The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  ‘Well, naturally,’ says Murray.

  ‘No, something else,’ he says. ‘I enjoyed it.’

  In this highly dramatic scene, we see Lawrence divided. He’s learned to control the world by adherence to a vanity that manifests as rebellion. This theory of control has driven him to huge success. It’s enabling him to become an extraordinary man. But it’s also led to unexpected effects. He has glimpsed what he’s turning into, and what ‘success’ actually means, and it’s terrified him.

  But the military chiefs ignore Lawrence’s pleas. And they know just how to convince a vain man like him – by shoring up his leaking theory of control. They tell him his feats in the desert were superhuman and recommend him for a medal. He’s a brilliant soldier, they say. He’s extraordinary. Precisely because of the nature of Lawrence’s flaw, their manipulations work. He returns to the desert more vain and rebellious than ever. He leads an attack on a Turkish train. The Arabs loot it and hail him almost as a living god: ‘Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!’

  His flaw deepens. He begins demanding the impossible of his men – ‘My friends, who will walk on water with me?’ When Sherif Ali protests that he’s asking too much of them, Lawrence pushes back: ‘Whatever I ask them to do can be done … Do you think I’m just anybody, Ali? Do you?’

  By now Lawrence has become so vain and rebellious he behaves as if he has magical powers. With a nervous Sherif Ali at his side, he swans into a Turkish garrison, splashing through puddles, utterly convinced he won’t be seen despite his glaring whiteness. ‘Do you not see how they look at you?’ Ali hisses.

  ‘Peace, Ali,’ he replies. ‘I am invisible.’

  But he’s not invisible. Lawrence is caught and brutally tortured. His beating is such that he’s forced to realise his theory of control was wrong. His most fundamental beliefs about who he was were mistaken, and catastrophically so. Back at base, still bleeding from his wounds, he hands General Murray a written request to leave Arabia.

  ‘For what reason?’ demands Murray.

  ‘The truth is,’ he says, ‘I’m an ordinary man.’ But Murray knows how to get around him. ‘You’re the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ begs Lawrence. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Well that’s a feeble thing to say.’

  ‘I know I’m not ordinary.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘Alright!’ says Lawrence. ‘I’m extraordinary. What of it?’

  Soon afterwards, in the film’s most iconic sequence, Lawrence leads his Arab army in a gruesome attack on fleeing Turks. ‘No prisoners!’ he yells. ‘No prisoners!’ When his handgun runs out of bullets, he starts madly slashing at people with his dagger. Sherif Ali, the man he berated at as ‘barbarous’ and a ‘murderer’ at the film’s start, begs him to stop. Soaked in blood, surrounded by fresh corpses, Lawrence lifts the gory blade of his knife and gazes in horror at his reflection.

  Stories such as this are like life itself, a constant conversation between conscious and subconscious, text and subtext, with causes and effects ricocheting between both levels. As incredible and heightened as they often are, they also tell us a truth about the human condition. We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.

  3.3

  Tragedies such as Lawrence of Arabia can be especially useful, for the purposes of analysis, because the causes and effects of character change tend to have greater emphasis in the narrative and are therefore clearer to see. But all archetypal stories are like this, even if the process is less overt in some. They’re about flawed selves being offered the opportunity to heal. Whether their endings are happy or otherwise depends on whether or not they take it. If they choose to heal, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or, say, Charlie Simms and Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, the twin protagonists of Bo Goldman’s Academy Award-winning Scent of a Woman, the audience will be profoundly cheered. But whatever happens, we’re usually left in little doubt as to what conclusion the writer wanted us to come to. In the closing scenes, the dramatic question will have been answered. We’ll leave the story with that lovely emotional sense that something, perhaps just beyond the level of conscious comprehension, has been completed.

  Modernist stories are different. Whilst they’re built from the same dance between surface drama and subconscious change, their causes and effects are often left ambiguous. Character change occurs, but it’s less clear how these changes are being triggered by the drama and what message we’re supposed to glean from them. More space is left for the reader to insert their own interpretations into the text.

  Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Passenger’ shows an enigmatic movement of cause and effect between consciousness and subconscious. It tells of a man on a tram feeling uncertain about himself and his place in the world. He becomes lost, for a moment, in the abstract physical details of a woman waiting to disembark – the position of her hands, the shape of her nose, the shadow her ear makes against her skull. These conscious observations trigger something deep in his subconscious. He asks, ‘How is it that she is not astonished at herself, that she keeps her mouth closed, and expresses nothing of any wonderment?’ In a way that recalls eastern story forms such as Kishõtenketsu, the reader is invited to ponder how one level connects to the other and thereby bring them into harmony.

  Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway tracks such movements between consciousness and subconscious in longer form, as it follows a day in the life of eponymous Clarissa, and various characters orbiting her, as she prepares for and hosts a party. The story is told not as if the protagonist is talking out loud to the reader, as is common in first-person narratives. Rather, it’s as if we’re privy to her inner narrator as it bounces between the external and internal – from event in the world to thought, memory, to sudden revealing insight – bringing it all together into a compelling and believable composite of self.

  In a similar style, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger tracks its unnamed protagonist’s struggle to survive mentally and physically while trying to earn money as a writer. Published in 1890, it’s a stunningly prescient exploration of human cognition. The central character, who ruefully describes himself as ‘nothing but a battleground for invisible forces’ is thrown relentlessly between the two levels of cause and effect. On seeing an attractive woman he becomes ‘possessed by a strange desire’ to frighten her and makes ‘stupid faces’ behind her back: ‘No matter how much I told myself I was acting idiotically, it did not help.’

  One morning, for some unknowable reason, the noises of the street send his mood soaring. ‘I was powerful as a giant and could stop a wagon with my shoulders … I started to hum for pure joy and for no particular reason.’ In desperation, he tries to pawn a tattered blanket and is humiliated when the pawnbroker sends him away. After taking it back home: ‘I acted as though nothing had happened, spread the blanket out again on the bed, smoothed out the wrinkles as I always did, and tried to erase every trace of my last action. I couldn’t possibly have been in my right mind when I decided to try this filthy trick. The more I thought of it, the more irrational it seemed. It must have been some failure of energy far inside that had caught me off guard.’

  Generations before science caught up, Hamsun showed how we are multiple and confabulatory, skating on the thin ice of sanity, all of us a battleground for the invisible forces of our own subconscious minds.

  3.4

  It’s not uncommon for a character to want something on the conscious level and yet subconsciously need something entirely different. As the story theorist Robert McKee writes, ‘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 contradict
ion. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly needs.’

  Alan Ball’s Academy Award-winning screenplay American Beauty focuses on just such a character. When we meet 42-year-old Lester Burnham, he’s bullied by his boss, his daughter and especially his disdainful and unfaithful wife. Miserable and trapped, Lester suffers a midlife crisis, deciding that happiness lies in his becoming young and carefree again. He buys a fast car, starts working out in his garage, finds a job at a drive-through burger restaurant and smokes marijuana. He stands up to his boss and wife. Much of the surface-level plot is taken up with Lester’s blackly comic attempts at sleeping with his daughter’s best friend, the apparently streetwise and experienced Angela.

  When he finally gets the opportunity to do so we’re shown the contradiction between his shallow, short-term conscious desires and his deep subconscious needs. Lying half-naked beneath him, Angela confesses she’s not as experienced as she’d appeared: ‘This is my first time.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ says Lester. He crumbles, refusing to carry on. Angela becomes upset. Lester wraps her in a blanket and holds her as she sobs – a responsible adult, finally.

  While Lester wanted to be young again, what he’d needed was to mature and become truly powerful. In this touching and revelatory moment, as a better version of his self bubbles up from his subconscious, we realise that the answer to the dramatic question has suddenly flipped to its opposite.

  The scene has additional power because it doesn’t only show a transformation in who we understand Lester to be. We see Angela in a new way too. In all great stories, each major character is altered somehow by their interpersonal encounters. As they clash, they send each other spinning outwards, only to clash again in new and altered ways, and then spin out again, and meet again and so on and so on, out across the plot, in an elegant and gripping dance of change.

  3.5

  Story time is compressed time. An entire life can be told in the space of just ninety minutes and still somehow feel complete. It’s this compression that’s the secret of arresting dialogue. The words characters speak should both sound true and writhe with meaning, making for a rich source of data for the model-making brain. Speech should be crammed with deep facts that can be greedily absorbed by readers and viewers, whose hyper-social brains rapidly construct models of the fictional characters’ minds.

  Some of the most famous lines of dialogue in film history derive their power from the fact that they’re so dense with narrative information it’s as if the entire story is packed into just a few words:

  I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

  Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Michael Herr

  I wish I knew how to quit you.

  Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana via Annie Proulx

  I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.

  Network, Paddy Chayefsky

  The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

  The Usual Suspects, Christopher McQuarrie

  I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.

  Notting Hill, Richard Curtis

  These go to eleven.

  This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer

  I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.

  Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D. M. Marshman Jr

  You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

  Jaws, Peter Benchley

  All the principles of storytelling combine into the art of dialogue. Dialogue should be changeful, it should want something, it should drip with personality and point of view, and it should operate on the two story levels – both conscious and subconscious. It can give us clues about everything we need to know about the character: who they are, what they want, where they’re going, where they’ve been, their social background, their personality, their values, their sense of status, the tension between their true self and the false front they’re presenting, their relationships to other characters, the secret torments that will drive the narrative forwards.

  Take this opening monologue from the TV series Marion and Geoff by Rob Brydon and Hugo Blick. How much do we learn in just eighty-three seconds of screen time about the taxi driver Keith Barrett?

  KEITH: [sliding into his car seat]: Good morning, good morning! Another day, another dollar. [speaks into handheld radio] My first pick up please? [white noise – he shrugs.] I’ll just drive around. It’s like that some days. You just ease your way into the day.

  [Cut to Keith driving] KEITH: These sleeping policemen are a wonderful idea, but they’re a pain in the bloomin’ neck, I’ll tell you that. I mean, I’m not against them. I would never say that. If they only save one life … then probably not very cost-effective.

  [Cut] KEITH: It’s not that the kids think of Geoff as their father, because they don’t. They think of him as an uncle. A special uncle. A new uncle. I like him. If you like someone you like someone, you can’t help it. I mean, I actually said to him, ‘I don’t feel like I’ve lost a wife, I feel like I’ve gained a friend.’ I would never have met Geoff if Marion hadn’t left me. Not a chance of it. We’re in different worlds. He’s in pharmaceuticals, I’m in cars. Literally – I’m in the car. I bear you no ill, sir. I bear you no ill.

  Similarly, how much do we learn in this brief exchange between the ageing salesman Willy Loman and his wife Linda, from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman?

  WILLY: If old man Wagner was alive I’d a been in charge of New York now! That man was a prince, he was a masterful man. But that boy of his, that Howard, he don’t appreciate. When I went up north the first time, the Wagner company didn’t know where New England was!

  LINDA: Why don’t you tell those things to Howard, dear?

  WILLY (encouraged): I will, I definitely will. Is there any cheese?

  3.6

  As we move through the plots of our lives, we’re not only struggling against unruly, unpredictable and unhelpful versions of self. We’re also fighting to manage powerful drives that are wired deeply into us. These are the products of human evolution. Exposing these drives means travelling back tens of thousands of years, to the era in which we became a storytelling animal. The journey’s reward is the unburying of ancient yet critical lessons about story, not least the origin and purpose of the dramatic question.

  Films and novels are pleasurable – tense, shocking, gut-wrenching, thrilling, suspenseful, satisfying – in large part because of their ancient roots. The emotions we experience, when under the power of story, don’t happen by accident. Humans have evolved to respond in certain ways to tales of heroism and villainy because doing so has been critical for our survival. This was especially true back when we were living in hunter-gatherer tribes.

  We’ve spent more than ninety-five per cent of our time on earth existing in such tribes and much of the neural architecture we still carry around today evolved when we were doing so. In this twenty-first century of speed, information and high technology, we still have Stone Age brains. As powerful as culture is, it cannot cancel out or transform these deeply embedded primal forces, but only modulate it. No matter where we come from, East, West, North or South, Pleistocene winds blow in our subconscious minds, touching almost every part of our modern lives, from our codes of morality to the ways we arrange our furniture. One study found people prefer to sleep as far from their bedroom door as possible and with a clear view of it, as if still in a cave and wary of night-time predators. The body’s reflexes remain primed for the savannah we once roamed: when someone creeps up and shocks us, the body automatically responds as if being attacked by a prey animal. All over the world, people enjoy open spaces and lawns and prefer trees of a shape, height and canopy similar to that which we evolved amongst. Our Stone Age values also remain strongly e
vident in stories.

  It’s testament to the powers of the storytelling brain that many psychologists argue that human language evolved in the first place in order to tell tales about each other. As unlikely as this sounds, it makes sense. Human tribes were big, topping out at around 150 members who’d occupy a large physical territory and live, day-to-day, in clusters of perhaps five to ten families. In order to be functional, it was essential that members of a tribe cooperated – that they shared and helped and worked together, putting the needs of others before their own. But this presented a problem. Humans are people. And yet, despite this apparently catastrophic design flaw, ancient tribes excelled at cooperating. Not only did they manage to do so such that they survived for tens of thousands of years, with some still existing today, they’re thought to have been far more egalitarian than modern humans. How did they do this? How did they control each other’s self-interested behaviour so fantastically, without the help a police force, a judiciary or even any written law?

  They’d do it with the earliest and most incendiary form of storytelling. Gossip. People would keep track of everyone else, closely tallying their behaviour. When these gossipy stories concerned a person behaving selflessly – when they put the tribe’s needs before their own – listeners would experience a wash of positive emotions and an urge to celebrate them. But when they were told tales of someone being selfish, listeners would experience the emotion of moral outrage. They’d be motivated to act – to punish them, whether by being shamed and mocked, violently attacked or ostracised from the group, which would’ve been a sentence of death.

  This is how stories kept the tribe together as a functional, cooperating unit. They were essential for our survival. And our brains operate in the same way today. We enjoy great books or immersive films because they’re activating and exploiting these ancient social emotions. When a character behaves selflessly we experience a deep primal craving to see them recognised by the group as a hero and hailed. When a character behaves selfishly, we feel a monstrous urge to see their punishment. ‘Stories arose out of our intense interest in social monitoring,’ writes the psychologist Professor Brian Boyd. They work by ‘riveting our attention to social information’, whether in the form of gossip or screenplay or books, which typically tell of ‘heightened versions of the behaviours we naturally monitor’.