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

by Will Storr

the only animals in which gangs of males expand their territory by deliberately exterminating neighbouring males happen to be humans and chimpanzees. What is the chance of such tendencies evolving independently in two closely related mammals?’

We still have this primitive cognition. We think in tribal stories. It’s our original sin.

When a group’s collective status feels threatened and they fear even the possibility of humiliation by another group, the result can be massacre, crusade and genocide.

But such stories don’t only exploit outrage and tribal humiliation for their power. Many deploy a third incendiary group emotion: disgust.

Tribal propaganda exploits these processes by representing enemies as disease-carrying pests such as cockroaches, rats or lice.

As literary critic Adam Kirsch has observed, goodness is ‘infertile terrain for a writer’. If a hero starts out in perfect selfless shape there’s going to be no tale to tell.

how do we explain antiheroes?

Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,

we immediately learn that Humbert is dead. Next we discover that, prior to his passing, he was in ‘legal captivity’ awaiting trial. This immediately deflates much of our moral outrage before we even get the chance to feel it: the poor bastard’s caught and dead. Whatever he’s done, he’s had his tribal comeuppance.

When we meet the man himself our outrage is further punctured by his immediate acknowledgements of wrong-doing, calling Lolita ‘my sin’ and himself a ‘murderer’.

It helps, too, that Humbert’s the opposite of disgusting, being handsome, well-tailored and charming. He’s darkly funny,

We learn his hebephiliac tendencies were triggered by tragedy: when he himself was twelve, his first love Annabelle died,

When Humbert’s adult interest in girls of Annabelle’s age becomes apparent, he tries to cure himself with therapy and marriage. It doesn’t work.

By a variety of powerful and crafty means, Nabokov is manipulating our emotions such that we find ourselves somewhat rooting for Humbert.

the television series The Sopranos.

Patricia Highsmith indulges in similar manipulations. In Ripley’s Game,

There’s a sense in which all protagonists are antiheroes. Most, when we meet them, are flawed and partial and only become truly heroic if and when they manage to change.

we seem to enjoy ‘playing’ the antihero. I wonder if this is because, somewhere in the sewers far beneath our hero-making narrators, we know we’re not so lovely. Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting.

This, perhaps, is the subversive truth of stories about antiheroes. Being freed to be evil, if only in our minds, can be such a joyful relief.

William Shakespeare began experimenting with breaking the rules

true leap into genius took place when he made the ‘crucial breakthrough’ of removing one particular class of character information.

Shakespeare had always been sceptical of ‘accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do’.

Leaving his audiences to guess at the precise causes of a character’s actions enabled the playwright to toy wonderfully with their domesticated brains.

Literary storytelling is often dominated not by surface action as much as by the laying out of extensive clues as to why the characters behave as they do.

While this isn’t always true – in Lolita, of course, Nabokov tells of Humbert’s childhood trauma specifically to help build empathy – many great stories do obscure the root causes of their characters’ damage.

The story of Citizen Kane shows an unusual use of origin damage in that its plot tells of an overt hunt for it.

Such examples show the freedom writers have in playing with origin damage. They can hint at it and tease it, use it to build empathy, even orient plots around a hunt for it.

it’s valuable for the storyteller to know specifically when and how such damage happened to their principal cast before they start writing.

In reality, of course, origin damage is often a matter of grim erosion, commonly taking place over months, years and repeated bloody incidents.

But if a writer is to conjure great characters on the page, they first have to model them vividly in their minds, and that means defining them precisely. They should be able to ‘see’ how they’ll behave in any dramatic situation and try to control the drama that flies at them. To do this, it helps to pin a character’s origin damage down to an actual event,

This means imagining that event thoroughly, then deciding what flawed belief about the world or themselves it generated.

Once the writer knows when it happened, how it happened and what flawed concept the incident created, their character can more easily come alive in their imagination.

The mistake about reality they’ve made, in that instant, helps define not only who that character is, but the li...

Because humans crave control, infants whose caregivers behave unpredictably can grow up in a constant state of anxious high alert. Their distress gets built into their core concepts about people which can lead to significant social problems when they’re grown.

Every now and then, actual reality will push back at us. Something in our environment will change in such a way that our flawed models aren’t predicting and are, therefore, specifically unable to cope with.

this was the one inviolable rule of drama: ‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’

Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built. The basic Darwinian aim of all life forms is to survive and reproduce.

human strategies to attain these goals centre on achieving connection with tribes, and on status within them.

Goal-direction gives story much of its tension and thrill. As the protagonist pursues their goal we feel their struggle.

these goal-related responses form the peaks and troughs of story’s rollercoaster,

the fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal.

Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, ‘The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.’ Instead, he described the idea of ‘eudaemonia’. This is ‘living in a way that fulfils our purpose’,

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

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

Humans are built for story. When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after but when we’re in pursuit of it.

When a threatening and unexpected change strikes, our goal is to deal with it. This goal possesses us. The world narrows. We enter a kind of cognitive tunnel and see only our mission. Everything in front of us becomes either a tool to help us achieve our desire or an obstacle we must kick aside.

This narrowing should be especially present at a story’s ignition point.

In order to be maximally compelling, protagonists should be active, the principal causer of effects in the plot that follows.

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

Its causes and effects always revolve around some sort of story event