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

by Will Storr

When the data scientist David Robinson analysed an enormous tranche of 112,000 plots including books, movies, television episodes and video games, his algorithm found one common story shape. Robinson described this as, ‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’

The historian Professor Lynn Hunt argues that the birth of the novel helped precipitate the invention of human rights. Prior to the eighteenth century, it was unusual for someone to think to empathise with a member of a different class, nationality or gender. God put us in our rightful place, and that was simply that. But then authors of popular tales such as Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–48) and Julie (1791) ‘encouraged a highly charged identification with the characters and, in doing so, enabled readers to empathise across class, sex and national lines’.