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

by Will Storr

We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love.

The cure for the horror is story. Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them.

What we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all.

Recent research suggests language evolved principally to swap ‘social information’ back when we were living in Stone Age tribes. In other words, we’d gossip. We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behaviour, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check.

Stories about people being heroic or villainous, and the emotions of joy and outrage they triggered, were crucial to human survival. We’re wired to enjoy them.

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale,

This book has an unusual genesis in that it’s based on a storytelling course that is, in turn, based on research I’ve carried out for various books.

the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in.

The surface events of the plot are critical, of course, and its structure ought to be present, functional and disciplined. But it’s only there to support its cast.

There are many things that attract and hold the attention of brains. Storytellers engage a number of neural processes that evolved for a variety of reasons and are waiting to be played like instruments in an orchestra: moral outrage, unexpected change, status play, specificity, curiosity, and so on. By understanding them, we can more easily create stories that are gripping, profound, emotional and original.

The ‘Sacred Flaw Approach’ is a character-first process,

Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change.

Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce.

These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us.

Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. It’s by learning how to control the world that they get what they want.

All character actions are motivated by what that character thinks he needs to do in the moment to control the environment! Character “reactions” are all responses to something in the environment that the character perceives to be important to some primal need.

Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity.

.change .danger .want .need

Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomorrow.

When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel...

This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers.

Aristotle argued that ‘peripeteia’, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama,

‘the image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.’

These changeful moments are so important, they’re often packed into a story’s first sentences:

These openers create curiosity by describing specific moments of change. But they also hint darkly at troubling change to come.

The threat of change is also a highly effective technique for arousing curiosity.

Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowledge. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers everything about them.

Brains, concluded the researchers, seem to become spontaneously curious when presented with an ‘information set’ they realise is incomplete. ‘There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,’ wrote Loewenstein, ‘even for questions of no importance.’

The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it.

The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.

.important

stories in which they’re (1) posed a puzzle; (2) exposed to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution; (3) surprised by red herrings, and (4) tantalised by the fact that someone knows whodunnit, and how, but we don’t.

Some of our most successful mass-market storytellers also rely on information gaps. J. J. Abrams is co-creator of the long-form television series Lost,

how it feels to be a living, conscious human. It feels as if we’re looking out of our skulls, observing reality directly and without impediment. But this is not the case. The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.

There’s a surprising limit to how much our brains can actually process. Pass that limit and the object is simply edited out.

Like an old television that can only pick up black and white, our biological technology simply can’t process most of what’s actually going on in the great oceans of electro-magnetic radiation that surround us.

Human eyes are able to read less than one ten-trillionth of the light spectrum.

Researchers find the majority of dreams feature at least one event of threatening and unexpected change, with most of us experiencing up to five such events every night.

According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters.

This is perhaps why transitive construction – Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad – is more effective than the ditransitive – Jane gave her Dad a kitten.

Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence.

.important

For the same reason, active sentence construction – Jane kissed her Dad – is more effective than passive – Dad was kissed by Jane.

A further powerful tool for the model-creating storyteller is the use of specific detail.

One study concluded that, to make vivid scenes, three specific qualities of an object should be described, with the researcher’s examples including ‘a dark blue carpet’ and ‘an orange striped pencil.’

.important

Immersive model worlds can also be summoned by the evocation of the senses. Touches, tastes, scents and sounds

This simple technique is used to magical effect in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume. It tells of an orphan with an awesome sense of smell

Humans have an extraordinary gift for reading and understanding the minds of other people.

The importance and complexity of human behaviour means we have an insatiable curiosity about it. Storytellers exploit both these mechanisms

When we started living in settled communities, they grew especially troublesome. There, it would’ve been the people who were better at getting along with others, rather than the physically dominant, who’d have been more successful.

Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story. For modern humans, controlling the world means controlling other people, and that means understanding them.

adults, they’ve become so adept at reading people that they’re making calculations about status and character automatically, in one tenth of a second.

Just as the brain models the outside world it also builds models of minds.