferral is the end stop of meaning dodged. Desire vanishes at the point of capture, of attainment, the goal of the mind’s penetration.

One of the greatest technicians of desire was also one of the most ironic: Duchamp; much of his work can be seen as forms of keep-away, electing and befuddling the viewer’s drive toward attainment, toward verifiability, a frustration he called “delay.” This notion of delay, he has said, began while he was looking in a shop window at a chocolate grinder…What he realized was that the desire he felt for the grinder as an object was accentuated and sustained by the interrupting barrier of the window, which, in contradiction, allowed certainty that the desired object was available while frustrating any final union with that object, any touch, any gratification of attainment. Desire is sustained through delay and Duchamp’s works are conjugations, positions of evasions and exposures. A door that is both open and closed…The glimpse.

It’s the juxtaposition of known and unknown that fascinates. It creates the desire to know more. It is memorable and can be enjoyed again and again. Duchamp’s art wasn’t viewed only once by every person who came to see his work. Some people may have only cared to view it one time, but others felt the attraction to it even if they knew the trick behind the curiosity and returned to it again and again. The commercials that open strongly and create the curiosity gap? No one actually minds watching them for the third or seventh time because they now know the full story; no, they watch them and remember how much they enjoyed the commercials the first time. They might even call to the person who has headed into the kitchen to come see one of those commercials because it was just that good, that powerful.

Is it possible to create that curiosity gap with every story or every piece of content? No, but Duchamp  didn’t, either. Some of his artwork fared better than others. The same is true of anyone else’s work. Creating the curiosity gap is something for which to aim because it often – to echo Robert Frost – creates a sense of surprise not only in the reader or viewer but also in the creator himself or herself.

Image: bgblogging (CC BY NC SA 2.0)