The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  In his fascinating book on story structure Into the Woods, John Yorke argues for the existence of an essential ‘midpoint’ in story. Partly inspired by Gustav Freytag’s nineteenth-century analysis of Ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama, Yorke argues that an event occurs almost halfway through ‘any successful story’ during which something ‘profoundly significant’ takes place that transforms the story and its protagonist in some irreversible way. King Lear’s scene on the stormy heath, when he raged and despaired over his sudden realisation of what his evil daughters had wrought, is a classic midpoint. Yorke additionally believes there’s a hidden symmetry in story, in which protagonists and antagonists function as opposites with their rising and falling fortunes mirroring one another.

  The Hollywood animation studio Pixar is home to some of the most successful mass-market storytellers of our age. ‘Story artist’ Austin Madison, who’s worked on blockbusters including Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up, has shared a structure he says all Pixar films must adhere to. The action starts with a protagonist who has a goal, living in a settled world. Then a challenge comes that forces them into a cause-and-effect sequence of events that eventually builds to a climax that demonstrates the triumph of good over evil and the revelation of the story’s moral.

  The arrival of ‘big data’ has led to a new era of story analysis. Researchers downloaded 1,327 of the most popular works of fiction available via Project Gutenberg, an online platform that makes available out-of-copyright novels. With the use of an algorithm, they sliced the books into 10,000-word sections and measured the emotional temperament of the language contained in each. They found stories tended towards six ‘emotional arcs’: Rags to Riches (characterised by rising emotion); Riches to Rags (tragedies, characterised by falling emotion); Man in a Hole (a fall then a rise); Icarus (a rise then a fall); Oedipus (fall, rise, fall). The most commercially successful emotional arcs, they found, were Icarus, Oedipus and ‘two sequential Man in a Holes’.

  Another big-data analysis was carried out by publishing executive Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers of Stanford University’s Literary Lab. After their algorithm had been to work on 20,000 novels it could predict a New York Times bestseller with an accuracy of eighty per cent. Fascinatingly, the data supported the life’s work of Christopher Booker, whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge. What also emerged was an indication of what people are most curious to read about. The ‘most frequently occurring and important theme’ of bestsellers was ‘human closeness and human connection’, an apposite interest for a hyper-social species.

  Archer and Jockers were especially interested in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, whose 125-million-selling success baffled many in the publishing industry. Some assumed it was successful because of its BDSM subject matter, but a textual analysis revealed that sex wasn’t actually its dominant theme. ‘The novel is not so much outright erotica, but is instead a spicy romance that has the emotional connection between its hero and heroine as its central interest,’ they wrote. What actually drove the action was ‘the constantly recurring question of whether or not Ana will submit’. The plot was powered, as all plots should be, by the dramatic question: who was Ana going to be?

  When Archer and Jockers laid out the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey on a graph, it turned out to take an intriguing and rare form. It made a roughly symmetrical pattern that travelled across five peaks and four valleys, each of which came regularly. Unusual as it was, it was strikingly similar to another novel that seemed to come from nowhere and into sales of dozens of millions: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. ‘The distance between each peak is about the same, and the distance between each valley is about the same, and finally, the distances between peaks and valleys are about the same,’ they wrote. ‘Both novels have mastered the page-turner beat.’

  All these plot designs embrace the three-act shape of crisis, struggle, resolution. When unexpected change happens to the right person, it ignites a drama that eventually comes to a conclusion. What these theorists often disagree about is the events of act two. But I suspect that none of these plot designs is actually the ‘right’ one. Beyond the basic three acts of Western storytelling, the only plot fundamental is that there must be regular change, much of which should preferably be driven by the protagonist, who changes along with it. It’s change that obsesses brains. The challenge that storytellers face is creating a plot that has enough unexpected change to hold attention over the course of an entire novel or film. This isn’t easy. For me, these different plot designs represent different methods of solving that complex problem. Each one is a unique recipe for a plot that moves relentlessly forwards, builds in intrigue and tension and never stops changing.

  These recipes work. But the problem with recipes is that, every time you follow one, you get the same bloody cake. Perhaps a more creatively freeing way of looking at plot is as a symphony of change. There’s the top level of cause-and-effect in which all the obvious action and drama plays out. There’s the second level in which characters are altered in surprising and meaningful ways. As well as this, the characters’ understanding of their situation can change. The characters’ plan for achieving their goal can change. The character’s goal can change. A character’s understanding of themselves can change. A character’s understanding of their relationships can change. The reader’s understanding of who the character is can change. The reader’s understanding of what’s actually happening in the drama can change. The secondary major (and even tertiary) characters can change. Information gaps can be opened and teased and closed. And so on. An efficient and immersive plot is one in which change is constant and taking place on many layers in harmony, with every new movement pushing the intertwined characters relentlessly towards their conclusions.

  Which forms of change are deployed, and when, is a creative decision that depends partly on the kind of story that’s being told. Police-procedural drama, for example, depends heavily on changes in the reader’s understanding of what’s really happening, which tend to dance exhilaratingly around what the Detective Inspector knows. This is change that plays with information gaps – curiosity is aroused and toyed with throughout act two and then finally satisfied. Much of the change in The Remains of the Day, meanwhile, takes the form of the reader’s understanding of Stevens, a character to whom nuance and colours (many of them dark) are progressively added, often with the use of flashbacks.

  If this second form of change is more profound and memorable it’s because it more directly connects with that elemental dramatic question. Who is Stevens? Who’s he going to be? The answer doesn’t stop changing until Ishiguro’s very final page.

  4.2

  The job of the plot is to keep asking the dramatic question. It does this by repeatedly challenging and gradually breaking the protagonist’s model of who they are and how the world works. This requires pressure. These models are tough. They run to the core of the character’s identity. If they’re going to crack, the protagonist needs to hurl themselves at the drama. It’s only by being active, and having the courage to take on the external world with all its challenges and provocations, that these core mechanisms can ever be broken down and rebuilt. For the neuroscientist Professor Beau Lotto it’s ‘not just important to be active, it is neurologically necessary’. It’s the only way we grow.

  When the data scientist David Robinson analysed an enormous tranche of 112,000 plots including books, movies, television episodes and video games, his algorithm found one common story shape. Robinson described this as, ‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’ The pattern he detected reveals that many stories have a point, just prior to their resolution, in which the hero endures some deeply significant test. For one final, decisive time, they’re posed the dramatic question. It’s the crucial moment in which they have the chance to become someone new.

  In archetypal storytelling, especially as it emerges in fairytales, myths and Hollywood movies, this event often takes the form of so
me life-or-death challenge or fight in which the protagonist comes face-to-face with all that they most dread. This is symbolic of what’s taking place in the second, subconscious layer of the story. Because the events of the drama are specifically designed to strike at the core of their identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest, and that they least want to confront. The flawed models they’re required to shatter run so deep that it takes an act of almost supernatural strength and courage to change them.

  The psychologist and story theorist Professor Jordan Peterson talks of the mythic trope in which a hero makes final battle with a dragon that’s hoarding treasure. ‘You confront it in order to get what it has to offer you. The probability is that’s going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit. But you don’t get the gold without the dragon. That’s a very, very strange idea. But it seems to be accurate.’

  That gold is your the reward for accepting the fight of your life. But you only get it if you answer story’s dramatic question correctly: ‘I’m going to be someone better.’

  4.3

  How does a story end? If all story is change then it naturally follows that a story ends when the change finally stops. From the ignition point onwards, the protagonist has been in a battle to reimpose control over the external world. If the story has a happy ending the process will be successful. Their brain’s model of the external world, and its theory of control, will have been updated and improved. They’ll finally be able to tame the chaos.

  Control, as we have already discovered, is the ultimate mission of the brain. Our hero-making cognition always wants to make us feel as if we have more of it than we actually do. When study participants were faced with a machine that issued rewards at random, they concocted elaborate rituals with its levers, convinced they were able to control when it paid out. Another test found that participants given electric shocks could withstand more pain simply by being told they could stop it at will. Random and uncontrollable shocks, meanwhile, led to psychological and physiological decline.

  To lose our sense of control is to suffer the loss of the sense of ourselves as an active heroic character, and this leads to anxiety and depression and worse. Desperate to avoid this, the brain spins its compelling, guileful and simplistic story of heroic us. ‘A critical element to our well-being is how well we understand what happens to us and why,’ writes psychologist Professor Timothy Wilson. Happy people have reassuring narratives of self that account for why bad things have happened to them and which offer hope for the future. Those who ‘feel in control of their lives, have goals of their own choosing and make progress towards those goals are happier than people who do not’.

  Brains love control. It’s their heaven. They’re constantly battling to get there. It’s surely no coincidence that control is the defining quality in the hero of the world’s most successful story. The star of the majority of religious sagas is ‘God’. He can do anything. He always knows what to do, He knows what’s coming, He knows what’s happened and He has unrestricted access to everyone’s most private gossip.

  Our craving for control explains why the endings of archetypal stories are so deeply satisfying. In tragedies such as Lolita, the protagonist answers the dramatic question by deciding not to become someone better. Rather than discovering and fixing their flaws they embrace them yet further. This causes them to enter a catastrophic spiral of model-defending behaviour that loosens their control over the external world more and more, leading to inevitable humiliation, ostracisation or death. Such an ending transmits the profoundly comforting signal, to the reader, that divine justice truly exists and is inescapable, and that there’s control in the chaos after all.

  Stories such as Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark take advantage of our wired-in lust for control by deliberately and cruelly not satisfying it. When her money is stolen by the selfish policeman, the selfless immigrant Selma Ježková’s attempts at regaining control over the external world cause her to spin yet further into disarray. The plot ends with her death by hanging in a prison. This is not what we want. In refusing to fulfil our tribal desire for justice and restored control, Von Trier leaves his audience in a state of devastation. By doing so, he successfully and powerfully makes his political comment on the treatment of the vulnerable by the United States.

  The ending of Damien Chazelle’s screenplay La La Land both satisfies and subverts our need for control. His romantic comedy follows two protagonists, one of whom is desperate to become a famous actress, the other a lauded jazz musician. When the plot poses each of them the dramatic question, they ultimately choose their ambitions over each other. In the wonderfully effective ending we’re happy to discover their dreams came true and yet sad they lost each other in the process. The ending works because the dramatic question is answered decisively and it feels true to who the characters are, and yet the viewer is left drowning in lovely, longing bitter-sweetness. They achieved control and lost it too.

  The butler Stevens’s story ends by promising us, subtly but surely, that his ability to control reality will transform. Extended flashback sequences in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day show us the melancholy consequences of his loyalty not only to the value of dignity in emotional restraint, but also to his former employer, Lord Darlington, who emerges as an anti-Semite and Nazi appeaser. Events on Stevens’s road trip to Cornwall, where he’s to meet with his former housekeeper Miss Kenton, cause various knocks to his internal model of the world, but he remains stubbornly true to it.

  When he finally meets Miss Kenton she admits she was once in love with him. On hearing her confession, Stevens admits to the reader that his ‘heart was breaking’. He nevertheless fails to share his feelings with Kenton herself, even as her eyes brim with tears. His model of the world, and its theory of control, has it that to show anything but dignity in emotional restraint is to invite chaos. He simply cannot do it.

  The story’s closing paragraphs take him to Weymouth pier where crowds have gathered in what remains of the day to see the electric lights turned on. Finally, Stevens concedes he was wrong about Lord Darlington who, he admits, made ‘mistakes’. He reflects that his position of servitude demanded loyalty to whatever view of the world Darlington chose. ‘What dignity is there in that?’ he asks.

  Moments later, he’s surprised to realise the people chatting behind him are not friends or family members but strangers gathered to watch the lights. ‘It is curious how people can build such warmth among themselves,’ he says. Wondering how it happens, he concludes it’s likely down to the ‘bantering skill’ that his new American employer enjoyed so much but which he’d given up trying to master. ‘Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically,’ he says. ‘After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.’

  In the book’s final page Stevens makes a commitment to change that might be trivial to anyone else but for him means wrestling dragons. His internal model of the world has been recognised as wrong and the reader is left in the lovely glow of the implication that his ability to control the external world will be improved and, as a result, he’ll receive the golden treasure of transformation. The ending of his story is a happy one.

  An archetypal happy ending can be found in the closing paragraphs of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Set in a psychiatric institution in 1950s, the novel is narrated by the native American patient Chief Bromden, whose model of the world is, like Mr B’s, pathologically delusional.

  When we meet him, he believes reality itself is controlled by a strange hidden mechanism he calls the Combine. His theory of control has it that he has no control at all. Bromden doesn’t talk, he just sweeps repetitively in the corner and listens. His model of the world is challenged and rebuilt by the arrival of the charismatic and rebellious McMurphy, who ends up being cruelly lobotomised. In an exceptionall
y moving ending, Bromden mercifully euthanises the friend who helped him heal. He then tears a heavy control panel out of the ground, hurls it through a window and leaps into the moonlit sky, leaving us with the words, ‘I been away a long time.’

  Back at the story’s start, Bromden appeared to be in hospital again, perhaps caught as an AWOL or having fallen ill once more. But the story ends where it does because that’s the blissful, fleeting instant in time in which Bromden has complete control over both levels of story: over the external world of the drama and the internal world of who he is. For one blissful, perfect moment, he has control over everything. He has become God.

  The perfect archetypal ending takes the form of ‘the God moment’ because it reassures us that, despite all the chaos and sadness and struggle that fills our lives, there is control. There’s no more reassuring message than this for the storytelling brain. Having been picked up in act one, and hurled around the drama, we’re put back down again in the best possible place. The psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister writes that ‘life is change that yearns for stability’. Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It’s a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is a thrill-ride of control.