Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (15 page)

This is a clear case of the “why” changing the surface meaning of an event by 180 degrees (which is exactly the sort of info readers are hungry for). What motivated Tom’s outburst is the opposite of what, at first blush, it appeared to be. It wasn’t that Tom was angry at Lily for risking a headache; it was that he loved her so much, he couldn’t bear anything—including her own pain—that might take her away from him. Ironically, Lily
does
know Tom as well as she thought she did, but now she’s not so sure. She no longer knows how much her husband loves her, but we do. And so as she struggles with it over the course of the novel, we’re able to gauge her progress against what we know are Tom’s true feelings for her. This is possible only because we are aware of not only Lily’s agenda, but of Tom’s as well.

It is this kind of glimpse into someone else’s hopes and fears that makes stories so compelling—and so much more than mere entertainment. It’s
hard
to understand what other people want from us. It’s
hard
to know what we truly want for ourselves (well, besides another piece of that salted caramel chocolate). Stories not only give us much-needed practice in figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

WHEN I WAS FIVE
, I closed my eyes and thought really hard about whether I was now invisible. After all, I couldn’t see anything, so how could anyone see me?
Yes
, I concluded: I had indeed vanished. It made perfect sense, and it was thrilling to boot. I felt very smart. And why not? Being wrong feels exactly like being right, as journalist and self-proclaimed “wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz so brilliantly points out in her book
Being Wrong
. I spent days plotting how to walk blindfolded through the kitchen without bumping into anything, the better to secretly borrow a few cookies. That is, until I heard my mother asking what the heck I was doing with my hand in the cookie jar—which opened my eyes, both literally and figuratively.

Being wrong changes how we see—or don’t see—the world. And we’re wrong a lot, partly because in order to survive, we’re wired to draw conclusions about everything we see, whether or not we have all—or any—of the facts; and partly because, more often than not, it’s our cognitive unconscious that deftly constructs the implicit beliefs that then organize and rule our world.
¹
So while it may be cold comfort, being wrong usually isn’t our fault, at least not in the “you know damn well what you did” sense. Most times, we have no clue. According to neuropsychologist Justin Barrett, our implicit or “nonreflective” beliefs are our default mode, constantly working behind the scenes to shape memory and experience.
²

As a result, from the moment one of those erroneous implicit beliefs is formed—
everyone’s only in it for themselves, so the nicer
someone is, the more you know they’re out to con you
—we blithely misinterpret everything that happens to us.
Everyone here is so nice—I better watch my back
. And the scary thing is, we don’t even know we’re doing it until something happens that proves us wrong, and suddenly our implicit belief is catapulted into our conscious mind, where we have to either deal with it or work overtime to rationalize it away.
³

Stories often begin at just that moment, as one of the protagonist’s long-held beliefs is about to be called into question. Sometimes that belief is what stands between her and something she really wants. Sometimes it’s what’s keeping her from doing the right thing. Sometimes it’s what she has to confront to get out of a bad situation before it’s too late. But make no mistake, it’s her struggle with this “internal issue” that drives the story forward. In fact, the plot itself is cleverly constructed to systematically back her into a corner where she has no choice but to face it or fold up her tent and go home. The events relentlessly cajole and coax her to reexamine her past, which often looks—and feels—very different in retrospect. It’s the same way that in life the present continually prods us to reassess our autobiographical selves, and as a result, past “events acquire new emotional weights … [and] facts acquire new significance.”
⁴
Or as T. S. Eliot so aptly noted, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”
⁵

Which brings us to a trick question: when you’re writing a story, where
is
the best place to start? No, the answer isn’t
at the beginning, on page one
, or even,
sitting at my desk
. The best place to start working on a story is long before your poor unsuspecting protagonist shows up on page one. The best place to start is by pinpointing the moment long before, when she first fell prey to the inner issue that’s been skewing her worldview ever since.

That’s why in this chapter, we’ll tackle something writers often shy away from: the notion of getting to know their characters before they tell their story. To that end we’ll examine the very important pros and the
trivial cons of outlining (how’s that for a great example of editorializing?); why it’s important to write focused character biographies that, happily, often beget outlines on their own; and why an exhaustive character bio can be more damaging than not writing one at all. And then, lest we get lost in the conceptual, we’ll run though an example of just how it’s done.

Stories are about people dealing with problems they can’t avoid—sounds so elementary, doesn’t it? Why, then, do writers so often leap in without knowing what, exactly, the protagonist’s problem actually is? Often it’s because they’re hoping it’ll become clear if they just start writing. But if you don’t know what’s broke, how can you write a story about fixing it? Which is why the second most-frequent editorial note that writers get, right after, “Uh, what’s this story about, anyway?” is “Why now?” as in, why does the story start at
this
minute as opposed to yesterday, tomorrow, or when Aunt Bertha gets back from bingo?

Ironically, often the same writer who swears that it would crush her creativity to pause to outline or work out character bios will start the story at the exact spot in the protagonist’s past where, instead, she should be digging; that is, at the moment his worldview was knocked out of alignment, along with the inception of the desire it thus thwarts. What she doesn’t realize is that the story itself actually begins much later, when those two long-dormant opposites come to a head, giving the protagonist no choice but to take action. This concept is elegantly summed up by, ahem, the Oracle to Optimus Prime in the animated TV show
The Transformers: Beast Machines
: “The seeds of the future lie buried in the past.”
⁶

Does this mean you really have to outline your story first? Sure sounds like it. But like everything else, it’s relative. Let’s take a look at the arguments for and against.

Many very successful authors swear the only way they can write is to jump in cold on page one, armed with nothing but the vaguest notion of where they’re going. For them, the kick is to uncover the story as they write it. If they’ve already figured it out, the thrill is gone and the actual writing feels redundant.

For instance, there is the legendary (read: probably apocryphal) story of Edith Wharton who, after a manuscript she’d just completed was lost in a fire, told her editor that she couldn’t possibly rewrite it, because she already knew the ending. In this Robert Frost concurs: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
⁷
Ditto Robert B. Parker, who says he has no idea where the story is going when he starts writing.
⁸