The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

Copyright © 2020 Will Storr

Cover © 2020 Abrams

Published in 2020 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

First published in 2019 in Great Britain by William Collins.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939891

ISBN: 978-1-4197-4303-0

eISBN: 978-1-68335-818-3

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For my firstborn, Parker

‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?’

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: CREATING A WORLD

1.0  Where does a story begin?

1.1  Moments of change; the control-seeking brain

1.2  Curiosity

1.3  The model-making brain; how we read; grammar; filmic word order; simplicity; active versus passive language; specific detail; show-not-tell

1.4  World-making in fantasy and science fiction

1.5  The domesticated brain; theory of mind in animism and religion; how theory-of-mind mistakes create drama

1.6  Salience; creating tension with detail

1.7  Neural models; poetry; metaphor

1.8  Cause and effect; literary versus mass-market storytelling

1.9  Change is not enough

CHAPTER TWO: THE FLAWED SELF

2.0  The flawed self; the theory of control

2.1  Personality and plot

2.2  Personality and setting

2.3  Personality and point of view

2.4  Culture and character; Western versus Eastern story

2.5  Anatomy of a flawed self; the ignition point

2.6  Fictional memories; moral delusions; antagonists and moral idealism; antagonists and toxic self-esteem; the hero-maker narrative

2.7  David and Goliath

2.8  How flawed characters create meaning

CHAPTER THREE: THE DRAMATIC QUESTION

3.0  Confabulation and the deluded character; the dramatic question

3.1  Multiple selves; the three-dimensional character

3.2  The two levels of story; how subconscious character struggle creates plot

3.3  Modernist stories

3.4  Wanting and needing

3.5  Dialogue

3.6  The roots of the dramatic question; social emotions; heroes and villains; moral outrage

3.7  Status play

3.8  King Lear; humiliation

3.9  Stories as tribal propaganda

3.10  Antiheroes; empathy

3.11  Origin damage

CHAPTER FOUR: PLOTS, ENDINGS AND MEANING

4.0  Goal directedness; constriction and release; video games; personal projects; eudaemonia

4.1  The story event; the standard five-act plot; plot as recipe versus plot as symphony of change

4.2  The final battle

4.3  Endings; control; the God moment

4.4  Story as a simulacrum of consciousness; transportation

4.5  The power of story

4.6  The value of story

4.7  The lesson of story

4.8  The consolation of story

APPENDIX: THE SACRED FLAW APPROACH

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES AND SOURCES

INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

INTRODUCTION

We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity.

But that’s not how we live our lives. Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it. We beetle away happily, into our minutes, hours and days, with the fact of the void hovering over us. To look directly into it, and respond with an entirely rational descent into despair, is to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition, categorised as somehow faulty.

The cure for the horror is story. Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them. What we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all. It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread. There’s simply no way to understand the human world without stories. They fill our newspapers, our law courts, our sporting arenas, our government debating chambers, our school playgrounds, our computer games, the lyrics to our songs, our private thoughts and public conversations and our waking and sleeping dreams. Stories are everywhere. Stories are us.

It’s story that makes us human. Recent research suggests language evolved principally to swap ‘social information’ back when we were living in Stone Age tribes. In other words, we’d gossip. We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behaviour, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check. Stories about people being heroic or villainous, and the emotions of joy and outrage they triggered, were crucial to human survival. We’re wired to enjoy them.

Some researchers believe grandparents came to perform a vital role in such tribes: elders told different kinds of stories – about ancestor heroes, exciting quests and spirits and magic – that helped children to navigate their physical, spiritual and moral worlds. It’s from these stories that complex human culture emerged. When we started farming and rearing livestock, and our tribes settled down and slowly merged into states, these grandparental campfire tales morphed into great religions that had the power to hold large numbers of humans together. Still, today, modern nations are principally defined by the stories we tell about our collective selves: our victories and defeats; our heroes and foes; our distinctive values and ways of being, all of which are encoded in the tales we tell and enjoy.

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don’t have to be a genius to master it. You’re already doing it. Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it.

This book has an unusual genesis in that it’s based on a storytelling course that is, in turn, based on research I’ve carried out for various books. My interest in the science of storytelling began about a decade ago when I was working on my second book, The Unpersuadables, which was an investigation into the psychology of belief. I wanted to find out how intelligent people end up believing crazy things. The answer I found was that, if we’re psychologically healthy, our brain makes us feel as if we’re the moral heroes at the centre of the unfolding plots of our lives. Any ‘facts’ it comes across tend to be subordinate to that story. If these ‘facts’ flatter our heroic sense of ourselves, we’re likely to credulously accept them, no matter how smart we think we are. If they don’t, our minds will tend to find some crafty way of rejecting them. The Unpersuadables was my introduction to the idea of the brain as a storyteller. It not only changed the way I saw myself, it changed the way I saw the world.

It also changed the way I thought about my writing. As I was researching The Unpersuadables, I also happened to be working on my first novel. Having struggled with fiction for years I’d finally buckled and bought a selection of traditional ‘how-to’ guides. Reading through them, I noticed something odd. Some of the things the story theorists were saying about narrative were strikingly similar to what the psychologists and neuroscientists I’d been interviewing had been telling me about brain and mind. The storytellers and the scientists had started off in completely different places and had ended up discovering the same things.

As I continued my research, for subsequent books, I continued making these connections. I started to wonder if it might be possible to join the two fields up and thereby improve my own storytelling. That ultimately led to my starting a science-based course for writers which turned out to be unexpectedly successful. Being faced regularly with roomfuls of extremely smart authors, journalists and screenwriters pushed me to deepen my investigations. Soon, I realised I had about enough stuff to fill a short book.

My hope is that what follows will be of interest to anyone curious about the science of the human condition, even if they have little practical interest in storytelling. But it’s also for the storytellers. The challenge any of us faces is that of grabbing and keeping the attention of other people’s brains. I’m convinced we can all become better at what we do by finding out a bit about how they work.

This is an approach that stands in contrast to more traditional attempts at decoding story. These typically involve scholars comparing successful stories or traditional myths from around the world and working out what they have in common. From such techniques come predefined plots that put narrative events in a sequence, like a recipe. The most influential of these is undoubtedly Joseph Campbell’s ‘Monomyth’, which, in its full form, has seventeen parts that track the phases of a hero’s journey from their initial ‘call to adventure’ onwards.

Such plot structures have been hugely successful. They’ve drawn crowds of millions and dollars by the billion. They’ve led to an industrial revolution in yarn-spinning that’s especially evident in cinema and long-form television. Some examples, such as the Campbell-inspired Star Wars: A New Hope, are wonderful. But too many more are Mars Bar stories, cold, corporate and seemingly cooked up by committee.

For me, the problem with the traditional approach is that it’s led to a preoccupation with these structural recipes. It’s easy to see why this has happened. Often the search has been for the One True Story – the ultimate, perfect plot structure by which every tale can be judged. And how are you going to describe that if not by dissecting it into its various movements?

A journey into the science of storytelling reveals the truth of such recipes. Most turn out to be just variations on the standard five-act plot which is successful not because of some secret cosmic truth, or any universal law of storytelling, but because it’s the neatest way of showing deep character change. It’s simple, efficient and relentless – perfectly tooled to capture the attention of masses of brains.

I suspect it’s this belief in plot as a magic formula that’s responsible for the clinical feel from which modern stories sometimes suffer. But a plot can never work in isolation. This is why I believe the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in. It’s the plight of specific, flawed and fascinating individuals that makes us cheer, weep and ram our heads into the sofa cushion. The surface events of the plot are critical, of course, and its structure ought to be present, functional and disciplined. But it’s only there to support its cast.

While there are general structural principles, and a clutch of basic story shapes which are valuable to understand, trying to dictate obligatory dos and don’ts is probably a mistake.

There are many things that attract and hold the attention of brains. Storytellers engage a number of neural processes that evolved for a variety of reasons and are waiting to be played like instruments in an orchestra: moral outrage, unexpected change, status play, specificity, curiosity, and so on. By understanding them, we can more easily create stories that are gripping, profound, emotional and original.

This, I hope, is an approach that will prove more creatively freeing. One benefit of understanding the science of storytelling is that it illuminates the ‘whys’ behind the ‘rules’ we’re commonly given. Such knowledge should be empowering. Knowing why the rules are the rules means we know how to break them intelligently and successfully.

But none of this is to say we should disregard what story theorists such as Campbell have discovered. On the contrary. Many popular storytelling books contain brilliant insights about narrative and human nature that science has only recently caught up with. I quote a number of their authors in these pages. I’m not even arguing that we should ignore their valuable plot designs – they can easily be used to complement this book. It’s really just a question of emphasis. I believe that compelling, profound and original plots are more likely to emerge from character than from a bullet-pointed list. And the best way to create characters that are rich and true and full of narrative surprise is to find out how characters operate in real life – and that means turning to science.

I’ve tried to write the storytelling book I wish I’d had, back when I was working on my novel. I wanted to balance The Science of Storytelling in such a way that it’s of practical use without killing the creative spirit by issuing lists of ‘You Musts’. I agree with the novelist and teacher of creative writing John Gardner, who argues that ‘most supposed aesthetic absolutes prove relative under pressure’. If you’re embarking on a storytelling project, I’d suggest you view what follows not as a series of obligations, but as weapons you can choose if and how to deploy. I’ve also outlined a practice that’s proved successful in my classes over the years. The ‘Sacred Flaw Approach’ is a character-first process, an attempt to create a story that mimics the various ways a brain creates a life, and which therefore feels true and fresh, and comes pre-loaded with potential drama.

This book is divided into four chapters, each of which explores a different layer of storytelling. To begin, we’ll examine how storytellers and brains create the vivid worlds they exist within. Next, we’ll encounter the flawed protagonist at the centre of that world. Then we’ll dive into that person’s subconscious, revealing the hidden struggles and wills that make human life so strange and difficult, and the stories we tell about it so compelling, unexpected and emotional. Finally, we’ll be looking at the meaning and purpose of story and taking a fresh look at plots and endings.

What follows is an attempt to make sense of some of what generations of brilliant story theorists have discovered in the face of what equally brilliant women and men in the sciences have come to know. I am infinitely indebted to them all.

Will Storr

CHAPTER ONE:

CREATING A WORLD

1.0

Where does a story begin? Well, where does anything begin? At the beginning, of course. Alright then: Charles Foster Kane was born in Little Salem, Colorado, USA, in 1862. His mother was Mary Kane, his father was Thomas Kane. Mary Kane ran a boarding house . . .

It’s not working. A birth may be the beginning of a life and, if the brain was a data processor, that’s surely where our tale would start. But raw biographical data have little meaning to the storytelling brain. What it desires – what it insists upon, in exchange for the rare gift of its attention – is something else.

1.1

Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And that’s how they continue too. Whether it’s a sixty-word tabloid piece about a TV star’s tiara falling off or a 350,000-word epic such as Anna Karenina, every story you’ll ever hear amounts to ‘something changed’. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.

It’s from such neural activity that your experience of life emerges. Everything you’ve ever seen and thought; everyone you’ve loved and hated; every secret you’ve kept, every dream you’ve pursued, every sunset, every dawn, every pain, bliss, taste and longing – it’s all a creative product of storms of information that loop and flow around your brain’s distant territories. That 1.2-kg lump of greyish-pink computational jelly you keep between your ears might fit comfortably in two cupped hands but, taken on its own scale, it’s vast beyond comprehension. You have 86 billion brain cells or ‘neurons’ and every one of them is as complex as a city. Signals flow between them at speeds of up to 120 metres per second. They travel along 150,000 to 180,000 kms of synaptic wiring, enough to wrap around the planet four times.

But what’s all this neural power for? Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce. These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us. Convincing a member of the opposite sex that we’re a desirable mate is a challenge that requires a deep understanding of social concepts such as attraction, status, reputation and rituals of courting. Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control. Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. It’s by learning how to control the world that they get what they want.

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.

Now think of your face, not as a face, but as a machine that’s been formed by millions of years of evolution for the detection of change. There’s barely a space on it that isn’t somehow dedicated to the job. You’re walking down the street, thinking about nothing in particular, and there’s unexpected change – there’s a bang; someone calls your name. You stop. Your internal monologue ceases. Your powers of attention switch on. You turn that amazing change-detecting machine in its direction to answer the question, ‘What’s happening?’

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.’

These changeful moments are so important, they’re often packed into a story’s first sentences:

That Spot! He hasn’t eaten his supper. Where can he be?

(Eric Hill, Where’s Spot?)

Where’s Papa going with that ax?

(E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web)

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.

(Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games)

These openers create curiosity by describing specific moments of change. But they also hint darkly at troubling change to come. Could Spot be under a bus? Where is that man going with that axe? 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.’

But threatening change doesn’t have to be as overt as a psycho’s knife behind a shower curtain.

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

(J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone)

Rowling’s line is wonderfully pregnant with the threat of change. Experienced readers know something is about to pop the rather self-satisfied world of the Dursleys. This opener uses the same technique Jane Austen employs in Emma, which famously begins:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

As Austen’s line suggests, using moments of change or the threat of change in opening sentences isn’t some hack trick for children’s authors. Here’s the start of Hanif Kureishi’s literary novel Intimacy:

It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.

Here’s how Donna Tartt’s The Secret History begins:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Here’s Albert Camus starting The Outsider:

Mother died today. Or yesterday. I don’t know.

And here’s Jonathan Franzen, opening his literary masterpiece The Corrections in precisely the same way that Eric Hill opened Where’s Spot?

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.

Neither is it limited to modern story:

Rage! Sing, Goddess, [of] Achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost