What is this wow factor? It’s the big surprise, the twist, the fake out you never saw coming. It’s the billion dollar, explosive finale on a big screen with ultra HD. It’s getting harder and harder to achieve in a world bogged down with ever-increasing noise, and endless feeds full of clickbait.

In a story-saturated ecosystem full of superheroes, high action epics, and ever advancing CGI, achieving any kind of noteworthy “wow factor” is like catching smoke in a jar. Given that audiences and readers are inundated constantly with bigger and louder climactic events, we’re also growing jaded.

I remember being absolutely mesmerized (and at times terrified) at the sight of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, unable to even conceive of how such real-looking dinosaurs were even made. It was new, exciting, and absolutely out of this world. I was too young to appreciate how groundbreaking the technology even was, but the times have changed. Audiences today aren’t as easily impressed as we were back in the 90s. (Remember when Reboot was considered awesome computer graphics?) That technology is old news now.

But as the push for bigger and louder content continues, and writers are getting pushed to meet deadlines, the quality of the storytelling itself has been slipping. Even those massively anticipated big budget blockbusters with a bottomless wallets fall flat because of poor story lines and flat characters. We’re getting remake after remake, or book adaptations, cuz big studios are afraid to take the risk on something new.

What does this mean for us nobodies? It’s more advantageous than you might think. Or at least this is my gut feeling on it.

I feel like we are coming full circle to a place where audiences are more impressed with thoughtful storytelling than they are with the sparkle and bang that held us captivated during the boom and advancement of CGI. At this point, we’ve all seen it all. What we need now is the storytelling that makes us forget about our own lives and sucks us into the pages to live vicariously through riveting, fully-realized characters.

Good Storytelling is the New Wow

If you go out and ask readers what they most enjoy about their favourite books, more often than not it’s their connection to the characters, or being lost in the story, or the world. What all of that boils down to is good storytelling.

It really is a great opportunity for up-and-coming writers to push their own limits in the development of their craft. When you’ve got pen to paper, or your fingers dancing on the keys, you are the master of puppets inside the world of your own designs, and the sky is the limit.

If you’re still an indie writer without the pressure of a publisher, milk it for all it’s worth. Read up on the tools of story crafting, the setup and the payoff, the smoking gun. Take the time to flesh out your world so that you can sprinkle in foreshadowing in the subtext. Taking the time to polish those details improves the rereadability of your work, and increases your chances of the best kind of marketing there is: word of mouth.

It’s so easy to feel defeated before you even begin when you consider how many different ways we’ve seen stories like our own being told in all the different formats we have available now. Too often I see writers feeling dismayed simply because they can’t reinvent the wheel. And they’re right, it’s been done. But that’s not why people pick up new books to read, or get excited about the next movie release. People love stories. And they love good storytelling.

And nobody has YOUR voice. That’s all you, my dudes. And I know damn well that if you’ve got a story burning to get onto the page, you’ve got a little wow in you too.