The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

by Will Storr

Salman Rushdie has written, Stevens was, ‘destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life’.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell said that ‘the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.’ It’s this imperfect person we meet in story and in life. But unlike in life, story allows us to crawl into that character’s mind and understand them.

Psychologists measure personality across five domains, which can be useful for writers doing character work to know. Those high in extraversion are gregarious and assertive, seekers of attention and sensation.

Being high in neuroticism means you’re anxious, self-conscious and prone to depression, anger and low self-esteem. Lots of openness makes for a curious soul, someone artistic, emotional and comfortable with novelty. High-agreeable people are modest, sympathetic and trusting while their disagreeable opposites have a competitive and aggressive bent. Conscientious people prefer order and discipline and value hard work, duty and hierarchy.

Personality can predict what kinds of futures we might have too. Conscientious people tend to enjoy greater than average job security and life satisfaction; extroverts are more likely to have affairs and car accidents; disagreeable

people are better at fighting their way up corporate ladders into the highest-paying jobs; those high in openness are more likely to get tattoos, be unhealthy and vote for left-wing political parties while those low in conscientiousness are more likely to end up in prison and have a higher risk of dying, in any given year, of around 30 per cent. Although women and men are far more alike than they are different, there are gender differences. One of the most reliable findings in

the literature is that males tend to be more disagreeable than females, with the average man scoring lower in agreeability than around 60 per cent (an...

A similar personality gap is found for neuroticism, where the average man scores lower than a...

The protagonist’s point of view orients us in the story. It’s a map of clues, full of hints about its owner’s flaws and the plot they’re going to create. For me, it’s the single most underrated quality of fiction writing.

In fiction, it might not be going too far to say all description works as a description of character.

To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true. Among the most powerful of these beliefs are the ones that serve to bolster our sense of our moral superiority. Our brains are hero-makers that emit seductive lies. They want to make us feel like the plucky, brave protagonist in the story of our own lives. In order to make us feel heroic, the brain craftily re-scripts our pasts.

For the psychologists Professors Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, the most important memory

distortions ‘by far’ are the ones that serve to ‘justify and explain our own lives’. We spend years ‘telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are’. By this process, memory becomes, ‘a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings’.

Because we start out convinced we’re a good person, then it only logically follows there must be a good reason for our negative feelings.

Everyone who’s psychologically normal thinks they’re the hero. Moral superiority is thought to be a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’. Maintaining a ‘positive moral self-image’ doesn’t only offer psychological and social benefits, it’s actually been found to improve our physical health.

Hitler, whose last words before shooting himself were said to be, ‘The world will be eternally grateful to National Socialism that I have extinguished the Jews in Germany and Central

Europe.’

Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and clichéd stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism – convictions of personal and moral superiority – that drive most acts of evil.

A character’s conviction in their rightness and superiority is precisely what gives them their terrible power. Great drama often forms itself around a clash of competing hero-maker narratives, one belonging to

the protagonist, the other to their foe. Their respective moral perceptions of reality feel utterly genuine to their owners and yet are catastrophically opposed. These are neural worlds that become locked in a fight to the death.

‘Greenpeace, the whole international group, is a $150m outfit. Bigger than the World Trade Organisation, and much more influential in terms of determining how people think. And there’s very deep networks of money and power and influence there too.’ This division of the world into opposing forces of plucky David and almighty Goliath seems a signature manoeuvre of the hero-making brain. The broad narrative it tells of the world is that we’re moral actors, struggling against great, Goliathine odds for the good of our lives and perhaps the world. This is a story that gives our lives meaning. It pulls our eyes from the terrible void above and forces them into the urgent now.

Meaning is created by just the right change-event happening to just the right person at just the right moment.

Bovary. No matter how bedazzling the events of a plot might be, all story is ultimately about character.

But all this is complicated by the fact that characters in story aren’t only at war with the outside world. They’re also at war with themselves. A protagonist is engaged in a battle fought largely in the strange cellars of their own subconscious mind. At stake

is the answer to the fundamental question that drives all drama: who am I?

You don’t care about anything except you. You

just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.’

Who was Charles Foster Kane really? That was the challenge that editor Rawlston made to his staff of storytellers at the beginning of Citizen Kane. Was he the man his old friend perceived: self-interested, delusional, desperate for approval and attention? Or was he the person...

If there’s a single secret to storytelling then I believe it’s this. Who is this person? Or, from the perspective of the character, Who am I? It’s the definition of drama. It is its electricity, its heartbeat, its fire.

The narrator can’t

trusted because it has no direct access to the truth of who we really are.

Our narrator is just observing what’s happening in the controlled hallucination in our skulls – including our own behaviour – and explaining it. It’s tying all the events together into a coherent tale that tells us who we

are, why we’re doing what we’re doing and feeling what we’re feeling. It’s helping us feel in control of our thrilling neural show. And it’s not lying, exactly. It’s confabulating. As the philosopher of psychology Professor Lisa Bortolotti explains, when we confabulate ‘we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story.’ And we’re confabulating all the time.

They showed a card saying WALK to a split-brain patient such that only their left eye saw it. Because of the way the brain’s wired up, this information was sent into the right hemisphere. And, because the wiring between their hemispheres had been cut, that’s where it stayed, hidden away from the narrator. So what happened? The patient stood up and walked.

His brain observed what was happening, in his neural realm, and made up a cause-and-effect story to explain it. It confabulated. It had no idea why he’d really stood up. But it instantly invented a perfectly credible tale to account for the behaviour – a tale that its owner unquestioningly believed.

a storyteller. And facts, while nice, don’t really matter to it: ‘The first makes-sense explanation will do.’

The terrible and fascinating truth about the human condition is that none of us really know the answer to the dramatic question as it pertains to ourselves. We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re

depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us. Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we’re in complete control of ourselves, but we’re not. We’re led to believe we really know who we are, but we don’t.

of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion. Our behaviour is ‘simply the end result of the battles’. All the while our confabulating narrator ‘works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages. Brains do this with the single minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of the democracy to make sense.’

them.’ Her alien hand would remove items from her handbag without her knowing. ‘I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on.’ Professor Michael Gazzaniga describes a patient who ‘grabbed his wife with his left hand and shook her violently, while with the right hand trying to come to his wife’s aid.’ One day Gazzaniga saw that patient’s left hand pick up an axe. ‘I discreetly left the scene.’ Our multiplicity is revealed whenever we become emotional. When we’re angry, we’re like a different person with different values and goals in a different reality than when we feel nostalgic, depressed or excited.

an evil spell, magicking us from princess to witch. In his pioneering classic The Uses of Enchantment the psychoanalyst Professor Bruno Bettelheim argues that making sense of such terrifying transformations is a core function of fairytales.

A child can’t consciously accept that an overwhelming mood of anger may make him ‘wish to destroy those on whom he depends for his existence. To understand this would mean he must accept the fact that his own

emotions may so overpower him that he does not have control over them – ...

How we behave, in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation.

What these photographs reveal is that human consciousness works on two levels. There’s the top level on which occurs the drama of our day-to-day lives – that meeting of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell which is narrated by the hero-making inner voice. And then, beneath that, there’s the subconscious level of the neural models, a stewing night ocean of feelings, urges and broken memories in which competing urges engage

in a constant struggle for control. The stories we tell also work on these levels. They operate ‘in two realms’, writes the psychologist Professor Jerome Bruner, ‘one a landscape of action in the world’, the other a landscape of the mind in which the ‘protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and secrets play themselves out’. On the plot’s conscious top layer we experience the visible causes and effects of the drama. Then there’s the

story’s subconscious that heaves beneath the visible. It’s a place of symbolism and division, in which characters are multiple and contradict...

Professor Brian Little writes, ‘All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.’ As these subtle revisions in who they are take place on the

subconscious second level, the answer to the dramatic question changes. And as their character changes this, in turn, alters their behaviour on the surface level of the drama. And so on and so on.

Lawrence of Arabia. An approximate definition of Lawrence’s flaw would be something like vanity that manifests as rebellion. He’s rather insolent and self-important. This is how he controls the world of people around him. It’s how he makes himself feel superior