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

by Will Storr

fight. For the nineteenth-century critic Ferdinand Brunetière this was the one inviolable rule of drama: ‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’ Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don’t passively endure the chaos that erupts around us.

Humans do things. They act. We can’t help it.

Most failed to recall more than a handful of sentences. But a second group were told prior to reading that the paragraph concerned the washing of clothes. The

simple addition of a human goal transformed the gobbledegook into something clear. They remembered twice as much.

One clever study asked restaurant employees to circle

all the likely possibilities for their own future lives, before doing the same on behalf of a liked colleague. Many more circles appeared for their lives than for their co-workers. Another test found that eight in every ten participants believed things would turn out better for them than for others. Goal-direction gives story much of its tension and thrill. As the protagonist pursues their goal we feel their struggle. As they grab for their prize, we experience their joy. As they fail, we cry out.

Video games plug directly into such core desires. Multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft and Fortnite, are stories. When a player logs on and teams up with fellow players to embark on a difficult mission,

their three deepest evolved cravings are powerfully fed – they experience connection, earn status and are given a goal to pursue.

In South Korea, two parents became so engrossed in a multiplayer game that they

allowed their three-month-old daughter to starve to death. The game that obsessed them, Prius Online, partly involved nurturing and forming an emotional bond with ‘Anima’, a virtual baby girl.

Little isn’t the first to argue that the fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal.

‘living in a way that fulfils our purpose’,

Aristotle was saying, “Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”’

living with a sufficient sense of purpose reduces the risk of depression and strokes and helps addicts recover from addiction.

When I asked Cole to define eudaemonia he said it was ‘kind of striving after a noble goal’.

Humans are built for story. When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive.

Without a goal to follow and at least some sense we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair. A living death.

The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist.

The secret of long-running soap operas

no definitive answer to the dramatic question of who that person really is.

The testing events just keep coming and coming, much as they do in life.

today’s landscape of popular storytelling. For the mythologist Joseph Campbell, a story starts with a hero receiving and, at first, refusing a call to adventure. A mentor comes along to encourage them. Somewhere in the middle they’ll undergo a ‘rebirth’, only to rouse dark forces that pursue them. After a near-deadly battle, the hero returns to their community with learnings and ‘boons’. The Hollywood animation studio Pixar is home to some of the most successful mass-market storytellers of our age. ‘Story artist’ Austin Madison, who’s worked on blockbusters including Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up, has shared a structure he says all Pixar films must adhere to. The action starts with a protagonist who has a goal, living in a settled world. Then a challenge comes that forces them into a cause-and-effect sequence of events that eventually builds to a climax that demonstrates the triumph of good over evil and the revelation of the story’s moral. Thirty years of study led Christopher Booker to assert the existence of seven recurring plots in story. He calls them: Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; The Quest; Voyage and Return; Rebirth; Comedy; and Tragedy. Each plot, he argues, consists of five acts: the call to action, a dream stage in which everything goes well, a frustration stage at which fortunes turn, a descent into nightmarish conflict, and finally a resolution. Following Jung, Booker outlines a character transformation he believes ubiquitous. At the story’s start the p...

The good news is that the understanding that plot is there only to test and change the protagonist serves to simplify and make sense of many of these seemingly disparate theories.

Western storytelling consists of those three acts – crisis, struggle, resolution

stage.’ For me, the standard five-act structure isn’t the only way to tell a story. It is, in fact, the narrative equivalent of the three-and-a-half-minute pop song, perfectly tooled to hold attention.

Act I: This is me, and it’s not working The protagonist’s theory of control is established.

Act II: Is there another way? The old theory of control is tested by the plot and it begins breaking down. There are rising emotions of excitement, tension or thrill as a new way forward is sensed, learned and actively experimented with. Act III: There is. I have transformed Grim tension grips as the plot fights back. The protagonist counter-attacks using their new strategy. In doing so, they transform in a way that feels profound and irreversible.

Act IV: But can I handle the pain of change? Chaos spirals. The protagonist’s lowest, darkest point. As the plot’s attack becomes relentless, our hero begins to question the wisdom of their decision to change. But the plot won’t leave them alone.

Act V: Who am I going to be? Tension builds at the approach of the final battle. A peak moment of ecstasy accompanies the protagonist finally achieving complete control over the plot. The chaos is vanquished and the dramatic question is answered definitively: they’re going to be someone new, someone better.

publishing executive Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers of Stanford University’s Literary Lab, whose algorithm was set to work on 20,000 novels and taught itself to predict a New York Times bestseller with an accuracy of 80 per cent. Fascinatingly, the resulting data supported the life’s work of Christopher Booker,

whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge. What also emerged was an indication of what people are most curious to read about. The ‘most frequently occurring and important theme’ of bestsellers was ‘human closeness and human connection’, an

apposite interest for a h...

What actually drove the action was ‘the constantly recurring question of whether or not Ana will submit’. The plot was powered,

as all plots should be, by the dramatic question: who was Ana going to be? When Archer and Jockers laid out the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey on a graph, it turned out to take an intriguing form. It made a roughly symmetrical pattern of constriction and release that travelled across five peaks and four valleys, each of which came regularly. It was strikingly similar to another novel that seemed to come from nowhere and into sales

dozens of millions: Dan Brown’s The D...

‘Both novels have mastered the page-turner beat.’

plot should serve to orchestrate a symphony of changes. It’s change that obsesses brains and

keeps them engaged.

top level of cause-and-effect in which the story event and its ra...

the second subconscious level in which characters are altered in surprising and meaningful way...

change in tribal emotions that tells us who to love and who to hate, and change in goal-direction emotions of constriction and release that ...

the chara...

understanding of their situation can change. The characters’ plan for achieving their goal can change. The characters’ goal can change. A character’s understanding of themselves can change. A character’s understanding of their relationships can change. The reader’s understanding of who the character is can change. The reader’s understanding of what’s actu...

change. Information gaps can be opened and teased and ...

Police-procedural drama, for example, depends heavily on changes in the reader’s understanding of what’s really happening, which tend to dance exhilaratingly around what the Detective Inspector knows. Much

in The Remains of the Day, meanwhile, takes the form of the reader’s understanding of Stevens, a character to whom nuance and colours (many of them dark) are progressively added during his road trip, often with the use of flashbacks.

A gripping plot is one that keeps asking the dramatic question. It uses its story event to repeatedly change and gradually break the protagonist’s model of who they are and how the world works before rebuilding

Beau Lotto it’s ‘not just important to be active, it is neurologically necessary’. It’s the only way we grow.

112,000 plots including books, movies, television episodes and video games, his algorithm found one common story shape. Robinson described this as, ‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’ The pattern he detected reveals that many stories have a point, just prior to their resolution, in which the hero endures some deeply significant test. For one final, decisive time, they’re posed the dramatic

question. It’s the moment they have to decide, once and for all, whether or not to become someone new.