Ian Thomas and Why Stories Need Memorable Moments, Not Just Good Writing
I have a plan. It's not a good plan. Let’s goooo!
One of the nice things about doing this series is that every conversation starts by making me feel slightly less qualified, and then, if I’m lucky, slightly more dangerous.
This time I spoke with Ian Thomas, narrative director at The Chinese Room, former programmer, designer, writer, LARP creator, consultant, and one of those people whose career path makes complete sense only after he explains it. He started in children’s entertainment and edutainment, moved through interactive television, LEGO game mechanics, writing, live roleplay, consultancy, and narrative design, and somewhere along the way built the kind of perspective that only seems to happen when someone has spent years thinking about games from both the systems side and the storytelling side.
Which was bad news for me, because I went into the call, as always, looking for the secret shortcut to becoming a bestselling writer without having to suffer too much.
And Ian, very politely, did not give me that.
What he gave me was better.
He gave me what might be the most practically useful storytelling principle I’ve heard in this series so far:
People do not remember stories because every scene was solid.
They remember stories because of a few moments they cannot shake.
That landed.
Because it sounds obvious once you hear it, but I do not think most writers actually work that way. We think in terms of plot, character arc, pacing, worldbuilding, dialogue, themes, lore, subtext, emotional consistency, and probably twenty-seven other noble concerns. All of that matters. But Ian’s point was that if none of it produces a moment that burns itself into the audience’s mind, then the work can still be good and still be forgettable.
And that is a very uncomfortable distinction.
Getting in touch with Ian Thomas
The Secret Is Not Perfection. It Is Recall.
Ian referenced William Goldman, which is already a good sign, because when people bring in William Goldman, you know they have at least seen a structure problem before.
The idea, in essence, is that what makes a story travel is not that every element is equally strong. It is that it gives the audience a handful of memorable beats, moments they will talk about in bars, online, in comments, in friend groups, years later.
Not “that film was well made.”
Not “the worldbuilding was coherent.”
Not “the prose was elegant.”
A moment.
The reveal in BioShock.
The twist in The Sixth Sense.
The front-of-the-ship scene in Titanic.
Ripley stepping into the loader in Aliens.
Whether or not these are your personal favorites is almost beside the point. The point is that they are emotionally fixed in public memory.
That is the standard.
Ian called his approach moment-based design, and the more we talked, the more I liked that phrase, because it pushes against a very common creative trap: the idea that if you are consistently good, that should be enough.
Apparently not.
Or at least not if your ambition is not merely to be respected, but to be remembered.
That distinction matters to me, because Road to Rank 1 is not called Road to Rank Respectably Well-Regarded. If I am honest, I am not trying to write stories that people think are pretty good. I want to write stories that stay with them.
And Ian’s point was that this does not happen by accident.
The Moment Is the Target. Everything Else Is the Delivery System
The important part, though, is that Ian was not talking about spectacle for spectacle’s sake.
This is where the advice becomes more useful and less Hollywood-dumb.
He was very clear that these moments cannot exist in isolation. You cannot just drop in a twist, a death, a revelation, a dramatic image, or a big emotional beat and expect it to matter. If the moment has not been earned, it feels hollow. Cheap. Manipulative. Decorative.
So the work of writing is not just inventing the moment.
It is building everything around it so that the moment lands with full force.
That means foreshadowing.
That means character setup.
That means emotional preparation.
That means rhythm, contrast, and timing.
That means creating the exact conditions in which one moment changes everything.
That is the craft.
And that, I think, is why this advice hit me so strongly. It is not an excuse to ignore structure or character or prose. It is a way of prioritizing them.
You do not write those things because they are boxes to tick. You write them because they are the runway for takeoff.
A memorable moment is not the interruption of the story. It is what the story was secretly building toward all along.
The Audience Needs Space, Not Full Explanation
The second thing Ian said that I immediately wrote down in my brain with neon marker was this:
Every story needs to leave space for the audience.
That idea connected beautifully with something I’ve been circling around in other conversations too, but Ian framed it with more precision.
If you explain everything, define everything, render every detail, and leave no gaps, then the audience has nothing to do. The story becomes closed, inert, sealed off from them. It may still be impressive, but it stops being collaborative in the strange way all great storytelling is collaborative.
Because the audience is always co-creating.
Ian made this point especially in relation to text and audio, which I obviously loved, because interactive audio is my home turf here. He argued that text is actually one of the most interactive forms because every reader generates their own version of it internally. They cast the characters differently in their heads. They hear the tone differently. They imagine the room, the body language, the faces, the atmosphere. No two readings are identical.
That is only possible because the text leaves space.
He used fantastic examples. Agatha Christie describing someone as “the sort of woman who wore limp dresses.” Raymond Chandler writing, “She was a dame to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
These lines do not over-explain. They do something better. They trigger imagination.
That is a very different kind of precision.
Not more detail. Better detail.
And it connects directly to why so many worlds become obsessions for audiences. Not because everything is spelled out, but because enough is left unresolved, implied, or partially buried that people begin doing the work themselves. They become archaeologists of the world.
That metaphor came up in the conversation too, and I loved it instantly.
If you leave the right traces, audiences start excavating. They build theories. They search for patterns. They argue. They connect clues. They watch six hundred hours of lore videos instead of sleeping like healthy adults.
This is not a failure of clarity. This is a form of success.
The Best Stories Create Archaeologists
That may have been my favorite idea in the whole call.
A great story does not just tell people what happened. It leaves behind artifacts.
Fragments.
Hints.
Contradictions.
Missing parts.
Emotional residues.
Questions that are not there to frustrate, but to invite.
This is why some stories become worlds people live in long after finishing them.
You see it in Elden Ring.
You see it in Game of Thrones.
You see it in The Lord of the Rings.
You see it in any work where fans end up doing interpretive labor voluntarily because the story has left enough room for obsession.
That does not mean everything should be vague or unresolved. Ian was clear on that too. The point is not confusion. The point is participation.
Audiences want to complete the circuit. They want to bring themselves into the work.
And suddenly a lot of things I care about in storytelling started snapping into place for me:
Why over-description is often weak.
Why some mysteries haunt people and others just annoy them.
Why the best endings close enough, but not too much.
Why modern fandoms can become extensions of the work itself.
If you leave no space, nothing grows.
You Can Forgive Flaws If the Story Gives You Something Exceptional
At one point I told Ian that I almost preferred his advice to the more reasonable advice people had given me before.
Write more.
Edit more.
Get feedback.
Revise.
Work consistently.
All true. Deeply offensive. Very labor-intensive.
Ian’s advice felt more exciting because it explained something I had sensed for a long time: being exceptional in a few places matters more than being uniformly competent everywhere.
He agreed.
And I think that is one of those truths we all know as audience members and keep forgetting as creators.
People forgive flaws in stories they love all the time.
Some of the most beloved films ever made are full of plot holes. People only start aggressively cataloguing those holes when the story has failed to grab them emotionally. If the mood, the character work, and the key moments work, most audiences do not care nearly as much as screenwriting discourse would like to believe.
That does not mean flaws are good. It means excellence has disproportional weight.
A story with no unforgettable moments can be technically fine and vanish.
A story with real flaws but one or two transcendent moments can become permanent.
That is not fair, exactly.
But it does seem to be true.
What I’m Taking from This One
If I reduce this conversation to the lesson I most want to carry into my own writing, it is this:
Do not just write a good sequence of scenes.
Design for moments that people will remember.
Then earn them properly.
That means I should probably ask different questions while outlining.
Not only:
What happens next?
What does this reveal?
What is the character arc?
But also:
What are the moments no one will forget?
Where does the audience’s stomach drop?
Where does the meaning of the story suddenly reconfigure?
Where do they feel awe, grief, dread, triumph, horror, recognition?
What image, line, reveal, or choice stays with them after the story is over?
And then, once I have those, the hard part begins.
Everything else has to serve them.
Which is somehow both inspiring and extremely annoying, because once again it turns out the secret is not a shortcut. It is a sharper standard.
Ian, thank you. This one was gold.
About Road to Rank 1
Road to Rank 1 is my public learning series about becoming a better writer of interactive fiction and audio stories by talking to experts from games, books, audio, and narrative design.
