Picture a cinematographer on a film set. She has a camera in her hand and a choice about lens-width. A wide lens shows everything in the room at once — every detail visible, the whole space laid out. A narrow lens shows one specific thing in tight focus — a doorknob, a hand on a glass, the corner of a window — with the rest of the room invisible. The cinematographer can move between these. She can open on a narrow shot and slowly widen to reveal the room around it. She can open on a wide shot and zoom into a specific detail.
Matt Dicks tells storytellers to be cinematographers with their words. Start with the narrowest lens possible and then begin to expand the lens over time. Because what you don't say is what's going to cause people to want to hear the next sentence.1 The metaphor is precise: the storyteller's unit of inclusion is the lens-width. Narrow openings produce engagement because the audience cannot see around the lens — they are locked into the single visible thing. Wide openings dissipate engagement because everything is visible at once and there's nothing pulling the audience forward to what's outside the frame.
The metaphor structures the suspense-deployment decision into three concrete operational moves:
1. Open narrow. The first sentence of any scene should be the tightest possible shot — one specific concrete thing in focus. I open my son's bedroom door and I can't believe what I see inside.2 That's narrow. The audience can see the door. They cannot see the room. Their attention is locked on the door because that's the lens-width the storyteller has chosen.
2. Expand incrementally. Each subsequent sentence widens the lens by a measured increment. I look at his bed. There's railroad tracks on his bed alongside dirty underwear and a baseball glove and a pile of things I can't begin to see.3 The lens has widened to include the bed. And then I might say on the edges of the bed, it's like snow drifts of clothing.4 The lens widens further to include the area around the bed. The audience is following the camera as it pulls back, each new revelation locking in further engagement because they want to see what else is in the frame.
3. Never open wide. Dicks names the failure mode explicitly: I open the door to my son's bedroom and it's a total mess. There's stuff everywhere. Can you feel how that sort of, like, I've stolen all of the air from the story? I've given you everything all at once instead of something small that eventually grows over time.5 Opening wide collapses the suspense before it can be built. The audience receives the full information and has nothing to lean toward.
The metaphor is not just a teaching aid — it is a generative tool the storyteller actively deploys in real-time during delivery. Working storytellers report that imagining themselves as a cinematographer choosing lens-widths sentence-by-sentence is one of the most reliable mid-delivery tools they have for adjusting suspense-calibration.
The cinematographer metaphor works as a working storyteller's tool in ways that an abstract principle like strategic inclusion plus strategic exclusion does not. The reason is that storytellers can visualize lens-width in a way they cannot visualize the abstract concept. The metaphor gives the technique a body-feel — the storyteller can almost feel the camera in their hand, can imagine pulling back, can sense when they're going too fast or staying too narrow too long.
This is what makes the cinematographer metaphor different from the underlying suspense principle it implements. The principle tells you what to do; the metaphor tells you how to feel it. Both are needed. The principle gives the storyteller theoretical grounding; the metaphor gives them operational instrument-sense.
The visual-metaphor approach also produces teachable revision moves. A storyteller reviewing their own draft can ask: what lens-width did I open this scene on? And immediately diagnose. I opened wide is a recognizable diagnostic that maps to a recognizable fix (rewrite the opening sentence on a narrow shot). This is harder to do with the abstract principle: I included too much information is correct but doesn't supply the same vivid revision target.
The cinematographer metaphor is the operational form of the suspense principle. The principle is abstract; the metaphor is body-feel-able. Together they cover both why-and-how of suspense-deployment.
The metaphor pairs cleanly with start with location and action: the location-and-action opening is the narrowest lens you can deploy. The metaphor is what generalizes the principle beyond just the opening sentence to every scene-transition throughout the piece.
The cinematographer metaphor pairs with leverage audience imagination: pulling back from narrow to wide preserves the audience's imagination-work because the wider frame is filled in by the audience's mental images rather than by the storyteller's description.
The metaphor connects to hourglasses at moments of climactic anticipation: the hourglass slows the camera's movement at peak-anticipation moments, holding on the narrow shot for an extra beat before allowing the audience to see what's around it.
Dicks demonstrates the metaphor in real-time during the Calum Johnson interview, narrating his son's-bedroom moment with explicit lens-width annotations:
Lens 1 (sentence one): I open the door to my son's bedroom and I can't believe what I see inside.6 That's a narrow lens. I haven't told you anything other than bedroom door and there's something inside that you can't believe.7 The audience's frame: a door, with something behind it that the narrator finds shocking. Single point of focus. Everything else is outside the frame.
Lens 2 (next sentence): I look at his bed. There's railroad tracks on his bed alongside dirty underwear and a baseball glove and a pile of things I can't begin to see. The lens widens to include the bed. The audience now has the bed in frame, with multiple specific items visible (railroad tracks, dirty underwear, baseball glove). Everything else — the rest of the room — is still outside the frame.
Lens 3 (next sentence): And then I might say on the edges of the bed, it's like snow drifts of clothing. The lens widens to include the area immediately around the bed. The frame expands by one ring.
Notice the engineering: each widening is one specific increment, not an indiscriminate pulling-back. The audience experiences the expansion as the camera moving deliberately, not as a sudden cut to a wide shot. The deliberate pace is what produces sustained engagement — at every moment the audience is wondering what's just outside the current frame and the storyteller is feeding them one more layer at a time.
Compare this to the failure mode Dicks names: I open the door to my son's bedroom and it's a total mess. That sentence opens the lens fully — the audience has the whole room in frame in one sentence. There's nothing outside the frame to want. The piece has collapsed its own suspense before it began.
Saturday morning. You're revising a draft. You're going to audit every scene-opening for lens-width.
Read each scene's first sentence aloud. For each one, ask: what is in the frame? Try to name the visible content precisely. If you can name one specific thing (a door, a face, a hand, a small object), you opened narrow. If you can name multiple things or the entire setting, you opened wide.
For every wide-opening sentence, rewrite. Find the one specific thing that the wide-opening was trying to evoke and make that the new opening. The conference room was packed → I walked into the conference room and the first thing I saw was my old boss's hand resting on the back of an empty chair. The narrow opening forces the audience to lean toward what's outside the frame; the wide opening dissipates the lean immediately.
Now walk through each scene sentence-by-sentence and check the expansion rate. Each new sentence should add one specific increment of visible content. If sentences are widening the lens too fast (multiple new visible elements per sentence), the suspense dissipates. If sentences are not widening the lens at all (the camera is stuck on the same narrow shot), the suspense over-builds and the audience starts feeling stuck.
The right pace is roughly one increment per sentence, with occasional held-narrow moments at peak-anticipation beats. Working storytellers calibrate this through delivery feedback — when audiences lean in at the right places and don't get bored at the wrong places, the lens-pace is right.
You open wide. First sentence shows the whole scene. Audience has no leaning-target. Rewrite the opening sentence to a narrow shot.
You expand too fast. Each sentence dumps multiple new visible elements into the frame. The audience cannot lean toward what's coming because everything arrives at once. Slow the expansion to one element per sentence.
You expand too slowly. The lens stays on the same narrow shot for paragraph after paragraph. The audience's want-for-more dissipates into frustration. Move the camera.
You skip the expansion. You open narrow and then jump to a wide shot without intermediate steps. The audience experiences the jump as a cut, which breaks the leaning-mechanism. Pull back through intermediate frames.
You expand into irrelevant content. Each lens-widening reveals new content that doesn't connect to the scene's actual point. The audience leans toward new frames that then turn out to be irrelevant. Frustration accumulates. Make sure each frame-expansion serves the scene's structural function.
The cinematographer metaphor is named explicitly in the Calum Johnson interview as Dicks's preferred operational frame for suspense-deployment.8 The metaphor is consistent with working-film-cinematography practice — Dicks is borrowing a real working-craft metaphor and applying it to oral storytelling.
A tension exists with leverage audience imagination — at first read, the cinematographer metaphor seems to ask for more description rather than less. The resolution: the metaphor is about controlled-incremental description in service of suspense. The descriptions added are not random color; they are calibrated frame-expansions that produce engagement. The principle and the metaphor are compatible when read carefully.
A tension also exists with Macfarlane's relational nature-writing which often opens with wide shots of place. The convention differs: long-form nature writing serves a different aesthetic function than short-form oral storytelling. The cinematographer metaphor is calibrated for forms where suspense-engineering matters; it doesn't claim universal applicability.
Open question: how does the lens-metaphor scale to very short forms — Twitter threads, social-media micro-posts? The frame-expansion technique requires multiple sentences to operate; pieces under 50 words may not have room. Alternative engagement-techniques may be required for ultra-short forms.
Dicks and Gelb converge on the cinematographer metaphor literally — Gelb's character-first documentary methodology is built on the same lens-deployment principles. Documentary filmmakers and oral storytellers are doing structurally identical work: managing what's in frame and what's just outside it. The two crafts can borrow techniques across direction without translation issues because the underlying mechanism is identical.
Dicks and Forsyth diverge interestingly. Forsyth's rhetorical figures methodology for prose builds engagement through figure-density (specific named structures repeated through a text) rather than through frame-expansion. Both crafts produce engagement; they use different operational mechanisms. Forsyth's tools are structural (anadiplosis, polyptoton, tricolon); Dicks's tools are imagistic (lens-widths, frame-expansions). The split reveals: print prose and oral storytelling have access to different engagement-toolkits because their delivery-modes differ.
The cinematographer metaphor is fundamentally a visual-imagination tool for structuring information-release — a technique that maps an abstract suspense principle onto a concrete bodily-felt sense. That mapping move has direct analogues in adjacent disciplines.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray (Hughes) — Hughes's elicitation work uses a funnel metaphor — start with the widest possible information-gathering questions and progressively narrow toward the specific disclosure target. Note the inversion: Hughes funnels narrow over time (information-gathering); Dicks funnels wide over time (information-release). Both use spatial metaphors to organize information-flow but in opposite directions. Look at the convergence under the inversion: spatial metaphors are reliable working tools across live-craft disciplines for managing information-asymmetry, and practitioners across orientations have independently developed them. The direction depends on whether the practitioner is extracting (narrow funnel) or delivering (wide expansion). The structural insight is the same; the application differs.
Eastern spirituality: The Iceberg Principle — the Hemingway-derived iceberg principle (seven-eighths underwater) is structurally parallel to the cinematographer metaphor. Both treat visible-content as a small fraction of total-content, with the engagement coming from what's not shown. The classical Sanskrit dhvani tradition (see Dhvani — Suggestion as Soul of Content) supplies the theoretical depth for why partial-visibility produces deeper engagement than full-visibility. What neither domain produces alone: dhvani-theory explains why the technique works at a philosophical level; the cinematographer metaphor supplies the working storyteller's body-feel-able operational tool; the iceberg principle supplies the fractional-relationship articulation (seven-eighths beneath the visible eighth). Combined, the practitioner has the philosophical justification, the operational tool, and the fractional calibration. The cross-tradition convergence reveals that partial-visibility as engagement engineering is a load-bearing principle across centuries and forms.
The Sharpest Implication The cinematographer metaphor implies that most amateur storytellers default to opening wide. They want to set the scene before they enter the scene, which produces openings that show the audience everything at once. The metaphor reveals this as a fundamental craft mistake. The opening sentence is a lens-width choice. Most amateurs choose wide. The technique requires choosing narrow. The misallocation is structural and ubiquitous — once you learn to spot it, you'll notice that perhaps 80% of amateur speeches, drafts, presentations, and stories open wide, and almost all of them would benefit from rewriting on a narrow shot. The fix is tiny (one sentence). The improvement is large.
Generative Questions