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

by Will Storr

This is why I believe the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in. It’s the plight of specific, flawed and fascinating individuals that makes us cheer, weep and ram our heads into the sofa cushion.

Change is endlessly fascinating to brains.

Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.

While it’s dangerous to leave readers feeling confused and abandoned, it’s just as risky to over-explain. Causes and effects should be shown rather than told; suggested rather than explained. If they’re not, curiosity will be extinguished and readers and viewers will become bored.

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.

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

Throughout the plot, as the character confronts the fact that they’re failing to control the world, they’re gradually forced to readdress their deepest beliefs about how it works. Their precious theory of control comes under question. Beneath the level of consciousness, they’re compelled to repeatedly ask themselves that fundamental dramatic question: who am I?