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The Science of Storytelling

Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

Will Storr

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39 quotes

language-arts

Chapter 1

  • Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomorrow. When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.Nov 9 2023 3:27AM
  • This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers. Those who’ve tried to unravel the secrets of story have long known about the significance of change. Aristotle argued that ‘peripeteia’, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John Yorke has written that ‘the image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.’Nov 9 2023 3:28AM
  • The threat of change is also a highly effective technique for arousing curiosity. The director Alfred Hitchcock, who was a master at alarming brains by threatening that unexpected change was looming, went as far as to say, ‘There’s no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.’Nov 9 2023 3:30AM
  • All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina – first sentence.)Nov 9 2023 3:31AM
  • In life, most of the unexpected changes we react to will turn out to be of no importance: the bang was just a lorry door; it wasn’t your name, it was a mother calling for her child. So you slip back into reverie and the world, once more, becomes a smear of motion and noise. But, every now and then, that change matters. It forces us to act. This is when story begins.Nov 9 2023 3:31AM
  • The secrets of human curiosity have been explored by psychologists, perhaps most famously by Professor George Loewenstein. He writes of a test in which participants were confronted by a grid of squares on a computer screen. They were asked to click five of them. Some participants found that, with each click, another picture of an animal appeared. But a second group saw small component parts of a single animal. With each square they clicked, another part of a greater picture was revealed. This second group were much more likely to keep on clicking squares after the required five, and then keep going until enough of them had been turned that the mystery of the animal’s identity had been solved. Brains, concluded the researchers, seem to become spontaneously curious when presented with an ‘information set’ they realise is incomplete. ‘There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,’ wrote Loewenstein, ‘even for questions of no importance.’Nov 9 2023 3:32AM
  • There is, concluded Loewenstein, a ‘positive relationship between curiosity and knowledge’. The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it.Nov 9 2023 3:33AM
  • Curiosity is shaped like a lowercase n. It’s at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.Nov 9 2023 3:33AM
  • In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: () the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; () ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; () ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; () knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.Nov 9 2023 3:34AM
  • The long-form journalist Malcolm Gladwell is a master at building curiosity about Loewensteinian ‘questions of no importance’ and manages the feat no more effectively than in his story ‘The Ketchup Conundrum’, in which he becomes a detective trying to solve the mystery of why it’s so hard to make a sauce to rival Heinz.Nov 9 2023 3:36AM
  • Dreams feel real because they’re made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake. The sights are the same, the smells are the same, objects feel the same to the touch. Craziness happens partly because the fact-checking senses are offline, and partly because the brain has to make sense of chaotic bursts of neural activity that are the result of our state of temporary paralysis.Nov 9 2023 3:40AM
  • For the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen, grammar acts like a film director, telling the brain what to model and when. He writes that grammar ‘appears to modulate what part of an evoked simulation someone is invited to focus on, the grain of detail with which the simulation is performed, or what perspective to perform that simulation from’.Nov 9 2023 3:43AM
  • According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters. This is perhaps why transitive construction – Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad – is more effective than the ditransitive – Jane gave her Dad a kitten.Nov 9 2023 3:43AM
  • For the same reason, active sentence construction – Jane kissed her Dad – is more effective than passive – Dad was kissed by Jane. Witnessing this in real life, Jane’s initial movement would draw our attention and then we’d watch the kiss play out. We wouldn’t be dumbly staring at Dad, waiting for something to happen. Active grammar means readers model the scene on the page in the same way that they’d model it if it happened in front of them. It makes for easier and more immersive reading.Nov 9 2023 3:44AM
  • If writers want their readers to properly model their story-worlds they should take the trouble to describe them as precisely as possible.Nov 9 2023 3:45AM
  • One study concluded that, to make vivid scenes, three specific qualities of an object should be described, with the researcher’s examples including ‘a dark blue carpet’ and ‘an orange striped pencil.’Nov 9 2023 3:46AM
  • The influential post-war director Alexander Mackendrick writes, ‘I start by asking: What does A think B is thinking about A? It sounds complicated (and it is) but this is the very essence of giving some density to a character and, in turn, a scene.’Nov 10 2023 1:57PM
  • Brain scans illustrate the second, more powerful, use of metaphor. When participants in one study read the words ‘he had a rough day’, their neural regions involved in feeling textures became more activated, compared with those who read ‘he had a bad day’. In another, those who read ‘she shouldered the burden’ had neural regions associated with bodily movement activated more than when they read ‘she carried the burden’. This is prose writing that deploys the weapons of poetry. It works because it activates extra neural models that give the language additional meaning and sensation. We feel the heft and strain of the shouldering, we touch the abrasiveness of the day.Nov 10 2023 5:40PM
  • And here the eighteenth-century writer and critic Denis Diderot uses a one-two of perfectly contrasting similes to smack his point home: ‘Libertines are hideous spiders, that often catch pretty butterflies.’Nov 10 2023 5:42PM
  • The author and journalist George Orwell knew the recipe for a potent metaphor. In the totalitarian milieu of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes the small room in which the protagonist Winston and his partner Julia could be themselves without the state spying on them as ‘a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.’Nov 10 2023 7:44PM
  • What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical ‘theory and explanation about what’s happening in the world and why’? Religion doesn’t merely seek to explain the origins of life, it’s our answer to the most profound questions of all: What is good? What is evil? What do I do about all my love, guilt, hate, lust, envy, fear, mourning and rage? Does anybody love me? What happens when I die?Nov 10 2023 7:48PM
  • In 2005, the Pulitzer prizewinning playwright David Mamet was captaining a TV drama called The Unit. After becoming frustrated with his writers producing scenes with no cause and effect – that were, for instance, simply there to deliver expository information – he sent out an angry ALL CAPS memo, which leaked online (I’ve de-capped what follows to save your ears): ‘Any scene which does not both advance the plot and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous or incorrectly written,’ he wrote. ‘Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.’Nov 10 2023 7:50PM
  • This is what the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada, Aline Brosh McKenna, suggested when she said, ‘You want all your scenes to have a “because” between them, and not an “and then”.’ Brains struggle with ‘and then’.Nov 10 2023 7:51PM
  • But all storytellers, no matter who their intended audience, should beware of over-tightening their narratives. While it’s dangerous to leave readers feeling confused and abandoned, it’s just as risky to over-explain. Causes and effects should be shown rather than told; suggested rather than explained. If they’re not, curiosity will be extinguished and readers and viewers will become bored.Nov 10 2023 7:53PM
  • Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. They’re not so much about events that take place on the surface of the drama as they are about the characters that have to battle them. Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws.Nov 10 2023 10:23PM

Chapter 2

  • Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being ‘in denial’. Of course we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws at all, but as virtues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a common plot moment in which protagonists ‘refuse the call’ of the story. This is sometimes why.Nov 14 2023 8:26PM
  • The mythologist Joseph Campbell said that ‘the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.’ It’s this imperfect person we meet in story and in life.Nov 15 2023 12:33AM
  • Psychologists measure personality across five domains, which can be useful for writers doing character work to know. Those high in extraversion are gregarious and assertive, seekers of attention and sensation. Being high in neuroticism means you’re anxious, self-conscious and prone to depression, anger and low self-esteem. Lots of openness makes for a curious soul, someone artistic, emotional and comfortable with novelty. High-agreeable people are modest, sympathetic and trusting while their disagreeable opposites have a competitive and aggressive bent. Conscientious people prefer order and discipline and value hard work, duty and hierarchyNov 15 2023 9:27AM
  • Personality can predict what kinds of futures we might have too. Conscientious people tend to enjoy greater than average job security and life satisfaction; extroverts are more likely to have affairs and car accidents; disagreeable people are better at fighting their way up corporate ladders into the highest-paying jobs; those high in openness are more likely to get tattoos, be unhealthy and vote for left-wing political parties while those low in conscientiousness are more likely to end up in prison and have a higher risk of dying, in any given year, of around per cent.Nov 15 2023 9:29AM
  • ‘Human personalities are rather like fractals,’ writes the psychologist Professor Daniel Nettle. ‘It is not just that what we do in the large-scale narratives of our lives – love, career, friendships – tends to be somewhat consistent over time, with us often repeating the same kinds of triumph or mistakes. Rather, what we do in tiny interactions like the way we shop, dress or talk to a stranger on the train or decorate our houses, shows the same kinds of patterns as can be observed from examining a whole life.’Nov 15 2023 9:38AM
  • ‘Behavioural residue’ is what psychologists call the things we accidentally leave behind: the stashed wine bottle, the torn-up manuscript, the punch dent in the wall. The psychologist Professor Sam Gosling advises the curious to ‘look out for discrepancies in the signals that people send to themselves and others’. Broadcasting one version of self in their private spaces and another in their hallways, kitchens and offices can hint at a tortuous ‘fractionating of the self’.Nov 15 2023 9:39AM
  • When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. You know with painful accuracy the provenance of everything you touch and the last time you touched it. The five little cushions on your sofa stay plumped and leaning at their jaunty angle for months at a time unless you theatrically muss them. The level of the salt in your shaker decreases at the same excruciating rate, day after day. Sitting in Sheba’s house – studying the mingled detritus of its several inhabitants – I could see what a relief it might be to let your own meagre effects be joined with other people’s.Nov 15 2023 9:39AM
  • Because individual self-reliance was the key to success, the all-powerful individual became a cultural ideal. The Greeks sought personal glory and perfection and fame. They created that legendary competition of self versus self, the Olympics, practised democracy for fifty years and became so self-focused they felt compelled to warn of the dangers of runaway self-love in the story of Narcissus. This conception of the individual as the locus of their own power, free to choose the life they wanted, rather than being slave to the whims of tyrants, fates and gods, was revolutionary. It ‘changed the way people thought about cause and effect,’ writes the psychologist Professor Victor Stretcher, ‘heralding in Western civilisation’Dec 24 2023 8:42PM
  • Compare this pushy, freedom-loving self to the one that emerged in the East. The undulating and fertile landscape in Ancient China was perfect for large groupish endeavours. Getting by would have probably meant being a part of a sizeable wheat-or rice-growing community or working on a huge irrigation project. The best way of controlling the world, in that place, was ensuring the group, rather than the individual, was successful. That meant keeping your head down and being a team player. This collective theory of control led to a collective ideal of self. In the Analects, Confucius is recorded as describing ‘the superior man’ as one who ‘does not boast of himself’, preferring instead the ‘concealment of his virtue’. He ‘cultivates a friendly harmony’ and ‘lets the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection’. He could hardly be more different than the pushy Westerner emerging seven thousand kilometres away.Dec 24 2023 8:42PM
  • In such stories, according to the psychologist Professor Uichol Kim, ‘you’re never given the answer. There’s no closure. There’s no happily ever after. You’re left with a question that you have to decide for yourself. That’s the story’s pleasure.’ In Eastern tales that did focus on an individual, the hero’s status tended to be earned in a suitably group-first way. ‘In the West you fight against evil and the truth prevails and love conquers all,’ he said. ‘In Asia it’s a person who sacrifices who becomes the hero, and takes care of the family and the community and the country.’Dec 24 2023 8:43PM
  • ‘One of the confusing things about stories in the East is there’s no ending,’ said Professor Kim. ‘In life there are not simple, clear answers. You have to find these answers.’Dec 24 2023 8:46PM
  • What these forms reflect is the different ways our cultures understand change. For Westerners, reality is made up of individual pieces and parts. When threatening unexpected change strikes, we tend to reimpose control by going to war with those pieces and parts and trying to tame them. For Easterners, reality is a field of interconnected forces. When threatening unexpected change strikes, they’re more likely to reimpose control by attempting to understand how to bring those turbulent forces back into harmony so that they can all exist together. What they have in common is story’s deepest purpose. They are lessons in control.Dec 24 2023 8:46PM
  • The beliefs we’ll fight to defend are the ones which we’ve formed our identity, values and theory of control around. An attack on these ideas is an attack on the very structure of reality as we experience it. It’s these kinds of beliefs, and these kinds of attacks, that drive some of our greatest stories.Dec 25 2023 9:43AM
  • Good stories have a kind of ignition point. It’s that wonderful moment in which we find ourselves sitting up in the narrative, suddenly attentive, our emotions switched on, curiosity and tension sparked. An ignition point is the first event in a cause-and-effect sequence that will ultimately force the protagonist to question their deepest beliefs. Such an event will often send tremors to the core of their flawed theory of control. Because it goes to the heart of their particular flaw, it’ll cause them to behave in an unexpected way. They’ll overreact or do something otherwise odd. This is our subconscious signal that the fantastic spark between character and plot has taken place.Dec 25 2023 9:47AM

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