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

by Will Storr

Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don’t have to be a genius to master it. You’re already doing it. Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it.

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.

The only thing we’ll ever really know are those electrical pulses that are sent up by our senses.

we experience the stories we read by building hallucinated models of them in our heads

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.

Active grammar means readers model the scene on the page in the same way that they’d model it if it happened in front of them. It makes for easier and more immersive reading.

If writers want their readers to properly model their story-worlds they should take the trouble to describe them as precisely as possible. Precise and specific description makes for precise and specific models. 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.’

The abstract information contained in adjectives such as ‘terrible’ and ‘delightful’ is thin gruel for the model-building brain.

Their wonder lies in the fact that they’re merely suggested. Like monsters in the most frightening horror stories, they feel all the more real for being the creations, not of the writer, but of our own incessant model-making imaginations.

When we’re reading, hearing or watching a story we deploy our theory-of-mind skills by automatically making hallucinatory models of the minds of its characters.

well-imagined characters always have theories about the minds of other characters and – because this is drama – those theories will often be wrong. This wrongness will lead to unexpected consequences and yet more drama. The influential post-war director Alexander Mackendrick writes, ‘I start by asking: What does A think B is thinking about A? It sounds complicated (and it is) but this is the very essence of giving some density to a character and, in turn, a scene.’

we’re more likely to attend to that which we find meaningful.

Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain. We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order to help us feel in control, brains radically simplify the world with narrative.

Cause and effect is a fundamental of how we understand the world. The brain can’t help but make cause and effect connections. It’s automatic.

Brains struggle with ‘and then’. When one thing happens over here, and then we’re with a woman in a car park who’s just witnessed a stabbing, and then there’s a rat in Mothercare in 1977, and then there’s an old man singing sea shanties in a haunted pear orchard, the writer is asking a lot of people.

Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. They’re not so much about events that take place on the surface of the drama as they are about the characters that have to battle them. Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws.

The controlled hallucination inside the silent, black vault of our skulls that we experience as reality is warped by faulty information. But because this distorted reality is the only reality we know, we just can’t see where it’s gone wrong.

At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way. The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them. As the story gives us hints and clues about the causes of their errors, we’ll warm to their vulnerability and become emotionally engaged in their struggle. When the dramatic events of the plot coax them to change we’ll root for them.

Our flaws form part of our perception, our experience of reality. This makes them largely invisible to us.

Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing.

The insidious thing about your biases, errors and prejudices is that they appear as real to you as Mr B’s delusions appear to him. It feels as if everyone else is ‘biased’ and it’s only you that sees reality as it actually is. Psychologists call this ‘naive realism’.

Taken in sum, the vastly intricate web of beliefs can be seen as the brain’s ‘theory of control’. It’s this theory of control that’s often challenged at the story’s start.

Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we’ll ever really come to escape.

Human environments are rich with clues about those who occupy them. People make ‘identity claims’ to broadcast who they are. This could be through displaying certificates, books, tattoos or meaningful objects. Identity claims betray how these people want others to think of them.

Behavioural residue’ is what psychologists call the things we accidentally leave behind: the stashed wine bottle, the torn-up manuscript, the punch dent in the wall. The psychologist Professor Sam Gosling advises the curious to ‘look out for discrepancies in the signals that people send to themselves and others’. Broadcasting one version of self in their private spaces and another in their hallways, kitchens and offices can hint at a tortuous ‘fractionating of the self’.

Far better to find ourselves waking up, on page one, startled and exhilarated to find ourselves inside a mind and a life that feels flawed, fascinating, specific and real.

As in life, everything we encounter is a component not of objective external reality, but of that character’s inner neural realm – the controlled hallucination that, no matter how real it seems, exists only in their head and is, in its own way, wrong. In fiction, it might not be going too far to say all description works as a description of character.

culture is actually built deeply and directly into our model of the world. It forms part of the neural machinery that constructs our hallucination of reality. Culture distorts and narrows the lens through which we experience life, exerting a potent influence on us, whether by dictating the moral rules we’ll fight and die to defend or defining the kinds of foods we’ll perceive as delicious.

What these forms reflect is the different ways our cultures understand change. For Westerners, reality is made up of individual pieces and parts. When threatening unexpected change strikes, we tend to reimpose control by going to war with those pieces and parts and trying to tame them. For Easterners, reality is a field of interconnected forces. When threatening unexpected change strikes, they’re more likely to reimpose control by attempting to understand how to bring those turbulent forces back into harmony so that they can all exist together. What they have in common is story’s deepest purpose. They are lessons in control.

Now that the flawed self with its flawed model of the world has been constructed, the brain starts to protect it.

Instead of the internal structures being shaped by the environment, the individual now acts to preserve established structures in the face of environmental challenges, and finds changes in structure difficult and painful.’

The rational response, when encountering someone with alien ideas, would be to either attempt to understand them or shrug. And yet we become distressed.

The person with merely differing views becomes a dangerous antagonist, a force that’s actively attempting to harm us.

We organise much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls.

The beliefs we’ll fight to defend are the ones which we’ve formed our identity, values and theory of control around. An attack on these ideas is an attack on the very structure of reality as we experience it. It’s these kinds of beliefs, and these kinds of attacks, that drive some of our greatest stories.

because of the power of naive realism. Because our hallucination of reality seems self-evident, the only conclusion we can come to is that our antagonist, by claiming to see it differently, is insane, lying or evil. And that’s exactly what they think of us.

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.

We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds. To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true. Among the most powerful of these beliefs are the ones that serve to bolster our sense of our moral superiority. Our brains are hero-makers that emit seductive lies. They want to make us feel like the plucky, brave protagonist in the story of our own lives.

We rewrite and even invent our own pasts.

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 are catastrophically opposed. These are neural worlds that become locked in a fight to the death.

This division of the world into opposing forces of plucky David and almighty Goliath seems a signature manoeuvre of the hero-making brain. The broad narrative it tells of the world is that we’re moral actors, struggling against great, Goliathine odds for the good of our lives and perhaps the world. This is a story that gives our lives meaning. It pulls our eyes from the terrible void above and forces them into the urgent now.

It’s easy to think that a story’s surface events – its twists, chases, explosions – are its point. Because we’re experiencing it through the eyes of the characters, we, like them, can become distracted by the drama of these thrilling changeful episodes.

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. They’ll usually only do so by stretching who they are, by trying something new, by making a some unprecedented effort – by changing.

Meaning is created by just the right change-event happening to just the right person at just the right moment.

No matter how bedazzling the events of a plot might be, all story is ultimately about character.

A character’s struggle, as we’ve discovered it so far, has been between themselves and the external world. They inhabit a model of the world, inside their skulls, that they experience as reality. Because that model is flawed, their ability to control the real, external world is harmed. When chaos strikes, their model will begin to break down. They’ll slowly lose control and this will bring them into further dramatic conflict with the people and events around them. But all this is complicated by the fact that characters in story aren’t only at war with the outside world. They’re also at war with themselves. A protagonist is engaged in a battle fought largely in the strange cellars of their own subconscious mind. At stake is the answer to the fundamental question that drives all drama: who am I?

Where the question is absent, and the events of drama move out of its narrative beam, they risk becoming detached – perhaps even bored.

Flawed characters, in life and story, are often badly led astray by this inner voice, which is generated by word and speech-making circuitry that is mostly located in the brain’s left hemisphere. This voice is not to be trusted.

The narrator can’t be trusted because it has no direct access to the truth of who we really are.