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

by Lisa Cron

  Have you exposed your protagonist’s deepest secrets and most guarded flaws? No matter how embarrassing or painful the revelation, have you forced him to fess up? Have you obliged him to confront his demons? How can he possibly overcome them (or realize that they aren’t so bad after all) unless he’s forced to come to grips with them?

  Does your protagonist earn everything she gets, and pay for everything she loses? This is another way of saying that there must be a consequence to everything that happens. Ideally, it’s a consequence that forces your protagonist to take an action she’d really rather not.

  Does everything your protagonist does to make the situation better actually make it worse? Good! The worse things get for your protagonist, the better for your story. By making sure that things go from bad to worse, you will keep your story’s pacing on track as the tension—and the stakes—ratchet ever upward.

  Is the force of opposition personified, present, and active? It doesn’t always have to be a giant, raging gorilla or a gun-toting psychopath, but readers want someone (or something) to root against. This means that vague threats, generalized “evil,” or unspecified possible disastrous events don’t cut it. The danger needs to be specific—and wired to a rapidly ticking clock.

  RED ABOVE THERE JOKES GRAVEL, instant might round most. Hard to read, huh? It feels like a train wreck inside your skull. With each new word it further defies the linguistic pattern you innately expect, which means no extra dopamine for you; instead, your neurotransmitters give you less of it than normal, in an effort to express their—that is, your—displeasure.1

  Your brain doesn’t like anything that appears random, and it will struggle mightily to impose order—whether it’s actually there or not. Take a starry, starry night, for instance. As Nobel laureate in physics Edward Purcell wrote to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “What interests me more in the random field of ‘stars’ is the overpowering impression of ‘features’ of one sort or another. It is hard to accept the fact that any perceived feature—be it string, clump, constellation, corridor, curved chain, lacuna—is a totally meaningless accident, having as its only cause the avidity for pattern of my eye and brain!”2

  But one thing that isn’t random is our passion for patterns, even if we do get carried away sometimes and see the face of our beloved etched in the clouds. Searching for patterns is a habit that began long before indoor plumbing, refrigerators, and doors, when home consisted of a nice cave, with maybe a comfy pile of leaves to bed down on, and being able to predict what might happen next was often a matter of life and death. Since lions and tigers and bare cavemen—oh my!—could walk in unannounced anytime, day or night, the brain had to become expert at translating any and all data into patterns, allowing us to determine what that bump in the night might be. After all, unless we know what the normal pattern is, how can we possibly detect something out of the ordinary? “The brain is a born cartographer,” says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.3 From the moment we leave the womb, it begins charting the patterns around us, always with the same agenda: What’s safe, and what had I better keep my eye on?4

  Stories are about the things we need to keep an eye on. They often begin the moment a pattern in the protagonist’s life stops working—which is good, because, as scholars Chip and Dan Heath note, “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”5 Can you see the fine print? In order to break a pattern, we need to know what the pattern is. And as far as the reader is concerned, everything is part of a pattern—and the thrill of reading is recognizing those patterns. What’s more, the reader assumes there is an interrelationship among all the facets of a story—that the patterns interlock in the same way ecosystems, borders, and jigsaw puzzles do. Yet this is the level of story that writers sometimes dismiss as mere plot, while toiling away making sure they’ve woven in a perfectly nuanced leitmotif based on water dripping and a big spatula. It’s kind of like piling frosting onto a cake you haven’t baked yet. Because, while readers may savor nuance, unless it illuminates and deepens a clear-cut pattern they’ve been following, it’s nothing more than fancy window dressing in a vacant house.

  It should be pretty evident by now that readers are a very demanding lot. We have specific expectations (which we’re rarely consciously aware of), and our brain wants them met or we’re taking our ball and going home. One of our most hardwired expectations is that anything that reads like the beginning of a new pattern—that is, a setup—will, in fact, be a setup, with a corresponding payoff. What’s more, we have a voracious appetite for setups. We love them because they’re intoxicating; they stimulate our imagination, triggering one of our favorite sensations: anticipation. They invite us to figure out what might happen next, which leads to an even better sensation: the adrenaline-fueled rush of insight that comes from making connections ourselves.6 When we identify a setup, guess what will happen, and end up being right, we feel smart. Setups seduce us with the granddaddy of all sensations: engagement. They make us feel involved and purposeful, like we’re part of something—and an insider to boot. Readers see setups as the writer’s way of talking in code. We know from the instant we spot one that it’s now our job to feverishly track the pattern leading to the payoff; we tackle it with abandon, relishing every moment, even when it keeps us reading long past our bedtime.

  To make sure your stories have lots of tired but satisfied readers, in this chapter we’ll explore just what a setup is and how to make sure the road from setup to payoff is actually visible on the page. We’ll examine how unintended setups derail a story and take a look at simple setups that pay off big time.

  Look Out—I Think It Might Be a Setup!

  So what exactly is a setup? It is just what the word implies. It’s something—a fact, an act, a person, an event—that implies future action. In its most basic form, a setup is a piece of information the reader needs well in advance of the payoff so the payoff will be believable. It can be something as simple as letting us know early on that James speaks Swahili, so when it turns out the instructions for diverting the meteor before it slams into downtown Des Moines are written in Swahili, we won’t groan when James announces he can read them. It also means that because readers won’t know the real reason you’re telling them about James’ bilingual prowess in chapter one, there needs to be a credible story reason for it to come up at that moment so it’s not a total giveaway, in neon, that you’re Trying to Tell Us Something. There’s a fine line between giving the reader a tantalizing bit of information that piques her imagination and clobbering her over the head with something so obvious there’s no suspense whatsoever. Arouse her suspicion, though, and she’ll love you for it.

  What you want the reader to think is Gee, I understand James speaks Swahili because it was the only language offered in his high school, and he couldn’t graduate without it, but something tells me that by the end of the story he’s going to be glad it worked out that way. Which means, of course, that if the whole Swahili thing doesn’t come up again, it will turn into one of those lonely elephants, wandering the halls of the story, looking for something to do (damage, most likely).

  Setups are, of course, often far more intricate and involving than James’s speaking Swahili—which is, after all, just a single piece of supporting information. Often a setup triggers an entire subplot, motive, or way to interpret what’s happening, as we’ll soon see. That said, it’s important to point out from the get-go that the payoff the reader then anticipates doesn’t have to be correct. Far from it. Very often the true meaning of the setup is clear only in hindsight. As we discussed earlier, in Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, we’re set up to believe the enigmatic Madeleine is the beautiful, disturbed wife of the man who hired ex-cop Scotty Ferguson to protect her, only to later discover that she is actually a shopgirl who’s been hired to pose as Madeleine. As we’ve already seen, the catch in this type of scenario is that when the payoff comes, everything that happened up to that moment to support the false assumption mu
st now, in hindsight, support the new twist. As Raymond Chandler wisely noted, “The solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”7

  There’s no avoiding this truth. So keep in mind that to the reader, everything in a story is either a setup, a payoff, or the road in between.

  Setups That Aren’t

  Readers are always on the lookout for patterns, so the last thing you want is for the reader to decide something is a setup that isn’t—and worse, to act on it. It’s like when the creepy guy in the next cubicle decides that the way you always ignore him proves you’re secretly in love with him, so of course he should make his move. In a story, this translates to dragging some irrelevant bit of information through your otherwise carefully constructed tale, undermining the assumptions that you do want the reader to make.

  I can’t stress this too strongly: readers’ cognitive unconscious assumes that everything in a story is there on a need-to-know basis, so they take it for granted that everything you present is part of a pattern. They believe that each event, fact, or action will have critical significance. Thus it’s astonishingly easy to mistake a digression or a random unnecessary fact for a setup. To make matters worse, because its relevance to what’s happening now seems shaky, readers take that to mean it will have even more significance later. And so it becomes part of the filter through which they run the meaning of everything that happens from that point on.

  For instance, let’s say the protagonist, Nora, mentions in passing to her husband, Lou, that Betty from next door spent all day loudly berating that good-for-nothing gun-toting boyfriend of hers. Now, as far as the writer is concerned, Nora might have only brought it up to explain why she has such a pounding headache and so can’t help Lou search for their missing Labradoodle pup, Rufus. But chances are the reader will think, What? Betty has a gun-toting boyfriend? I bet he has something to do with that poor pup’s disappearance. And hey, what happened to Nora’s sister, Kathy? She hasn’t been around for a while, not since that night she had dinner at Betty’s; I wonder if.…

  Or worse, the reader can’t even figure out how the information might apply. What would a gun-toting thug be doing in a gated Quaker commune, anyway? Thus part of the reader’s mind lags behind, busily chewing over what the gun-toting guy could possibly mean, while another part soldiers on, reading about Nora and Lou’s puppy. But as researchers at Stanford have proven, contrary to popular wisdom, effective mental multitasking is not actually possible—the brain, as it turns out, can’t process two strings of incoming information at the same time. According to neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, when trying to focus on multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, people are “not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal.”8 Thus, while the reader’s mind mulls over the import of Betty’s boyfriend, the significance of what’s actually happening on the page begins to fade. It’s a bit like listening to someone speaking in a very heavy accent. You have to strain so hard to make out the words, you miss what they’re trying to tell you. Soon the reader has no idea what’s going on, and not long after, ceases to care.

  It’s not even a choice; it’s innate: the brain is wired to go offline—that is, ignore the real world and slip into a fictional one—only if it believes the story will be of benefit by providing info that’ll help it navigate this cockeyed world of ours. Once engaged, it flips the switch that filters out actual reality. When that belief is shattered—say, by setups that go nowhere—reality floods back in.9

  With that in mind, the question becomes: what exactly does a real setup look like? Let’s pal around with a few of them to get the feel of what we’re talking about.

  Case Study: Die Hard and Girls in Trouble

  Sometimes setups don’t read like setups at all. For instance, Die Hard opens with protagonist John McClane on a plane that’s just landed at LAX. A New York City cop, McClane refused to relocate when his wife got a big promotion that required that she move to LA. She took the kids and left. He hopes to win her back. He’s exhausted—and clearly glad that the plane is no longer airborne. His seatmate, an older salesman, notices McClane’s relief and pegs him as a novice flyer. He then gives McClane a sage bit of advice on how to beat jet lag: stand on a rug barefoot and “make fists with your toes.”10 Uh-huh. It’s a nice bit of comic relief, and McClane’s polite but skeptical reaction tells us something about how he sees the world.

  The scene’s subtext is clear: beneath McClane’s dislike of flying is an even deeper dislike of being out of his element. New York City is a far cry from sunny Los Angeles, especially on the day before Christmas. The question is, is there anything about his interchange with the salesman that screams “Setup!”? Not really. It’s told us something about McClane, and technically that’s enough. What’s more, there’s no red flag saying, Look at me—I matter more than you think, which is great, because that’s the last thing you want a setup to do. And this is a setup.

  Because once McClane gets to the Christmas party at his wife’s office and finds himself alone and tense in a plush executive bathroom, he takes his shoes off and tries it. He smiles, amazed that it really works. He’s still blissfully making fists with his toes when he hears gunfire. With no time to do anything but grab his Beretta, he rushes into the hallway to check it out. Barefoot.

  And so he spends the rest of the movie running through minefields of broken glass, bleeding. That opening scene? Beyond being entertaining, and telling us something about McClane, it was a setup that paid off by making his road to becoming a hero that much more difficult.

  You might wonder whether setups like that are worth the trouble. Couldn’t McClane simply have taken his shoes off anyway? Couldn’t he have muttered something about how your feet seem to swell while you fly, and it’s such a relief to slip off your shoes for a minute? Absolutely. He even could have accidentally splashed water on them as he washed his face, and so taken them off to let them dry. But for the audience, both of those scenarios would have lacked something that the opening scene provided: a small “aha!” moment—that delicious sense of understanding when we grasp the specific (and sometimes deeper) why behind a character’s action. It’s this that allowed us to savor the irony: If only that guy on the plane had kept his trap shut, McClane wouldn’t be leaving such a bloody trail everywhere he goes.

  Setups, when done well, read like fate.

  While this is a minor twist in Die Hard, Caroline Leavitt’s novel Girls in Trouble offers a far more fleeting, yet substantial example. The novel begins in Boston and revolves around the relationship between Sara, an unmarried sixteen-year-old who is pregnant, and George and Eva, the couple who adopt her baby. It’ll be an open adoption, they promise. Sara will be welcome anytime. And before the birth, this is indeed true. George and Eva, hungry to spend as much time with Sara as possible—both because they genuinely care for her and because they fear she might change her mind—shower her with love and attention. However, once the baby is born, Sara’s dependence on them becomes overwhelming. What’s more, her presence begins to threaten Eva, who wants to feel that she alone is the baby’s mother. There is a palpable sense of trouble brewing, and the reader is sure that sooner or later it will come to a head.

  In the midst of this, George, a dentist, feeling the strain of his new situation—his unexpectedly fierce love for the baby, Sara’s neediness, Eva’s growing need to distance herself from Sara—reflects on his day:

  At four, he was finished, an hour earlier than he had hoped. His last patient had been another emergency, a woman who had come in with her bridge still attached to a bright red taffy apple she hadn’t been able to resist biting. She left with a temporary and a list of the foods she shouldn’t eat. He’d have to place an ad for another hygienist. He wished he could place an ad for a clone. Most dentists worked solo, and he had never wanted to be in a partnership, but maybe it might help things. He wouldn’t have to work so hard, such long hours. But of course the question was, who would be
the partner? You had to be careful with things like that. The only person he could think of was his old friend Tom from dental school, who lived in Florida and was always trying to get him to move down there. “Blue skies, sandy beaches,” Tom urged, but George hadn’t really wanted to move.11

  This passage is on page 98. George doesn’t think of Tom, or Florida, again until page 169. But throughout the seventy pages in between, the reader does. Because that one offhand reference to Tom’s urging George to move to Florida leaps out as a setup, a revelatory detail that puts the reader on notice. We sense this, even though there is absolutely nothing in the way it’s presented that says, Pay attention, remember me. But we do anyway. Why? Because the story itself has already supplied us with a context—a pattern—into which this tidbit fits neatly. We know how untenable the situation is, and that it’s only going to get worse. We’ve been anticipating that something will have to give, but until George thought about Tom in Florida, we weren’t sure how it might actually play out.

  From that moment on, we suspect that George and Eva will move away. And we begin anticipating how Sara will react when they do. Thus this small setup, this tiny nugget, takes on a much greater significance, affecting how the reader interprets everything that happens in the seventy pages between the setup (George’s first fleeting thought of Florida) and the payoff (when he once again remembers Tom, buys Tom’s dental practice, and moves his family to Boca Raton without a word to Sara).

  This isn’t to say that there aren’t times that the thought of Florida might slip the reader’s mind or when she might wonder whether George and Eva are really going to move after all. If setups always made specific payoffs inevitable from the moment they appeared, they’d stifle anticipation rather than spur it. What they often do is illuminate a possibility. Sure, that possibility might be exactly what happens—George, Eva, and the baby do move to Florida—but along the road from setup to payoff, the reader always has the sense that it might go either way. What keeps us reading is the building desire to find out.