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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lisa Cron
Read between
December 7 - December 24, 2018
Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution—more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. Story is what enabled us to imagine what might happen in the future, and so prepare for it—a feat no other species can lay claim to, opposable thumbs or not.
our 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.
The rush of intoxication a good story triggers doesn’t make us closet hedonists—it makes us willing pupils, primed to absorb the myriad lessons each story imparts.
But there’s a catch. For a story to captivate a reader, it must continually meet his or her hardwired expectations. This is no doubt what prompted Jorge Luis Borges to note, “Art is fire plus algebra.”
Stories were simple, relevant, and not so different from a little thing we like to call gossip.
A recent brain-imaging study reported in Psychological Science reveals that the regions of the brain that process the sights, sounds, tastes, and movement of real life are activated when we’re engrossed in a compelling narrative.
Your subconscious brain—which neuroscientists refer to as the adaptive or cognitive unconscious—is a finely tuned instrument, instantly aware of what matters, what doesn’t, why, and, hopefully, what you should do about it.2 It
neuroscientists aptly refer to as zombie systems,
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
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.”
Simply put, the brain constantly seeks meaning from all the input thrown at it, yanks out what’s important for our survival on a need-to-know basis, and tells us a story about it, based on what it knows of our past experience with it, how we feel about it, and how it might affect us.
Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters.
Story evolved as a way to explore our own mind and the minds of others, as a sort of dress rehearsal for the future.
The cliché that life imitates art is true because the function of some kinds of art is for life to imitate it.
Stephen Pinker
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.
What does your protagonist have to confront in order to solve the problem you’ve so cleverly set up for her?
with which our subconscious brain rips through data. It’s a biological imperative: we 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?
here are the three basic things readers relentlessly hunt for as they read that first page: 1. Whose story is it? 2. What’s happening here? 3. What’s at stake?
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.
Elmore Leonard famously said that a story is real life with the boring parts left out.
HERE’S A DISCONCERTING THOUGHT: marketers, politicians, and televangelists know more about story than most writers. This is because, by definition, they start with something writers often never even think about—the point their story will make. Armed with that knowledge, they then craft a tale in which every word, every image, every nuance leads directly to it. Look around your house. Chances are you bought just about everything you see (even Fido) because while you weren’t looking, a clever story snuck in and persuaded you to. It’s not that you’re easy to boss around, but a well-crafted story
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it underlies the story itself and is what renowned linguist William Labov has dubbed “evaluation” because it allows readers to evaluate the meaning of the story’s events.
Put plainly, it tells them what the story is about. As literary scholar Brian Boyd so aptly points out, a story with no point of reference leaves the reader with no way of determining what information matters: is it “the color of people’s eyes or their socks? The shape of their noses or their shoes? The number of syllables in their name?”
A story is designed, from beginning to end, to answer a single overarching question.
As one editor put it, “If you can’t summarize your book in a few sentences, rewrite the book until you can.” I agree.
“minds exist to predict what will happen next.”6 It’s their raison d’être—the better to keep us on this earthly plane as long as humanly possible.
theme actually boils down to something incredibly simple: • What does the story tell us about what it means to be human? • What does it say about how humans react to circumstances beyond their control? Theme often reveals your take on how an element of human nature—loyalty, suspicion, grit, love—defines human behavior.
But the real secret to theme is that it’s not general; that is, the theme wouldn’t be “love” per se—rather, it would be a very specific point you’re making about love.
Robert Dickman say in their book The Elements of Persuasion, “For those of us whose business depends on being able to persuade others—which is all of us in business—the key to survival is being able to cut through all the clutter and make the sale. The good news is that the secret of selling is what it has always been—a good story.”
What is it I want my readers to walk away thinking about? What point does my story make? How do I want to change the way my reader sees the world?
I want readers to know how pathological, rotten our co.complicity is when we grindd through poor famies
In other words, how does he rationalize them?
the sin known as “head hopping.”
“Intentions come from emotions, and emotions have evolved displays on the face and body. Unless you are a master of the Stanislavsky method, you will have trouble faking them; in fact, they probably evolved because they were hard to fake.”13
better know something about each of those things. But in the larger sense, “Write what you know” doesn’t refer as much to facts as to what you know emotionally, which translates to your knowledge of what makes people tick.
Writing what you actually know, however, is a dangerous game given our natural propensity to tacitly assume that others have the same knowledge and beliefs that we do.15 This tendency drives what communication scholars Chip and Dan Heath have dubbed “the Curse of Knowledge.” They explain, “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”
Fascinating
“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.”
BEFORE THERE WERE BOOKS, we read each other.
If you don’t know what the objective is, everything appears random.
This is of key importance, so I want to pounce on it: No one ever does anything for no reason, whether or not they’re aware of the reason.
you can often ignite the kind of external tension and internal conflict capable of driving an entire narrative.
Main character doesngt realoze the mystical dimension reched through thoroughgoing selflesness
According to neuropsychologist Justin Barrett, our implicit or “nonreflective” beliefs are our default mode, constantly working behind the scenes to shape memory and experience.
T. S. Eliot so aptly noted, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”
The best place to start working on a story is long before your poor unsuspecting protagonist shows up on page one. The best place to start is by pinpointing the moment long before, when she first fell prey to the inner issue that’s been skewing her worldview ever since.
“The seeds of the future lie buried in the past.”
J. K. Rowling, who had very carefully plotted all seven Harry Potter books by 1992—when she began writing the first one.
something seminal needs to happen on, oh, about page two.
A meeting where a lost, clueless mom fusses through an embatassing meeting and sids wiyh thee condescending teachers
MYTH: You Can Get to Know Your Characters Only by Writing Complete Bios REALITY: Character Bios Should Concentrate Solely on Information Relevant to Your Story
current conflict. Especially conflict wired to a ticking clock.
there’s no law that you have to stick to it. Sometimes the excitement of writing is discovering those places where the story suddenly careens into new territory on its own—and you realize its new direction makes even more sense than the one in which it was headed. Of course, in this as in most things in life, luck tends to favor the prepared.
