The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  4.4

  To live in a hallucination trapped inside a skull is to feel, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, like ‘the invisible actor at the centre of the world’. We’re that single point of focus at which everything meets: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, thought, memory and action. This is the illusion story weaves. Writers create a simulacrum of human consciousness. To read a page in a novel is to move naturally from visual observation to speech to thought to the recollection of a distant memory, back to visual observation again, and so on. It is, in other words, to experience the consciousness of the character as if we were them. This simulacrum of consciousness can become so compelling it nudges the reader’s actual consciousness backwards. When we’re lost in story, brain scans suggest the regions associated with our sense of self become inhibited.

  As the story sends us on its thrilling rollercoaster of control, our bodies respond accordingly, experiencing its events: heart rate goes up, blood vessels dilate, changing activations of neurochemicals such as cortisol and oxytocin have powerful effects on our emotional states. We can become so replaced by the storyteller’s simulated model-world that we miss our train stop or forget to go to sleep. Psychologists call this state ‘transportation’.

  Research suggests that, when we’re transported, our beliefs, attitudes and intentions are vulnerable to being altered, in accordance with the mores of the story, and that these alterations can stick. ‘Research has demonstrated that the transported “traveller” can return changed by the journey,’ write the authors of a meta-analysis of 132 studies of narrative transportation. ‘The transformation that narrative transportation achieves is persuasion of the story-receiver.’

  In the 1960s, the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dragged its readers through the experiences of an ordinary prisoner in one of Stalin’s gulag camps, shocking the Communist citizens of the Soviet Union. During the nineteenth century, slave narratives brought white readers into the lives of those trapped in bondage in the southern states of America. Books such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass sold by the tens of thousands and gave abolitionists a mighty weapon, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped precipitate the American Civil War.

  Transportation changes people, and then it changes the world.

  4.5

  We all inhabit foreign worlds. Each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neural realms, ‘seeing’ things differently, feeling different passions and hatreds and associations of memory as our attention grazes over them. We laugh at different things, are moved by different pieces of music and transported by different kinds of stories. All of us are in search of writers who somehow capture the distinct music made by the agonies in our heads.

  If we prefer storytellers with similar backgrounds and lived experiences to our own, it’s because what we often crave in art is the same connection with others that we seek in friendship and love. It’s only natural if a woman prefers books by women or a working-class man prefers working-class voices: storytelling will always be full of associations that speak directly to particular perspectives.

  Take this first sentence: ‘The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.’ To this middle-aged Kentishman it’s a fine enough opener, but has little resonance beyond its surface facts. But readers with a similar background to its author, Toni Morrison, might know the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agency was one of the largest African-American owned companies in the United States, and one founded by a former slave. Morrison also hoped the reader would pick up on a sense of movement from North Carolina to Lake Superior that, she writes, ‘suggests a journey from South to North – a direction common for black immigration and in literature about it’.

  But just because books by people like us can ring with greater personal meaning doesn’t mean we should stay in our silos. It doesn’t require a forbidding amount of historical or cultural knowledge to enjoy Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Psychologists have examined the effects of storytelling on our perceptions of tribal ‘others’. One study had a group of white Americans viewing a sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, that represented Muslims as friendly and relatable. Compared to a control group (who watched Friends) they ended up with ‘more positive attitudes towards Arabs’ on various tests – changes that persisted when re-tested a month later.

  Story, then, is both tribal propaganda and the cure for tribal propaganda. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch advises his daughter Scout that she’ll ‘get along a lot better with all kinds of folks’ if she learns a simple trick: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ This is precisely what story enables us to do. In this way, it creates empathy. There can hardly be a better medicine than that for the groupish hatred that comes so naturally and seductively to all humans.

  And yet it’s sometimes argued that a storyteller who climbs into the skin of a person of a different gender, race or sexuality is guilty of a kind of theft – that of appropriating and unjustly profiting from another’s culture. Storytellers who attempt such feats of imagination have a heightened obligation towards truth, to be sure. But I don’t believe they’re the enemies of peace, justice and understanding. On the contrary, I fear it’s those who rage against them who’ll end up dividing us further. Smart people will always be able to construct persuasive moral arguments to defend their beliefs, but calls to keep strictly within the bounds of one’s group seem to me to be little more than chimpish xenophobia.

  Story should not respect such boundaries. If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer. At its best, it reminds us that, beneath our many differences, we remain beasts of one species.

  4.6

  The lesson of story is that we have no idea how wrong we are. Discovering the fragile parts of our neural models means listening for their cry. When we become irrationally emotional and defensive, we’re often betraying the parts of us that require the most aggressive protection. This is the place in which our perception of the world is most warped and tender. Facing these flaws and fixing them will be the fight of our lives. To accept story’s challenge and win is to be a hero.

  4.7

  The consolation of story is truth. The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us.

  It’s not only us who are broken; it’s not only us who are conflicted; it’s not only us who are confused; it’s not only us who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets and feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves. It’s not only us who are scared. The magic of story is its ability to connect mind with mind in a manner that’s unrivalled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone, in that dark bone vault, after all.

  APPENDIX:

  THE SACRED FLAW APPROACH

  This is a technique that’s been developed principally in my writing classes since 2014. It’s an attempt to incorporate essential Science of Storytelling principles into a practical, step-by-step method for creating effective and original stories.

  I call it an ‘approach’ because it’s a series of exercises to undertake principally as you approach the actual writing of your first draft. The essential idea is to build a protagonist, in all its fascinating weirdness and damage, in the same way t
hat a brain builds a self. By going through a relatively straightforward series of steps, we can aim to discover a character who is interesting and original and has, surrounding them, a cast of compelling and necessary secondary characters. Incorporated into the process are some well-known and popular creative writing exercises which you might have encountered before.

  While you’re working with the Sacred Flaw Approach, it’s important to remember a couple of things. First, I’m not suggesting in any sense that this is the only way to make story. This is simply one route which the people who’ve attended my class have found useful. Second, it doesn’t need to be followed religiously. The demands of your particular piece might make some parts of this framework irrelevant or inappropriate. You might reach a point where you no longer need it. It’s really just a guide to help you think in the right direction. The only thing that matters is that it helps.

  The method’s focus is on character because, for me, this is where all storytellers should begin their serious creative endeavours. Character work is essential whether you’re writing an art-house film or some plot-heavy genre fiction. If your passion is for the thriller or bonk-buster or action-adventure story, your plots clearly need to be tight and efficient and superior. But if you disregard character they risk becoming predictable. In life our ‘plots’ emerge out of who we are. It’s the active decisions we make that create the events of our days. These decisions reflect our character – our values, flaws, personality and goals. It’s in this way that the lives we lead emerge out of the people we are. This is true in life and it should also be true in story.

  SACREDNESS

  During my research into the storytelling brain, I was lucky enough to interview the famous psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt. He told me something I’ve never forgotten: ‘Follow the sacredness. Find out what people believe to be sacred, and when you look around there you will find rampant irrationality.’

  Rampant irrationality! This is exactly what we, as storytellers, should be hunting in our characters. In order for them to change, our protagonists need to start off broken. When we meet them, in act one, they should be immersed in a reality of rampant irrationality without really being aware of it. This is not to say they should believe the earth is a painted cauliflower or there’s a vampire camping in their sock-drawer. They’re not crazy crazy. They’re ordinarily crazy – a person you might meet in your everyday life who’s become locked into some belief or behaviour that’s somehow damaging them, even if they can’t see it.

  In order to locate the thing they’re irrational about, we need to ask what they make sacred. The things we make sacred are, to a great extent, the things that come to define us. This, I believe, is the secret of unlocking the truth of a character. When other people think of us – when they’re asked what we’re like – our sacred belief will probably be the first thing that pops into their minds. It will be how they describe us to a stranger. And because sacredness is the source of ‘rampant irrationality’, it’s also probably going to be the cause of misery, error and distress. This is the stuff of story. It’s exactly what we’re hunting.

  A fictional character’s ‘sacred flaw’, then, is the broken part of them that they’ve made sacred. In The Remains of the Day, the butler James Stevens had made the idea of English dignity in emotional restraint sacred. This is where we meet him in act one. Early in Citizen Kane, we watch Charles Foster Kane make the idea of himself as a selfless warrior for the ‘common man’ sacred – a faulty belief that powered the rest of his journey. Likewise, the early sequences of Lawrence of Arabia portray T. E. Lawrence making the idea that he is an ‘extraordinary’ man sacred – and then we’re dragged unforgettably through the consequences of this irrational belief.

  These were faulty concepts that became built into these characters’ neural models of reality. They struggled to see past them. They defined who they were. The point of the plots was to test and retest and ultimately break these sacred ideas apart. That’s what the drama was for. That’s what made those stories gripping.

  The cases of Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia demonstrate that the sacred flaw doesn’t necessarily have to be fully in place at the story’s start. But don’t forget those protagonists were still damaged when we met them – Kane with his childhood trauma and Lawrence with his cocky, rebellious vanity. Their personalities were such that, when the events of the plot started flying at them, it became inevitable that these flaws rapidly developed and came to possess them. Additionally, these were tragic plots, so the development of the flaw, rather than the process of it being healed, took centre stage in their stories. If we’re aiming for a happier ending we’re more likely to meet someone more overtly flawed on page one, and then root for them as they slowly work out who to become in order to heal.

  For the purposes of this exercise we’re going to work towards this model – a character who’s in the grip of their sacred flaw on page one, as this tends to make for the more dramatic beginning. There’s nothing stopping you starting your story earlier, however, especially if you’re going for a tragic theme. But keep in mind that your character still needs to be broken in a specific and purposeful way at the moment we meet them. Their flaw needs the potential to develop into something damagingly irrational.

  Our job, then, is to find the sacred flaw in our protagonist. Once we’ve found it, we need to build a life and a self around this person. We need to work out what effect this flaw has had on them. What ramifications has it had for their family life, their romantic life and their working life? What benefits has adherence to this flaw brought them? And what costs? By doing so, an entire world can be conjured around this tiny flaw. This will be the world of our story.

  EMBRACE THE REWIND

  With every class I teach, there are usually one or two writers who politely resist this process. When I work with them, I sometimes sense the problem is that they’ve rather fallen in love with their protagonists. They’ve lived with them for months and maybe years of drafting and redrafting and they don’t want to closely define them because they’re this and they’re also this and they’re this and this and this and, oh my God, they’re just amazing! The last thing they want is to assign to them any flaws.

  For some of these students, I suspect what’s secretly holding them back is that the protagonist actually is them. The more work they do on that character, the further that character moves away from who they are. As strange as it might sound, this process can cause them some emotional pain, almost as if they’re losing a loved one. But it’s pain they must endure. Unless it’s overcome, this problem can be fatal to their creativity. A storyteller needs spine. They have to make hard and clear decisions about their characters, even if those decisions are left somewhat ambiguous on the page. Underpinning every gripping scene in their story is that fundamental dramatic question: who is this character really? If the author doesn’t know, the reader is likely to sense it and grow confused, frustrated and uninterested.

  A further issue is that starting out with little more than a close definition of a single flaw can feel reductive. In the early stages of the process, it’s almost as if we’re sketching cartoon characters. But starting with absolute specificity is incredibly useful. Over and over and over again I’ve found this somewhat paradoxical truth: the more tightly we define the sacred flaw, the more complex and unique the character that explodes out of it.

  A final, practical problem is that storytellers resist focussing on character because the source of their inspiration, and their excitement about their project, is not a character at all. There are three main routes into a story idea that don’t come from character – a milieu, a what-if and an argument.

  THE MILIEU

  Here’s a reasonable milieu – scientists have found the cure for death and the earth is overflowing with humans. It feels like it could be the basis of some big-budget TV series. But the problem is, it’s not a story, it’s a setting for a story. The risk is that the writer feels most of their creati
ve heavy lifting is now done and, having thought of a dark and compelling milieu, they just have to fill it with some thrilling action. So here’s the haggard cop and here’s the ballsy sex worker and here’s the brave but beleaguered politician and here’s some cool CGI panning shots of a foggy night in the rammed metropolis.

  None of this is good. To move beyond cliché requires specificity. What specific part of this deathless world can we zoom in on? Well, what’s happening to the earth’s resources? Is this a place of extremely heightened inequality in which only the rich can afford to eat fresh food and see the ocean? That could be an interesting line to pursue. Or perhaps we could think about the people who decide that, despite the cure, they actually want to die. There’d presumably be a booming euthanasia industry. There’d be peripheral industries too – what if there was a paradise island where the tired-of-life could go to, in their last week, in order to live out their wildest dreams? What kind of weird human dramas could happen in a place like that? Perhaps the story could be about intergenerational war, as 200-year-old humans with 200-year-old political views fight the new progressive generation?

  Or what if our story followed a renegade scientist who wanted to save the planet from this runaway plague of humans? And this person is attempting to destroy the cure for death? This could make for an interesting subversion, in which the plucky selfless hero is the person who’s trying to kill everyone. She’d surely be likely to suffer from some massive internal conflict over her project.