The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

The cure for the horror is story. Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them. What we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all. It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread.

I wanted to find out how intelligent people end up believing crazy things. The answer I found was that, if we’re psychologically healthy, our brain makes us feel as if we’re the moral heroes at the centre of the unfolding plots of our lives.

Storytellers engage a number of neural processes that evolved for a variety of reasons and are waiting to be played like instruments in an orchestra: moral outrage, unexpected change, status play, specificity, curiosity, and so on. By understanding them, we can more easily create stories that are gripping, profound, emotional and original.

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

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.

the fundamental question that drives all drama: who am I?

You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.’

Who is this person who behaves like this? The question then re-emerges every time the protagonist is challenged by another or compelled to make a choice.

If there’s a single secret to storytelling then I believe it’s this. Who is this person? Or, from the perspective of the character, Who am I? It’s the definition of drama. It is its electricity, its heartbeat, its fire.

It’s tying all the events together into a coherent tale that tells us who we are, why we’re doing what we’re doing and feeling what we’re feeling. It’s helping us feel in control of our thrilling neural show.

We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us. Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we’re in complete control of ourselves, but we’re not. We’re led to believe we really know who we are, but we don’t.

The problem of self-control, I’ve come to think, isn’t really one of willpower. It’s about being inhabited by many different people who have different goals and values, including one who’s determined to be healthy, and one who’s determined to be happy.

Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion.

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? Who do I need to be in order to make this right?

An approximate definition of Lawrence’s flaw would be something like vanity that manifests as rebellion.

Once again, the first layer of drama affects the second layer of subconscious. His theory of control – that you got what you wanted with vain rebelliousness – has been proven right. And so he becomes yet more vain and rebellious. He’s accepted into the tribe. In a deeply symbolic moment, Sherif Ali, the man who shot his guide, burns his western clothes and dresses him in ‘the robes of a Sherif’. When Lawrence leads the Arabs on a successful assault on the Turkish stronghold, his vanity soars even more. And yet, beneath the level of the surface drama, things have started cracking.

The pressure of the drama is beginning to crack Lawrence’s model of the world. Adherence to his theory of control might be leading him to great victories but it’s also causing him deep subconscious distress.

He’s a brilliant soldier, they say. He’s extraordinary. Precisely because of the nature of Lawrence’s flaw, their manipulations work. He returns to the desert more vain and rebellious than ever.

His beating is such that he’s forced to realise his theory of control was wrong. His most fundamental beliefs about who he was were mistaken, and catastrophically so.

We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.

While Lester wanted to be young again, what he’d needed was to mature and become truly powerful. In this touching and revelatory moment, as a better version of his self bubbles up from his subconscious, we realise that the answer to the dramatic question has suddenly flipped to its opposite.

Psychologists define humiliation as the removal of any ability to claim status. Severe humiliation has been described as ‘an annihilation of the self’. It’s thought to be a uniquely toxic state and is implicated in some of worst behaviours the human animal engages in, from serial murder to honour killings to genocide. In story, an experience of humiliation is often the origin of the antagonist’s dark behaviour, whether it be murderous Cassius or Gone Girl’s scheming Amy Elliot Dunne,

The Epic of Gilgamesh, which pre-dates Ezra’s story by more than a thousand years and even lends it its episode about a worldwide flood, tells of a King who, like Shakespeare’s Lear, has forgotten that status should be earned. In its first section, the gods send down a challenger, Enkidu, to humble him. King Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends. Together they bravely take on the monster of the forest, Humbaba, using superhuman effort to slay him before triumphantly returning with valuable wood to continue building Gilgamesh’s great city. By the end of the saga, Enkidu has died, but King Gilgamesh is fully humbled, accepting his lot as just another mortal human. We think more of him and thereby reward him with a bump in status.

Late adolescence sees many choosing a political ideology, left or right – a tribal master-story that fits over our unconscious landscape of feelings and instincts and half-formed suspicions and makes sense of it, suddenly infusing us with a sense of clarity, mission, righteousness and relief. When this happens it can feel as if we’ve encountered revealed truth and our eyes have suddenly been opened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Tribal stories blind us. They allow us to see only half the truth, at best. The psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt has explored the stories that competing ideological tribes tell about the world. Take capitalism. For the left, it’s exploitative. The Industrial Revolution gave evil capitalists the technology to use and abuse workers as dumb machine-parts in their factories and mines and reap all the profits. The workers fought back, unionising and electing more enlightened politicians and then, in the 1980s, the capitalists became resurgent, heralding an era of ever-increasing inequality and eco-disaster. For the right, capitalism is liberation. It freed the used and abused workers from exploitation by kings and tyrants and gave them property rights, the rule of law and free markets, motivating them to work and create. And yet this great freedom is under constant attack from leftists who resent the idea that the most productive individuals are properly rewarded for their hard work.

Whenever we sense the status of our tribe is threatened by another, these foul networks fire up. In that moment, to the subconscious brain, we’re back in the prehistoric forest or savannah. The storytelling brain enters a state of war. It assigns the opposing group purely selfish motives. It hears their most powerful arguments in a particular mode of spiteful lawyerliness, seeking to misrepresent or discard what they have to say. It uses the most appalling transgressions of their very worst members as a brush to smear them all. It takes its individuals and erases their depth and diversity. It turns them into outlines; morphs their tribe into a herd of silhouettes.

The brain enters this war state because a psychological tribal threat is a threat to its theory of control – its intricate network of millions of beliefs about how one thing causes another. Its theory of control tells it, among many other things, how to get what it most desires, namely connection and status. It forms the scaffolding of the model of the world and self it has been building since birth.

Besides, if a hero starts out in such perfect selfless shape there’s going to be no tale to tell. For the story theorist Professor Bruno Bettelheim, the storyteller’s challenge isn’t so much one of arousing the reader’s moral respect for the protagonist, but their sympathy. In his inquiry into the psychology of fairy tales, he writes that ‘the child identifies with the good hero not because of his goodness, but because the hero’s condition makes a deep positive appeal to him.

Any attempt to find a single reason why we find characters root-worthy is probably destined to fail. There isn’t one secret to creating empathy but many. The key lies in the neural networks. Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways – all instruments by which masses of brains can be captivated and manipulated.

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.

We’re literally blind to that which the brain ignores. If it sends the eye to only the distressing elements around us, that’s all we’ll see. If it spins cause-and-effect tales of violence and threat and prejudice about actually harmless events, that’s what we’ll experience.

‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’

In order to encourage us to act, to struggle, to live, the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better. Assuming we’re mentally healthy, we’re pushed on into our plots by a delusional sense of optimism and destiny.

Little likes to tell his students, ‘We are our personal projects.’ His studies have found that, in order to bring us happiness, a project should be personally meaningful and we ought to have some level of control over it. When I asked him if a person pursuing one of these ‘core’ projects was a bit like an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution he said, ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’ Little isn’t the first to argue that the fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle tried to puzzle out the true nature of human happiness. Some posited a ‘hedonic’ form defined by pleasure and the satisfaction of short-term desires. But 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’. For Aristotle happiness was not a feeling but a practice. ‘It’s living in a way that fulfils our purpose,’ the classicist Professor Helen Morales said. ‘It’s flourishing. Aristotle was saying, “Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”’ Recent extraordinary evidence that humans are built to live according to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as a practice rather than a goal comes from the field of social genomics.

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 archetypal feminine traits of feeling and understanding.

They found stories tended towards six ‘emotional arcs’: Rags to Riches (characterised by rising emotion); Riches to Rags (tragedies, characterised by falling emotion); Man in a Hole (a fall then a rise); Icarus (a rise then a fall); Oedipus (fall, rise, fall). The most commercially successful emotional arcs, they found, were Icarus, Oedipus and ‘two sequential Man in a Holes’.

The job of the plot is to keep asking the dramatic question. It does this by repeatedly challenging and gradually breaking the protagonist’s model of who they are and how the world works. 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.

The psychologist and story theorist Professor Jordan Peterson talks of the mythic trope in which a hero makes final battle with a dragon that’s hoarding treasure. ‘You confront it in order to get what it has to offer you. The probability is that’s going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit. But you don’t get the gold without the dragon. That’s a very, very strange idea. But it seems to be accurate.’

Our craving for control explains why the endings of archetypal stories are so deeply satisfying. In tragedies such as Lolita, the protagonist answers the dramatic question by deciding not to become someone better. Rather than discovering and fixing their flaws they embrace them yet further. This causes them to enter a catastrophic spiral of model-defending behaviour that loosens their control over the external world more and more, leading to inevitable humiliation, ostracisation or death. Such an ending transmits the profoundly comforting signal, to the reader, that divine justice truly exists and is inescapable, and that there’s control in the chaos after all.

The psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister writes that ‘life is change that yearns for stability’. Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It’s a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is a thrill-ride of control.

‘Follow the sacredness. Find out what people believe to be sacred, and when you look around there you will find rampant irrationality.’

Additionally, these were tragic plots, so the development of the flaw, rather than the process of it being healed, took centre stage in their stories. If we’re aiming for a happier ending we’re more likely to meet someone more overtly flawed on page one, and then root for them as they slowly work out who to become in order to heal.

Our job, then, is to find the sacred flaw in our protagonist. Once we’ve found it, we need to build a life and a self around this person. We need to work out what effect this flaw has had on them. What ramifications has it had for their family life, their romantic life and their working life? What benefits has adherence to this flaw brought them? And what costs? By doing so, an entire world can be conjured around this tiny flaw. This will be the world of our story.

Place your character in a position in which they’re being challenged by authority over a decision they’ve made on the basis of their flaw – and that has got them into trouble. It could be a police officer. It could be a teacher. It could be a romantic partner (as long as they’re sufficiently aggressive in arguing back).

• It makes us believe we’re deserving of more status • It makes us believe we’re selfless, somehow, and that our enemies are selfish

for their theory of control. This is their brain’s overarching strategy for getting what they want out of the human world.

As odd as it might sound, even if your character has extremely low status and is even self-loathing, there will be a way in which their flaw makes them feel somehow better than other people. (If they simply think they’re worthless, and wrong about all their most precious beliefs, they’re probably not a vastly interesting character.)

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that many of the most memorable and popular characters in film and literature – the ones that seem to burst, Scrooge-like, from the screen or page utterly alive and compelling – are the ones who seem the most possessed by their mistaken idea.

Do you want to adjust it, in light of how much better you know them? Remember, we’re looking for a moment of unexpected change that connects with their flawed theory of control. It should hit them directly where they’re most weird and vulnerable.

It’s because of this unusual response that reader and viewer will sense that something alchemical has happened and they’ve entered the realm of story.

The protagonist’s unusual response will take the form of an active behaviour. They’ll decide to deal with the ramifications of that change in a practical way. Because it’s triggered their flaw, their attempt will not just fail but will bring them even more chaos. (If you decide that they are in temporary denial of what’s happened to them, this denial should also somehow bring increased threat, or trigger another event that finally persuades them to act.)