Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

by Lisa Cron

  In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino has seen the gradual covering over of these walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by these unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.17

  The snippet not only provides backstory and insight into how Dr. Urbino views the world, it also deftly sums up an aspect of the universal human condition that all of us struggle with—that someday the world will go on without us, perhaps as if we had never been. Which, ahem, is one of the reasons we write stories. It’s better than spray painting “Kilroy was here” on a rock.

  So if you want to write a novel that inspires people you’ve never even met to call their friends and say, “You gotta read this book,” you need to root through your story and make sure you’ve translated anything brain-numbingly vague, abstract, or generic into something that’s surprisingly specific, deliciously tangible, and grippingly visceral.

  CHAPTER 6: CHECKPOINT

  Have you translated every “generic” into a “specific”? This is another way of saying, “Do your job.” After all, you don’t want your reader filling in the blanks in ways you never intended.

  Have the specifics gone missing in any of the usual places? Are there places where the reason, rationale, reaction, memories, or possibilities that underlie your protagonist’s actions are invisible to the reader?

  Can your reader see what, specifically, your metaphors correlate to in the “real world,” grasp their meaning, and picture them, when reading at a clip? The last thing you want is for your reader to have to reread it three or four times—first to be able to picture it and then to figure out what the heck it means.

  Do all the “sensory details”—that is, what something tastes, feels, or looks like—have an actual story reason to be there, beyond “just because”? You want to be sure each sensory detail is strategically placed to give us insight into your characters, your story, and perhaps even your theme. And remember, scenery without subtext is a travelogue.

  THE BRAIN DOESN’T LIKE CHANGE. Would you, if you’d spent millions of years evolving with the sole goal of maintaining a constant, stable equilibrium? And the brain didn’t slack off after mastering mere physical survival, no sir; it turned its sights to making sure we had a nice comfortable sense of well-being to go along with it. Only then did the brain settle in for the long haul—unseen yet vigilant—ready to pounce on any possible imbalance, often before it hits our conscious radar.1 That explains why the thought of switching barbers, taking a new route to work, or buying a different brand of toothpaste can feel disconcerting enough to keep us loyal to our old brand. After all, our teeth haven’t fallen out yet, so it must be working. Why rock the boat?

  And as neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer points out in How We Decide, “Confidence is comforting. The lure of certainty is built into the brain at a very basic level.”2 In fact, it’s a big part of our sense of well-being. That is why, when questions arise that challenge our beliefs about, well, anything, we tend get a little cranky. Or as social psychologist Timothy D. Wilson says, “People are masterful spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information and go to great lengths to maintain a sense of well-being.”3

  We don’t like change, and we don’t like conflict, either. So most of the time we do our best to avoid both. This isn’t easy, since the only real constant is change, and change is driven by conflict. This or that? Me or you? Chocolate or vanilla?

  Sounds sort of bleak, doesn’t it? But wait, as they say on late night infomercials, there’s more! As anyone who’s ever fallen under the spell of a sparkly bauble, charming stranger, or cockeyed dream knows, there’s another side to this coin. The lure of the new, the novel—of that bright shiny thing hovering just out of range—is equally hardwired.

  We evolved as risk takers, too. We had to. Without a sense of adventure, we wouldn’t have gone off in search of the wild prey that fed our growing brain, dared to scale the mountain range that led to the life-sustaining verdant valley below, or had the nerve to approach that charming stranger who then made life worth living.4

  And there’s the paradox: we survived because we’re risk takers, but our goal is to stay safe by not changing an iota unless we absolutely have to. Talk about conflict! And that brings us right back to story. Story’s job is to tackle exactly how we handle that conflict, which boils down to this: the battle between fear and desire.

  Thus it’s no wonder that from time immemorial conflict has been called the lifeblood of story. It’s something everyone tends to agree on, whether cranking out a mass market potboiler about killer spiders or penning an exquisitely rendered literary novel that turns on whether or not the protagonist sighs when the postal carrier at long last slips the much-anticipated ivory envelope through the tarnished brass mail slot. As a result, creating conflict seems delightfully clear, completely up front, embarrassingly obvious.

  Well, I’m here to tell you not to believe that for a minute. Instead, my friends, consider conflict the original passive-aggressive devil. So in this chapter, in the hope of wrestling that devil to the mat, we’ll explore how to harness impending conflict to mounting suspense from the very first sentence; where the specific avenues of conflict and suspense are often found; and why holding back crucial information for a big reveal later ironically tends to ensure that readers will never get there.

  Understanding Our Conflict with Conflict

  When it comes to conflict, your reader—like the pasty-faced kid in The Sixth Sense—must be able to see things that aren’t there. In order for readers to sense that “all is not as it seems,” conflict must be palpable long before it rises to the surface. It’s the potential for conflict that gives urgency to everything that happens, underscoring even the most benign events with portent. Indeed, it ripples through the story in the guise of mounting tension, engendering in the reader that delicious dopamine-driven sensation we’re addicted to when it comes to a good tale: suspense, the desire to find out what’s really going on.

  But when it comes to portraying conflict on the page, how we’re wired for real life tends to muck things up. “Since we are social creatures, a need to belong is as basic to our survival as our need for food and oxygen,” says neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak.5 It started a couple of hundred thousand years ago when it first dawned on us that, survival-wise, two heads are better than one, and a whole society, better yet! Thus a new human goal was born, one still championed by kindergarten teachers the world over: working well with others. This gave rise to a whole host of emotions—some pleasant and some decidedly not—to encourage us to get along. And for anyone with lingering doubts about the unequaled power of emotion, a recent study using magnetic resonance imaging revealed that intense social rejection activates the same areas in the brain that physical pain does.6 Our brain is making a point. Conflict hurts.

  That’s probably why we try to defuse conflict as quickly as possible. We are made to understand at a very early age that we bring conflict into relationships at our own peril, and we are rewarded—by both society and the chemicals in our brain—for finding ways to nip it in the bud before it escalates. As the old song goes, the idea is to focus on the positive rather than the negative and—whatever you do—“don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”7 The thing is, every story tells the tale of Mr. In-Between. As in, between a rock and a hard place. Yet it’s so easy to fall prey to our unconscious urge to steer clear of rocks and hard places and, in accordance with the golden rule, to never put anyone else in that position, either—including, unfortunately, our protagonist.

  I’ll never forget working with an author who had writte
n an eight-hundred-page manuscript, a novel about a guy named Bruno, chronicling his rise from poverty to ill-gotten riches as a ruthless Mafia don. Or make that, he probably would have been ruthless, but he was never given the chance. His loving wife never suspected he had a mistress, despite all the nights he spent “in town,” nor did his devoted mistress ever so much as threaten to Google his wife. Sure, occasionally there was the possibility of a little conflict. Bruno would be walking into an elaborate ambush replete with guns, knives, brass knuckles, and, in case all else failed, a car bomb. But just as he was reaching for the anthrax-coated doorknob, the rival thugs would get a call telling them everything had been resolved, so they’d yank the door open, give Bruno a bear hug, and then they’d all sit down for an espresso and some nice biscotti.

  The author was a successful businessman who, at sixty-something, was still married to his childhood sweetheart and had several smart, well-adjusted kids. I asked him how he felt about conflict in his real life. He frowned. “I don’t like it,” he said, tensing. “Who does?”

  The answer, of course, is no one (drama queens notwithstanding). That’s exactly why we turn to story—to experience all the things that in life we avoid, rationalize away, fear, or long to accomplish but for various and sundry reasons haven’t or can’t. We want to know what it would cost us emotionally, what it would really feel like, should we ever find ourselves, or someone we know, in a similar situation. It boils down to this: in real life we want conflict to resolve right now, this very minute; in a story we want conflict to drag out, ratcheting ever upward, for as deliciously long as humanly possible.

  But wait! I hear you asking: If we’re wired to feel what the protagonist does, since conflict hurts, are you saying we’re masochists? Not at all. In the same way that a vicarious thrill, being one crucial step removed, isn’t nearly as powerful as the real thing, neither is the pain we experience when lost in a story. Sure, we’re literally feeling what the protagonist feels, but our trusty brain is also quite aware that what befalls the poor sap is not, in fact, literally happening to us. So, although we feel Juliet’s anguish on awaking to find Romeo lifeless by her side, we never once lose sight of the fact that our own beloved is, in fact, snoring peacefully in the theater seat next to us. And that, my friends, is what makes stories so deeply satisfying. We get to try on trouble, pretty much risk-free.

  And so in literature, not as in life, the goal is to embrace conflict and harness it to suspense. Now, for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: how do you translate impending conflict into ongoing suspense?

  Suspense Is the Handmaiden of Conflict

  As we know, a story spans the distance from “before” to “after,” when things are in flux. Therefore a story inherently chronicles something that is changing. Usually that “something” revolves around a problem the protagonist must solve in order to actually get from the shores of “before” to the banks of “after.”

  On the surface, conflict is borne along by escalating external obstacles that keep the protagonist from quickly solving the problem and getting on with his day, no worse for wear. But those obstacles mean nothing unless, beneath the surface, the seeds of that conflict are present from the outset, as they begin pushing their tender shoots through the soil in search of the sun. Picture it as the first hairline crack in the otherwise solid wall of “before.” The cause of this fissure is often the answer to the question, Why does this story have to start at this very minute? For instance, in Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife, it’s the ominous sound of a predawn knock at the door that tells Kathryn, the protagonist, that something is very wrong. This initial crack causes the plaster to slowly crumble as Kathryn discovers that her husband, Jack, was in many ways a complete stranger. The story, however, isn’t in the facts of Kathryn’s situation, per se, but in how she struggles to make sense of them, given that everything she believed to be true up to that moment, wasn’t. Talk about the kind of change we’re wired to resist. Everything in Kathryn wants to believe Jack was the perfect husband, if only life (aka the story) would stop poking holes in her carefully—and largely subconsciously—constructed rationalizations.

  Thus a story’s first hairline crack and its resulting offshoots are like fault lines, running through the center of the protagonist’s world, undermining everything. As with an earthquake, the cracks tend to be caused by two opposing forces, with the protagonist caught between them. I like to think of these battling forces as “the versus,” which taken together create the arena in which the story then proceeds to duke it out. Keeping in mind that every story has more than one versus, here are the most common:

  • What the protagonist believes is true versus what is actually true

  • What the protagonist wants versus what the protagonist actually has

  • What the protagonist wants versus what’s expected of her

  • The protagonist versus herself

  • The protagonist’s inner goal versus the protagonist’s external goal

  • The protagonist’s fear versus the protagonist’s goal (external, internal, or both)

  • The protagonist versus the antagonist

  • The antagonist versus mercy (or the appearance thereof)

  So, to enlarge our nutshell a bit: story takes place in the time between “before” and “after” and in the space between the “versus,” as the protagonist maneuvers within two conflicting realities, trying to bring them into alignment (and thus solve the problem). Once he does this, the space between them closes and the story ends. Meanwhile, the suspense builds as the reader wonders how on earth these realities, which seem to be moving further and further apart, will ever come together.

  In short, it’s the story’s job to poke at the protagonist, in one way or another, until she changes. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how the “versus” can shape a story from the inside out.

  The Tale of Rita and Marco: Versus by Versus

  Before we dive into their story, let’s review three important facts about how our brain processes info:

  1. As we’ll explore in chapter 10, the brain is wired to hunt for meaningful patterns in everything, the better to predict what will happen next based on the repetition or the alteration of the pattern (which means, first and foremost, that there need to be meaningful patterns for the reader to find).8

  2. We run the scenario on the page through our own personal experience of similar events, whether real or imagined, to see whether it’s believable (which gives us the ability to infer more information than is on the page—or go mad when there isn’t enough information for us to infer anything at all).9

  3. We’re hardwired to love problem solving; when we figure something out, the brain releases an intoxicating rush of neurotransmitters that say, “Good job!”10 The pleasure of story is trying to figure out what’s really going on (which means that stories that ignore the first two facts tend to offer the reader no pleasure at all).

  All this is another way of saying the reader knows way more than you think she does, so relax and don’t worry so much about giving too much away. Chances are your readers will be several steps ahead of your protagonist, which is exactly where you want them to be. For instance, the reader will have a much better handle on the likelihood of whether or not Marco, the office Lothario, will actually leave his wife the second she gets back from visiting her sick mother, than his fretful mistress Rita does—even though Rita is the first-person narrator. And that’s a good thing. Because it means suspense arises not only from what we suspect the characters will do, but from the tension we feel watching Rita pick out her trousseau, knowing damn well that not only won’t Marco be leaving his wife, but there’s a good chance he doesn’t even have a wife.

  Thus while we’re rooting for Rita, the last thing we’re hoping for is that she’ll actually land Marco, even though we’re in her skin and can feel how strong her desire is. Instead we’re hoping she’ll realize Marco is actually the last thing she needs, before it’s too la
te and, god forbid, she actually gets him. Rita’s real struggle—the one the reader is following with bated breath, the one the story is about—is internal. In other words, the story revolves around how Rita views her world rather than what happens in it. Therefore there are myriad layers of conflict laced into Rita’s story. Let’s take them versus by versus, shall we?

  On the external level we have what Rita wants (Marco) versus what Rita has (Marco’s promises). On the internal plane, the conflict is between what Rita believes (that Marco is her soul mate) versus what is actually true (Marco is soulless). This means that on the page we’re watching Rita try to woo and win Marco, as the writer slowly reveals that Marco is a very different sort from what Rita imagines. This gives the reader the space to anticipate how Rita will feel when she finds out and what she’ll do as a result.

  This brings us to one of the most potent versus of all, one that often defines the playing field: what Rita wants (Marco’s unadulterated love) versus what is expected of her (Marco expects her to turn a blind eye to his cheating). This means that throughout the story Rita will be struggling with the fact that Marco seems to believe all she wants from life is to cater to his every whim, no questions asked. Knowing how weak this makes her look to her friends, chances are she’ll be struggling to at least appear to meet their expectations, too. She’s going to dump him, she swears; she just hasn’t found the right moment.