Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)

by Lisa Cron

we fall under the spell of a captivating story. We don’t have a choice. The power story has over us is biological. But while responding to story is hardwired, creating a story is not.

Story is about how the things that happen in the plot affect the protagonist, and how he or she changes internally as a result. Think of the protagonist’s internal struggle as the novel’s live wire. It’s exactly like the third rail on a subway train—the electrified rail that supplies the juice that drives the cars forward. Without it, that train, no matter how well constructed, just sits there, idling in neutral,

everything—action, plot, even the “sensory details”—must touch the story’s third rail in order to have meaning and emotional impact. Anything that doesn’t impact the protagonist’s internal struggle, regardless of how beautifully written or “objectively” dramatic it is, will stop the story cold, breaking the spell that captivated readers, and unceremoniously catapulting them back into their own lives.

you have to know everything there is to know about the protagonist’s specific internal problem before you create the plot, and why this knowledge will then, with astonishing speed, begin to generate the plot itself. Story first, plot second, so that your novel has the juice to instantly captivate your readers, biologically hooking them before they know what hit ’em.

there have been no societies that did not tell stories. —URSULA K. LEGUIN

a novel is by far the most potent drug, the longest lasting, and the only one that won’t leave you with any regrets in the morning. Well,

an effective story is, literally, an offer your brain can’t refuse. You didn’t decide to keep reading—it was a biological reaction.

Story was the world’s first virtual reality. It allowed us to step out of the present and envision the future, so we could plan for the thing that has always scared us more than anything: the unknown, the unexpected. What

Stories let us vicariously try out difficult situations we haven’t yet experienced to see what it would really feel like, and what we’d need to learn in order to survive. So it’s no surprise that there’s never been a society on earth that didn’t have storytelling. It’s a human universal,

Stories feel good for the same reason food tastes good and sex feels good: because without them we couldn’t survive. Food nourishes us, sex begets us, stories educate us. It’s just that with food and sex, the consequences tend to become apparent pretty darn quickly,

story’s effect on us is just as profound, as life-altering, and as biologically driven. It turns out that great feeling you get when you’re lost in a good story, the feeling that can keep you up all night reading, is not ephemeral, it’s not arbitrary, it’s not pleasure for pleasure’s sake, it’s not even the point. It’s actually the biological lure, the hook that paralyzes you, making the real world vanish so you can experience the world of the story. That feeling is what compels us to drop everything and pay attention.

What actually causes that great feeling is a surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s a chemical reaction triggered by the intense curiosity that an effective story always instantly generates.

When we’re under the spell of a compelling story, we undergo internal changes along with the protagonist, and her insights become part of the way we, too, see the world. Stories instill meaning directly into our belief system the same way experience does—not by telling us what is right, but by allowing us to feel it ourselves. Because just like life, story is emotion based. As Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert said, “Indeed, feelings don’t just matter, they are what mattering means.”

In a story, if we’re not feeling, we’re not reading. It is emotion, rather than logic, that telegraphs meaning, thus emotion is what your novel must be wired to transmit, straight from the protagonist to us.

studies reveal that when we’re reading a story, our brain activity isn’t that of an observer, but of a participant.

we come to every story we hear—not just novels, which, evolutionarily speaking, arrived on the scene about five seconds ago—hardwired to ask one question in what’s known as our cognitive unconscious: What am I going to learn here that will help me not only survive, but prosper?

We’re all people who need people. Which means that in order to have a shot at prospering, we need to understand other people. And so story’s purpose evolved from simply decoding the mysteries of the physical world to deciphering the far more intricate social world—a far trickier task.

can sharpen our mind-reading skills by devouring a ton of novels. The purpose of story—of every story—is to help us interpret, and anticipate, the actions of ourselves and of others.

We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.

story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.

The initial job of an effective story is to anesthetize the part of your brain that knows it is a story. That’s why when you’re caught up in a story it doesn’t feel like a story at all; it feels like reality—especially since you’re experiencing what’s happening to the protagonist along the same neural pathways you would if it were actually happening to you.

The very fact that you can move things around is a telltale sign that the novel has no internal logic. Will your first draft be shitty no matter what? Probably. It’s kind of a badge of honor. But make no mistake: there’s a massive difference between the shitty draft of an actual story and a shitty first draft that randomly romps all over the damn place.

them. Rather than inviting us in, the beautiful language is more like a waterproof sealant, locking us on the surface where all we can do is admire the words, rather than absorb the story that they’re meant to tell. And while this is the last thing the author meant to do, now we’re kind of annoyed. Because it feels a wee bit like the writer is showing off. Like he’s saying, “Look how well I write!” rather than “Forget about me; lose yourself in my story!”

it starts, proceeds, and finishes with your protagonist’s inner struggle—your story’s third rail. Creating the inside story comes first, because without it you can’t create your plot.

a story is about how someone grapples with a problem they can’t avoid, and how they change in the process.

You can’t write about how someone changes unless you know, specifically, what they’re changing from. You can’t write about a problem unless you know, specifically, what caused it. And as real life has taught us all too well, by the time we’re forced to face a thorny problem, chances are it’s been building for quite a while—years, decades, often our whole life up to that moment.

the real truth: your novel itself begins “in the middle of the thing”—the “thing” being the story. What starts on page one is the second half of the story, when the plot kicks in. The second half—the novel itself—will contain large parts of the first in the form of flashbacks, dialogue, and snippets of memory as the protagonist struggles to make sense of what’s happening, and what to do about it. It bears repeating: nothing in this process goes to waste.

just about every story starts with a cliché. A cliché is simply something that’s so familiar that it feels old hat. It’s the story’s job to make it, um, new hat. As Samuel Johnson so aptly pointed out, “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”4

why is it necessary to pick one person to be your protagonist? Your Protagonist’s Brain Is Your Reader’s Portal The answer brings us right back to why we’re wired for story. The world is teeming with things that happen, and on most days, especially before that first cup of coffee, it sure looks like chaos out there. Our survival depends on making sense of the particular chaos we call home—not in the general “objective” sense we hear so much about, but in the much more practical, subjective, how-will-this-affect-me-personally sense.

evolutionary job of story is to funnel said chaos through one very grounding filter: the specific effect that chaos has on the protagonist, who becomes our avatar.

when we’re lost in a story, we’re not passively reading about something that’s happening to someone else. We’re actively experiencing it on a neural level as if it were happening to us. We are—literally—making the protagonist’s experience our own. Without a main character, the reader has no skin in the game, and everything remains utterly neutral and surprisingly hard to follow.

the question isn’t what will happen to your protagonist now. It’s, Who is she, really, just before it happens? Because your novel is going to change her. The question is, change her from what? This is one of the hardest parts of writing, because you really are creating something (make that someone) out of what feels like nothing. So be kind to yourself. If it feels difficult, that’s because it is. But one thing we’ll see throughout this book is that specifics beget specifics. The minute you begin to define your protagonist, specifically, you start to bring her or him into focus.

Envisioning who your protagonist is on the day before your novel starts will enable you to start figuring out exactly how he got there. You will soon learn much more about him, and the general details you unearth in your sketch will begin to expand.

Why “Why”? The human brain is a meaning-seeking machine; rather than taking everything at face value, we’re wired to try to figure out what’s really going on. Because understanding the why fundamentally changes our perception of the what. This is what sets us apart from most other critters, who simply accept the surface world as they find it. They live their lives solely reacting to what happens, rather than meticulously planning for the future, especially around the holidays. We humans take

how do you isolate and identify your protagonist’s inner struggle, so you can then develop it? By laser beaming into his specific dueling internal duo: what your protagonist wants (his desire) and the misbelief that keeps him from it (think: fear). It is from those two small, burning embers that all stories grow and flame. It is this struggle that becomes your story’s third rail.

What your protagonist wants doesn’t have to be possible, it just has to be concrete.

What Will Getting It Mean to Her?) Having nailed what your protagonist wants out there in the surface world, we can now ask the internal question that matters even more: Why does she want it?

Defining misbeliefs tend to spring up during difficult situations, and when they do, they rescue us from something that might otherwise harm us. They’re little “aha!” moments that clue us into what seems to be the way of the world. Using this hard-won intel, we then set our own agenda, trusting the misbelief to guide us through the rocky parts.

Try defining your protagonist’s misbelief. As concisely as you can, write down what she wants, and what the fear is that’s keeping her from achieving it. One question to ask yourself as you work this out is, Given her misbelief, what does she think the very worst thing that could happen would be? Try to picture it.

Just as the protagonist’s POV isn’t like a camera lens, neither is a scene written as if you’re narrating something that you’re watching on a video screen. Instead, you want to plant us inside your protagonist’s head as the event unfolds.

questions you’ll ask yourself when writing—or envisioning—any scene. They are • What does my protagonist go into the scene believing? • Why does she believe it? • What is my protagonist’s goal in the scene? • What does my protagonist expect will happen in this scene?

capture the moment when your protagonist’s worldview shifted, and her misbelief took root in her brain, where it’s been coloring how she’s seen the world from that moment on. Write a full-fledged scene. Don’t be worried if it takes several tries to nail it. Feel free to test several scenarios until you hit on the one that feels right. As you saw with Jennie, chances are there will be moments in your own life that will leap to mind, providing evocative material just waiting to be mined. After all, what “write what you know” really means is, write what you know emotionally.

defines fiction as “a simulation that runs on the software of our minds. And it is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect.”1

write three in-depth scenes that helped create, perpetuate, and escalate the problem your protagonist will be forced to deal with when your novel starts. Because the story-specific cause-and-effect trajectory that will propel your novel from the first page to the last doesn’t begin on page one; it began with the origin scene you wrote in the last chapter. The first page of your novel, on the other hand, probably takes place somewhere near the middle of said trajectory.

protagonist’s past is a big part of a novel’s force of opposition. Because as we’ll see, it tells you what, specifically, your protagonist is up against—both internally and externally. That’s why it’s important to trace how the internal battle between your protagonist’s desire and her misbelief has affected the story-specific decisions she’s made in her life.

That’s how stories begin. The protagonist thinks everything is on course—and then, bam! Life says, “Think again.” That is the function of plot. Something happens that forces your protagonist’s hand, leaving her no choice but to take action. And that, as it turns out, is a very good thing. Which is precisely the beauty of problems we can’t avoid: they force us to make the changes we’ve always wanted to but—okay, let’s be totally honest here—were too chicken to try.

That is why, as your novel begins, your protagonist has most likely spent a good bit of time downplaying, postponing, and often willfully ignoring the urge to change. In other words, he’s rationalizing—sometimes consciously, but more often than not, as far as he’s concerned, he’s simply making strategic sense of the world, and acting accordingly.

That moment—the one when the problem finally has the firepower to override his ability to ignore it—tends to be when your novel begins.

what unavoidable external change will catapult my protagonist into the fray, triggering her internal battle? In other words, what threshold is my protagonist standing on the brink of, whether she knows it or not? Who (or what) is taking aim at her little boat? Keep in mind she might be the culprit herself—in fact, self-sabotage can be far more ruthless, not to mention infinitely more effective, than the third-party kind that conspiracy theorists

Every time the protagonist solves a problem it feels like the novel has ended. The momentum stops because the reader now has nothing to anticipate, and so no reason to read forward. • Each obstacle tends to carry the same approximate weight and meaning, so it begins to feel like, second verse, same as the first. And the third, and the fourth. • Although the writer has painstakingly designed each obstacle to test a certain part of the protagonist’s mettle, the reader never makes that connection, because it’s conceptual. Plus, what the protagonist learns from having solved the first problem has no effect on what she must do to solve the second, so the reader starts to wonder what the point is.