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

by Will Storr

Once they’re in this hostile and alien place, their flawed theory of control is tested and retested, ofte...

Sometimes story events are located near the start of a plot, with the rest dealing with its ...

Sometimes they arrive around ...

Sometimes the story event comprises almost the plot’s entire length: in Lawrence of Arabia, it’s the war.

In sitcoms a story event typically occurs at the start of an episode.

Contemporary long-form television is frequently structured around one overarching story event – Breaking Bad’s Walter White’s transition to a drug dealer;

The secret of long-running soap operas

story events occur frequently and characters are offered the opportunity to change, and sometimes do in subtle ways. But there’s rarely a final resolution to the process

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

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 ...

At the story’s start the protagonist’s personality will be ‘out of balance’. They’ll be too strong or weak in the archetypal masculine traits of strength and order, or the archety...

In the happy resolution of the final act, the hero achieves ‘the perfect balance’ of all four trai...

John Yorke argues for a hidden symmetry in story, in which protagonists and antagonists function as opposites with their rising and falling fortunes mirroring one another.

a ‘universal’ plot design that centres around a midpoint peak. This he describes as a ‘big, epochal, life-changing moment’, occurring ‘exactly’ halfway through ‘any successful story’, in which something ‘profoundly significant’ takes place that transforms it in some irreversible way.

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.

For me, the standard five-act structure

perfectly tooled to hold attention. It’s ubiquitous in mass-marketing storytelling because it’s the simplest way of showing a character’s flawed theory of control being broken, changed and rebuilt.

Act I: This is me, and it’s not working

Act II: Is there another way?

Act III: There is. I have transformed

Act IV: But can I handle the pain of change?

Act V: Who am I going to be?

Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers

the resulting data supported the life’s work of Christopher Booker, whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge.

The ‘most frequently occurring and important theme’ of bestsellers was ‘human closeness and human connection’,

it seems to me the only true plot fundamentals are that a story event on the surface triggers subconscious character change beneath.

Beyond this, a plot should serve to orchestrate a symphony of changes. It’s change that obsesses brains and keeps them engaged.

the top level of cause-and-effect

subconscious level in which character...

the change in tribal emotions that tells us who to lov...

change in goal-direction emotions of constric...

the characters’ understanding of their situat...

The characters’ plan for achieving their g...

The characters’ goal c...

A character’s understanding of themselv...

A character’s understanding of their relations...

The reader’s understanding of who the characte...

The reader’s understanding of what’s actually happening in th...

Information gaps can be opened and teas...

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 it. This requires pressure. These models are tough. They run to the core of the character’s identity. If they’re going to crack, the protagonist needs to hurl themselves at the drama. It’s only by being active, and having the courage to take on the external world with all its challenges and provocations, that these core mechanisms can ever be broken down and rebuilt.

his algorithm found one common story shape.

‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’

many stories have a point, just prior to their resolution, in which the hero endures som...

Because the story event has been designed to strike at the core of this character’s identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest.

The flawed models they’re required to shatter run so deep that it takes an act of almost supernatural strength and courage to finally change them for good.

This, for me, is the point at which much contemporary storytelling collapses i...

the requirement for a final ‘battle’ is sometimes taken too literally. Properly written characters, with effective internal drama, don’t need to rely on overblown and hyperactive drama to satisfy.

That gold is your the reward for accepting the fight of your life. But you only get it if you answer story’s dramatic question correctly: ‘I’m going to be someone better.’