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

by Will Storr

The beliefs we’ll fight to defend are the ones which we’ve formed our identity, values and theory of control around.

It’s these kinds of beliefs, and these kinds of attacks, that drive some of our greatest stories.

As they struggle through the events of the plot, they’ll usually encounter a series of obstacles and breakthroughs.

obstacles and breakthroughs often come in the form of secondary characters, each of whom experiences the world differently to them in ways that are specific and necessary to the story.

They’ll be led astray by antagonists, who’ll represent perhaps darker and more extreme versions of their flaw.

they’ll learn valuable lessons from allies, who are often the embodiment of new ways of being that our hero must adopt.

there might be signs that their ability to control the world is failing, which they frantically ignore;

An ignition point is the first event in a cause-and-effect sequence that will ultimately force the protagonist to question their deepest beliefs.

Such an event will often send tremors to the core of their flawed theory of control. Because it goes to the heart of their particular flaw, it’ll cause them to behave in an unexpected way. They’ll overreact or do something otherwise odd.

memories can be detailed, vivid and emotional and yet entirely invented.

the most important memory distortions ‘by far’ are the ones that serve to ‘justify and explain our own lives’.

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’.

Even murderers and domestic abusers tend to consider themselves morally justified, often the victims of intolerable provocation.

Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism.

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 ar...

This division of the world into opposing forces of plucky David and almighty Goliath seems a signature manoeuvre of the hero-making brain.

Those stories are gripping, not because of the bullets or high-speed ski chases in isolation, but because we want to know how this specific person, with this specific history and these strengths and these flaws will get out of it.

characters in story aren’t only at war with the outside world. They’re also at war with themselves.

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

Who is this person who behaves like this? The question then re-emerges every time the protagonist is challenged by the plot and compelled to make a choice.

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 protagonists themselves don’t know the answer. They’re discovering who they are, moment by moment, as the pressure of the drama is applied. And, as the plot turns, they’re often surprised by who they turn out to be.

As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads, we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are.

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.

We have a core personality, mediated by culture and early life experience, which is relatively stable. But that core is a pole around which we’re constantly, elastically moving. How we behave, in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation.

In well-told stories, characters reflect this. They’re ‘three-dimensional’ or more. They’re both recognisably who they are and yet constantly shifting as their circumstances change.

human consciousness works on two levels.

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.

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 ...

The stories we tell also work on ...

‘one a landscape of action in the world’, the other a landscape of the mind in which the ‘protagonists’ thoughts and feeling...

On the plot’s conscious top layer we experience the visible causes and...

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

In well-told stories, there’s a constant interplay between the surface world of the drama and the subconscious world of the characters.

‘All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.’

Some of the most memorable scenes in drama allow us to watch the dramatic question battle itself in the mind of the character. In such scenes, the character appears divided and in a state of internal conflict. What they’re saying, for example, might contradict how they’re behaving in ways that show they’re manifesting as two different versions of self at once. We can’t quite tell what they’re going to do next. Who they are is changing before our eyes.

Inch by inch, scene by scene, characters and plot interact, each altering the other.

the fact that they’re failing to control the world, they’re gradually forced to readdress their deepest beliefs about how it works.

Beneath the level of consciousness, they’re compelled to repeatedly ask themselves that fundamental dramatic question: who am I? Who do I ...

The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway tracks such movements between consciousness and subconscious in longer form, as it follows a day in the life of eponymous Clarissa, and various characters orbiting her, as she prepares for and hosts a party.

Knut Hamsun’s Hunger tracks its unnamed protagonist’s struggle to survive mentally and physically while trying to earn money as a writer. Published in 1890, it’s a stunningly prescient exploration of human cognition.

It’s not uncommon for a character to want something on the conscious level and yet subconsciously need something entirely different.

‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction.

The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist ...

What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually bu...