The Science of Storytelling

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. (Location 99)

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. (Location 183)

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. (Location 193)

Note: How to create change and suzpense in a notion guide

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: (Location 213)

‘There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,’ wrote Loewenstein, ‘even for questions of no importance.’ (Location 252)

The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure. (Location 260)

In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’. (Location 266)

Note: How can i incorporat more questions

Abrams has described his controlling theory of storytelling as consisting of the opening of ‘mystery boxes’. Mystery, he’s said, ‘is the catalyst for imagination … what are stories but mystery boxes?’ (Location 282)

There’s no colour out there either. Atoms are colourless. All the colours we do ‘see’ are a blend of three cones that sit in the eye: red, green and blue. (Location 348)

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. Picturing Jane, then the Kitten, then her Dad mimics the real-world action that we, as readers, should be modelling. It means we’re mentally experiencing the scene in the correct sequence. Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence. (Location 385)

As C. S. Lewis implored a young writer in 1956, ‘instead of telling us a thing was “terrible”, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.’ (Location 399)

Orwell was even right when he wrote about writing. ‘A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,’ he suggested, in 1946, before warning against the use of that ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ (Location 625)

‘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.’ (Location 699)

Expert readers understand that the patterns of change they’ll encounter in art-house films and literary or experimental fiction will be enigmatic and subtle, the causes and effects so ambiguous that they become a wonderful puzzle that stays with them months and even years after reading, ultimately becoming the source of meditation, re-analysis and debate with other readers and viewers – why did characters behave as they did? What was the filmmaker really saying? (Location 718)

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. (Location 721)

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. (Location 939)

For me, it’s the single most underrated quality of fiction writing. Too many books and films begin with characters that seem to be mere outlines: perfect, innocent human-shaped nothings, perhaps with a bolt-on quirk or two, waiting to be coloured in by the events of the plot. Far better to find ourselves waking up, on page one, startled and exhilarated to find ourselves inside a mind and a life that feels flawed, fascinating, specific and real. (Location 958)

Stories weren’t like this in Ancient China. This was a realm so other-focused there was practically no real autobiography for two thousand years. When it did finally emerge, life stories were typically told stripped of the subject’s voice and opinions and they were positioned not at the centre of their own lives but as a bystander looking in. (Location 1033)

‘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.’ (Location 1047)

The brain defends our flawed model of the world with an armoury of crafty biases. When we come across any new fact or opinion, we immediately judge it. If it’s consistent with our model of reality our brain gives a subconscious feeling of yes. If it’s not, it gives a subconscious feeling of no. (Location 1075)

Not only do our neural-reward systems spike pleasurably when we deceive ourselves like this, we kid ourselves that this one-sided hunt for confirmatory information was noble and thorough. This process is extremely cunning. It’s not simply that we ignore or forget evidence that goes against what our models tell us (although we do that too). We find dubious ways of rejecting the authority of opposing experts, give arbitrary weight to some parts of their testimony and not others, lock onto the tiniest genuine flaws in their argument and use them to dismiss them entirely. Intelligence isn’t effective at dissolving these cognitive mirages of rightness. Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to ‘prove’ they’re right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness. (Location 1082)

Everyone who’s psychologically normal thinks they’re the hero. Moral superiority is thought to be a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’. Maintaining a ‘positive moral self-image’ doesn’t only offer psychological and social benefits, it’s actually been found to improve our physical health. (Location 1197)

Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and clichéd stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism – convictions of personal and moral superiority – that drive most acts of evil. (Location 1212)

story it can about what we’re up to and why. It’s because of such findings, writes Professor Nicholas Epley, that ‘no psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts and behaviour anymore unless they’re interested in storytelling’. It’s why a neuroscientist colleague of Professor Leonard Mlodinow said that years of psychotherapy had allowed him to construct a helpful story about his feelings, motivations and behaviour, ‘but is it true? Probably not. The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.’ (Location 1357)

The problem of self-control, I’ve come to think, isn’t really one of willpower. It’s about being inhabited by many different people who have different goals and values, including one who’s determined to be healthy, and one who’s determined to be happy. (Location 1400)

Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion. Our behaviour is ‘simply the end result of the battles’. All the while our confabulating narrator ‘works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?’ (Location 1404)

Our multiplicity is revealed whenever we become emotional. When we’re angry, we’re like a different person with different values and goals in a different reality than when we feel nostalgic, depressed or excited. (Location 1419)

Millions of brains have been attracted to the hidden and half-hidden truths that emit from these solitary trees. They triggered something in the photographers’ subconscious which responded by giving their owners a pleasurable hit of feeling. Lonely, brave, relentless and beautiful, those who stop and snap are not taking pictures of trees, but of themselves. (Location 1461)

‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction. (Location 1603)

‘Stories arose out of our intense interest in social monitoring,’ (Location 1707)

Similar findings have been revealed by researchers at Shenzhen University. Twenty-two participants were asked to play a simple computer game, then told (falsely) they were a ‘two-star player’. Next, in a brain scanner, they were shown pictures of various ‘one-star’ and ‘three-star’ players receiving what looked to be painful facial injections. Afterwards, they claimed to have felt empathy for all the injectees. But their scans betrayed the lie: they only tended to experience empathy for the lower status ‘one-star’ players. (Location 1816)

It’s often said the genius of Shakespeare lies in his psychological truth. Recent advances in the sciences of the mind show the extraordinary degree to which this is correct. Shakespeare had always been sceptical of ‘accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do’. In his scepticism he’s been proven entirely correct. As we’ve learned, none of us know why we do what we do – not King Lear, not Iago, not me and not you. (Location 2109)

‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’ (Location 2227)

The psychologist Professor Brian Little has spent decades studying the goals that humans pursue in their everyday lives. He finds we have an average of fifteen ‘personal projects’ going at once, a mixture of ‘trivial pursuits and magnificent obsessions’. These projects are so central to our identity that Little likes to tell his students, ‘We are our personal projects.’ His studies have found that, in order to bring us happiness, a project should be personally meaningful and we ought to have some level of control over it. When I asked him if a person pursuing one of these ‘core’ projects was a bit like an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution he said, ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’ (Location 2278)

The process was born out of the observation that the most common and fundamental problem I encounter in my students is that their plot and protagonist are essentially unconnected. In reality character and plot are indivisible. Life emerges from self and is a product of it. This is how story ought to work too. (Location 2597)

Our protagonist’s sacred belief that she was the only adult in any room was, at one point, her superpower. It helped earn her everything she most valued. It gave her confidence, tenacity and courage. It gave her wealth, status and a place in the driving seat of history. But ultimately it turned out to be her downfall. This is why our screenplay’s story event is the delicate, complex and high-stakes Brexit process. This was the surface-world event that tested and brutally exposed the reality of her subconscious flaw. Her faulty model of the world prevented her from taking advice or compromising. It alienated and enraged all the people who could’ve helped and supported her. Because she refused to see her flaw and fix it, she ended up failed, loathed and broken. Her story is a tragedy. (Location 2728)

Even if your character has extremely low status and is even self-loathing, there will be a way in which their flaw makes them feel somehow better than other people. (If they simply think they’re worthless, and wrong about all their most precious beliefs, they’re probably not a vastly compelling character.) (Location 2858)