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

by Lisa Cron

Via the protagonist’s internal thought:

because they directly reveal how the protagonist is affected by—and how she interprets the meaning of—what happens to her.

That’s what readers come for. Their unspoken hardwired question is, If something like this happens to me, what would it feel like? How should I best react?

Everything in the story relates to him or else why would he be telling us about it?

Every word the narrator says must in some way reflect his point of view. • The narrator never mentions anything that doesn’t affect him in some way. • The narrator draws a conclusion about everything he mentions. • The narrator is never neutral; he always has an agenda. • The narrator can never tell us what anyone else is thinking or feeling.

Conveying Thoughts in the Third Person

Third-person objective:

Third-person limited (aka third person close):

Third-person omniscient:

And very often that assumption then tells us something about the character making it, as

Body Language

“Intentions come from emotions, and emotions have evolved displays on the face and body.

Rather, body language should tell us something we don’t know.

At its most effective, it tells us what’s really going on inside the character’s head. This is why body language works best when it’s at odds with what’s happening—either by telling us something that the character doesn’t want known

The irony is, the less you tell us how to feel, the more likely

we’ll feel exactly what you want us to. We’re putty in your hands as long as you let us think we’re making up our own mind.

REALITY: Write What You Know Emotionally

Mark Twain’s pithy observation close at hand: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”17

As novelist Donald Windham so astutely says, “I disagree with the advice ‘write about what you know.’ Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.”18

And speaking of understanding, here’s a final word to the wise: the bigger the word, the less emotion it conveys. In fact, the less it tends to convey, period, beyond the vague

CHAPTER 3: CHECKPOINT

Does your protagonist react to everything that happens and in a way that your reader will instantly understand?

The joy of writing is being stealthy enough to stack the deck so your reader will choose yours.

Machiavellian, as in duplicitous, manipulative, and cunning. Truth is, agenda is just another word for goal—making it completely neutral and utterly necessary to survival.

In fact, Steven Pinker defines intelligent life as “using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles.”

According to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, who pioneered the research, our mirror neurons fire when we watch someone do something and when we do the same thing ourselves. But it’s not just that we register what it would feel like physically; our real goal is to understand the action.

Mirror neurons allow us to feel what others experience almost as if it were happening to us, the better to infer what “others know in order to explain their desires and intentions with real precision.”4 But here’s the kicker. We don’t just mirror other people. We mirror fictional characters too.

of the brain while reading a short story, revealed that the areas of the brain that lit up when they read about an activity were identical to those that light up when they actually experience it. Yes, yes, I can see those of you who’ve read steamy novels nodding sagely and thinking, Uh, you needed

a brain scan to tell you that?

It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? So in this chapter our goal is to zero in on how to define your protagonist’s goal, since it’s what bestows meaning on everything that happens. We’ll examine the difference between her internal and external goals, which are often at odds with each other; explore how both are driven by the core issue she’s struggling with; and discover how to create external obstacles for her that add drama rather than stop the story cold.

Julian Barnes sums it up nicely: “Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.”8

why the protagonist wants what she wants, what it means to her, and what getting it will cost her. It’s this that we, as readers, “try on for size.” Cognitive psychology professor and novelist Keith Oatley puts it this way: “In literature we feel the pain of the downtrodden, the anguish of defeat, or the joy of victory, but in a safe space.… We can refine our human capacities of emotional understanding. We can hone our ability to feel with other people who, in ordinary life, might seem too foreign—or too threatening—to elicit our sympathies. Perhaps, then, when we return to our real lives, we can better understand why people act the way they do.”9 Or put more simply, as the aggravated newsreel producer barked at the beginning of Citizen Kane, “Nothing is ever better

than finding out what makes people tick.” Because with that comes the predictive power of knowing when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to

Because as we know, the heart of the story doesn’t lie in what happens; it beats in what those events mean to the protagonist.

Proust observed, “The only true voyage of discovery … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess [new] eyes.”10

his external goal and his internal goal were at odds all along.

We’re talking about the fear that whispers, What the hell do you think you’re doing? as she

Why is the protagonist scared? What, specifically,

is she scared of that keeps her from achieving her goal?

REALITY: Adding External Problems Adds Drama Only If They’re Something the Protagonist Must Confront to Overcome Her Issue

The result is that writers craft plots in which these events occur rather than crafting protagonists whose internal progress depends on said events occurring. Such stories are written from the outside in: the writers throw dramatic obstacles in their protagonist’s path because the timeline tells them to rather than because they’re part of an organic, escalating scenario that forces the protagonist to confront her inner issue. Thus the dramatic events aren’t spawned by the story itself but by an external by-the-numbers story-structure formula.

So while we don’t care a whit about what “any person” would do, we care passionately about what your protagonist would do—as long as we know why.

Do you know what your protagonist wants? What does she desire most? What is her agenda, her raison d’être? Do you know why your protagonist

wants what he wants?

Do you know what your protagonist’s external goal is?

Do you know what your protagonist’s internal goal

Does your protagonist’s goal force her to face a specific longstanding problem or fear? What

The Great Outlining Debate