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

by Lisa Cron

An argument for conditional sentences

Facts that don’t affect us—either directly or because we can’t imagine how the facts affect someone else—don’t matter to us. And that explains why one personalized story has infinitely more impact than an impersonal generalization, even though the scope of the generalization is a thousand times greater. In fact, it is only via a specific personalization that the point of a generalization is shot home.

A great quote for the anne frank unit

For a look at just how much information you can convey in a mental passage before your protagonist delivers an actual response, here’s a revealing snippet from Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters: She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. “A few hundred,” she said. “How do you find the time?” he asked, gobsmacked. She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pregame, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading! “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging.12 Need I say more?

Mary Poppins’ sage advice in mind: enough is as good as a feast.

REALITY: Unless They Convey Necessary Information, Sensory Details Clog a Story’s Arteries

As Chip and Dan Heath point out in Made to Stick, while vivid details can boost a story’s credibility, they must be meaningful—that is, they need to symbolize and support the story’s core idea.

Remember those 11,000,000 bits of information our five senses are lobbing at us every second? They are sensory details. Yet our brain knows that we need to be shielded from at least 10,999,960 of them. The only details it lets through are the ones with the potential to affect us. The same is true of your story. Your job is to filter out the details that don’t matter a whit so you can have plenty of space left for the ones that do.

As Elmore Leonard so shrewdly advised, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

George S. Kaufman’s old Broadway saw in mind: “You can’t hum the scenery.”

For example, let’s turn to a master, the unparalleled Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and crib something from Love in the Time of Cholera. The following paragraph is a quintessential example of how the mere description of a room can be harnessed to provide insight into a character. In this passage, Dr. Juvenal Urbino surveys the parlor of his good friend and chess partner, photographer Jeremiah de Saint-Armour, who has just committed suicide. 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.

surprisingly specific, deliciously tangible, and grippingly visceral.

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?

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.”

Political implications

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.”

Story’s job is to tackle exactly how we handle that conflict, which boils down to this: the battle between fear and desire.

“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.

intense social rejection activates the same areas in the brain that physical pain does.6 Our brain is making a point. Conflict hurts.

if only life (aka the story) would stop poking holes in her carefully—and largely subconsciously—constructed rationalizations.

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.

In fact, those who are truly brave tend to see themselves as not brave at all.

MYTH: Withholding Information for the Big Reveal Is What Keeps Readers Hooked REALITY: Withholding Information Very Often Robs the Story of What Really Hooks Readers

If we don’t know there’s intrigue afoot, then there is no intrigue afoot.

If you make sure the reader’s always aware of the conflicting realities the protagonist finds herself trapped between, you’ll be off to the races—together.

how we make sense of the world—are logically interrelated. According to Damasio, the brain tends to organize the profusion of input and memories, “much like a film editor would, by giving it some kind of coherent narrative structure in which certain actions are said to cause certain effects.”

The good news is, when it comes to keeping your story on track, it boils down to the mantra if, then, therefore. If I put my hand in the fire (action), then I’ll get burned (reaction). Therefore, I’d better not put my hand in the fire (decision).

Thus the key thing to remember is, naturally, Newton’s first law of thermodynamics: you can’t get something from nothing. Or as the equally brainy Albert Einstein reportedly quipped, “Nothing happens until something moves.” In other words, no matter how much something catches you off guard, nothing ever really occurs out of the blue. Not in real life, not in a story. There is always a cause-and-effect trajectory, whether or not the protagonist—or in the case of real life, you and I—see it coming.

Each scene’s decision point is tested by the next scene’s action. In other words, each scene makes the next scene inevitable.

guarantee that the stakes ratchet ever upward, you want to make sure you’ve infused each cause with enough firepower to trigger an effect that packs an unexpected, yet perfectly logical, wallop.

sure each individual scene effectively uses its specific “action, reaction, decision” to evoke maximum tension

Remember those cards that writers love to keep up their sleeves? Strategically revealed new information can change how the protagonist interprets everything that’s happened up to then, not to mention change how the reader interprets the protagonist’s motives from that point on.

Shirley jackson

The fact is, raising expectations that have nothing to do with the story we’re reading changes the way we interpret absolutely everything that happens from that moment on.

Hermeneutic Cycle

This is exactly the sort of situation that prompted Chekhov to note to S. Shchukin, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

The “And So?” Test When you ask “And so?” you’re testing for story relevance.

“But with a little sex in it?”6

After all, as Emily Dickinson points out, “A wounded deer leaps the highest.”

Don’t let your characters admit anything they aren’t forced to, even to themselves.

Aesop, who said, “Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large misfortunes.”

Do encourage your characters to lie. While in real life, we don’t want people to lie to us, in a story, characters who lie are the ones who catch our interest.

Not that your bad guy has to be redeemed, mind you, but both he—and the story—are far more intriguing if the possibility is open.

Do expose your demons.

Plutarch offers this sage advice: “It must needs be that those who aim at great deeds should also suffer greatly.”15 Often in public. Or, to put it a bit more philosophically, there’s Jung: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

The danger needs to be specific—and wired to a rapidly ticking clock.

“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

As Raymond Chandler wisely noted, “The solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”

we know what Powell must overcome to protect him. And protect him he does, in one of the most touching moments of deeply felt macho bonding in the pre-bromance era.

In other words, memories aren’t just for reminiscing. They never were. Memories are for navigating the now.

As Steven Pinker points out, “Gossip is a favorite pastime in all human societies because knowledge is power.”