Narrative Threads

Storytelling is about setting in motion narrative threads or arcs.  It is about the balancing of promise with payoff.

Whenever you introduce a question in to the narrative, you are making a promise to the audience that if they invest in this promise, the story will reward them before its all done.  The story will pay off that promise with a reward of insight or enlightenment.

This is why plot holes are so unbalancing to a story.  Each one is an example of a broken promise.

Failed stories add on too many promises, and then fail to resolve them.  They make flat characters whose potential is wasted.  Their authors get distracted by a new idea and abandon previous promises and make a bunch of new ones.  And sometimes storytellers simply have possibility-laden promises with disappointing payoffs.