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

by Lisa Cron

Story is about change, which results only from unavoidable conflict.

STORY SECRET: A story

follows a cause-and-effect trajectory from start to finish.

STORY SECRET: There’s no writing; there’s only rewriting.

brain is hardwired to respond to story; the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.2

there is an implicit framework that must underlie a story in

order for that passion, that fire, to ignite the reader’s brain. Stories without it go unread; stories with it are capable of knocking the socks off someone who’s

bare...

Story originated as a method of bringing us together to share specific information that might be lifesaving. Hey bud, don’t eat those shiny red berries unless you wanna croak like the Neanderthal next door; here’s what happened.…

After all, a good story doesn’t feel like an illusion. What it feels like is life.

humble amoeba, has one main goal: survival. Your subconscious brain—which neuroscientists refer to

as the adaptive or cognitive unconscious—

Here’s how neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sums it up: “The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable—in a word, of how to make it stick—was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution—storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly.… [I]t should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures.”4 We

Rather than recording everything on a first come, first served basis, our brain casts us as “the protagonist” and then edits our experience with cinema-like precision, creating logical interrelations, mapping connections between memories, ideas,

Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters.

Stories allow us to simulate intense experiences without actually having to live through them. This was a matter of life and death

Story evolved as a way to explore our own mind and the minds of others, as a sort of dress rehearsal for the future.

As a result, story helps us survive not only in the life-and-death physical sense but also in a life-well-lived social sense. Renowned cognitive scientist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker explains our need for story this way:

The cliché that life imitates art is true because the function of some kinds of art is for life to imitate it.7

what a story is supposed to do: plunk someone with a clear goal into an increasingly difficult situation they then have to navigate. When a story meets our brain’s criteria, we relax and slip into the protagonist’s skin, eager to

experience what his or her struggle feels like, without having to leave the comfort of home.

what is a story? A story is how what happens affects someone who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a

difficult goal, and how he or she changes as a result. Breaking it down in the soothingly familiar parlance of the writing world, this translates to

“What happens” is the plot. “Someone” is the protagonist. The “goal” is what’s known as the story question. And “how he or she changes” is what the story itself is actually about.

Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change.

They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story, as we’ll see throughout, is an internal journey, not an external one.

What does your protagonist have to confront in order to solve the problem you’ve so cleverly set up for her? And that problem is what the reader is going to be hunting for from the get-go, because it’s going to define everything that happens from the first sentence on.

Jonah Lehrer says, nothing focuses the mind like surprise.9

I’ve heard it said that fiction (all stories, for that matter) can be summed up by a single sentence—All is not as it seems—which means that what we’re hoping for in that opening sentence is the sense that

something is about to change (and not necessarily for the better).

Simply put, we are looking for a re...

So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keep...

signaling that intriguing information is on ...

are always on the hunt for meaning—not in the metaphysical “What is the true nature of reality?” sense but in the far more primal, very specific sense of: Joe left without his usual morning coffee; I wonder why? Betty is always on time; how come she’s half an hour late? That annoying dog next door barks its head off every morning; why is it so quiet today?

We are always looking for the why beneath what’s happening on the surface. Not only because our survival might depend on it, but because it’s exhilarating. It makes us feel something—namely, curiosity. Having our curiosity piqued is visceral. And it leads to something even more potent: the anticipation of knowledge we’re now hungry for, a sensation caused by that pleasurable rush of dopamine. Because being curious is necessary for survival (What’s that rustling in the bushes?), nature encourages it. And what better way to encourage curiosity than to make it feel good? This is why, once your curiosity is roused as a reader, you have an emotional, vested interest in finding out what happens next. And bingo! You feel that delicious sense of urgency (hello dopamine!) that all good stories instantly ignite.

What are you talking about and why should I care? That is, if you’re still listening. It’s the same with the first

And to that end, here are the three basic things readers relentlessly hunt for as they read that first page:

Whose story is it? 2. What’s happening here? 3. What’s at stake?

WHOSE STORY IS IT?

writers often don’t know: in a story, what the reader feels is driven by what the protagonist feels. Story

is visceral.

In short, without a protagonist, everything is neutral, and as we’ll see in chapter 3, in a story (as in life) there’s no such thing as neutral. Which means we need to meet the protagonist as soon as possible—hopefully, in the first paragraph.

WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE?

As John Irving once said, “Whenever possible, tell the whole story of the novel in the first sentence.”12 Glib? Yeah, okay. But a worthy goal to shoot for.

WHAT’S AT STAKE?

but conflict that is specific to the protagonist’s quest. From the first sentence, readers morph into bloodhounds,

The Obvious Question

Richard Restak writes, “Within the brain, things are always evaluated within a specific context.”13

It is context that bestows meaning, and it is meaning that your brain is wired to sniff out. After all, if stories are simulations that

our brains plumb for useful information in case we ever find ourselves in a similar situation, we ...