Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (21 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
So if you want to write a novel that inspires people you’ve never even met to call their friends and say, “You
gotta
read this book,” you need to root through your story and make sure you’ve translated anything brain-numbingly vague, abstract, or generic into something that’s surprisingly specific, deliciously tangible, and grippingly visceral.
CHAPTER 6
: CHECKPOINT
Have you translated every “generic” into a “specific”?
This is another way of saying, “Do your job.” After all, you don’t want your reader filling in the blanks in ways you never intended.
Have the specifics gone missing in any of the usual places?
Are there places where the reason, rationale, reaction, memories, or possibilities that underlie your protagonist’s actions are invisible to the reader?
Can your reader see what, specifically, your metaphors correlate to in the “real world,” grasp their meaning, and picture them, when reading at a clip?
The last thing you want is for your reader to have to reread it three or four times—first to be able to picture it and then to figure out what the heck it means.
Do all the “sensory details”—that is, what something tastes, feels, or looks like—have an actual story reason to be there, beyond “just because”?
You want to be sure each sensory detail is strategically placed to give us insight into your characters, your story, and perhaps even your theme. And remember, scenery without subtext is a travelogue.
THE BRAIN DOESN’T LIKE CHANGE
. Would you, if you’d spent millions of years evolving with the sole goal of maintaining a constant, stable equilibrium? And the brain didn’t slack off after mastering mere physical survival, no sir; it turned its sights to making sure we had a nice comfortable sense of well-being to go along with it. Only then did the brain settle in for the long haul—unseen yet vigilant—ready to pounce on any possible imbalance, often before it hits our conscious radar.
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That
explains why the thought of switching barbers, taking a new route to work, or buying a different brand of toothpaste can feel disconcerting enough to keep us loyal to our old brand. After all, our teeth haven’t fallen out yet, so it must be working. Why rock the boat?
And as neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer points out in
How We Decide
, “Confidence is comforting. The lure of certainty is built into the brain at a very basic level.”
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In fact, it’s a big part of our sense of well-being. That is why, when questions arise that challenge our beliefs about, well, anything, we tend get a little cranky. Or as social psychologist Timothy D. Wilson says, “People are masterful spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information and go to great lengths to maintain a sense of well-being.”
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We don’t like change, and we don’t like conflict, either. So most of the time we do our best to avoid both. This isn’t easy, since the only
real constant
is
change, and change is driven by conflict.
This or that? Me or you? Chocolate or vanilla?
Sounds sort of bleak, doesn’t it?
But wait
, as they say on late night infomercials,
there’s more!
As anyone who’s ever fallen under the spell of a sparkly bauble, charming stranger, or cockeyed dream knows, there’s another side to this coin. The lure of the new, the novel—of that bright shiny thing hovering just out of range—is equally hardwired.
We evolved as risk takers, too. We had to. Without a sense of adventure, we wouldn’t have gone off in search of the wild prey that fed our growing brain, dared to scale the mountain range that led to the life-sustaining verdant valley below, or had the nerve to approach that charming stranger who then made life worth living.
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And there’s the paradox: we survived because we’re risk takers, but our goal is to stay safe by not changing an iota unless we absolutely have to. Talk about conflict! And that brings us right back to
story
. Story’s job is to tackle exactly how we handle that conflict, which boils down to this: the battle between fear and desire.
Thus it’s no wonder that from time immemorial conflict has been called the lifeblood of story. It’s something everyone tends to agree on, whether cranking out a mass market potboiler about killer spiders or penning an exquisitely rendered literary novel that turns on whether or not the protagonist sighs when the postal carrier at long last slips the much-anticipated ivory envelope through the tarnished brass mail slot. As a result, creating conflict seems delightfully clear, completely up front, embarrassingly obvious.
Well, I’m here to tell you not to believe that for a minute. Instead, my friends, consider conflict the original passive-aggressive devil. So in this chapter, in the hope of wrestling that devil to the mat, we’ll explore how to harness impending conflict to mounting suspense from the very first sentence; where the specific avenues of conflict and suspense are often found; and why holding back crucial information for a big reveal later ironically tends to ensure that readers will never get there.
When it comes to conflict, your reader—like the pasty-faced kid in
The Sixth Sense
—must be able to see things that aren’t there. In order for readers to sense that “all is not as it seems,” conflict must be palpable long before it rises to the surface. It’s the
potential
for conflict that gives urgency to everything that happens, underscoring even the most benign events with portent. Indeed, it ripples through the story in the guise of mounting tension, engendering in the reader that delicious dopamine-driven sensation we’re addicted to when it comes to a good tale: suspense, the desire to find out what’s really going on.
But when it comes to portraying conflict on the page, how we’re wired for real life tends to muck things up. “Since we are social creatures, a need to belong is as basic to our survival as our need for food and oxygen,” says neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak.
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It started a couple of hundred thousand years ago when it first dawned on us that, survival-wise, two heads are better than one, and a whole society, better yet! Thus a new human goal was born, one still championed by kindergarten teachers the world over: working well with others. This gave rise to a whole host of emotions—some pleasant and some decidedly not—to encourage us to get along. And for anyone with lingering doubts about the unequaled power of emotion, a recent study using magnetic resonance imaging revealed that intense social rejection activates the same areas in the brain that physical pain does.
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Our brain is making a point. Conflict hurts.
That’s probably why we try to defuse conflict as quickly as possible. We are made to understand at a very early age that we bring conflict into relationships at our own peril, and we are rewarded—by both society and the chemicals in our brain—for finding ways to nip it in the bud before it escalates. As the old song goes, the idea is to focus on the positive rather than the negative and—whatever you do—“don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”
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The thing is,
every
story tells the tale of Mr. In-Between. As in, between a rock and a hard place. Yet it’s so easy
to fall prey to our unconscious urge to steer clear of rocks and hard places and, in accordance with the golden rule, to never put anyone
else
in that position, either—including, unfortunately, our protagonist.
I’ll never forget working with an author who had written an eight-hundred-page manuscript, a novel about a guy named Bruno, chronicling his rise from poverty to ill-gotten riches as a ruthless Mafia don. Or make that, he
probably
would have been ruthless, but he was never given the chance. His loving wife never suspected he had a mistress, despite all the nights he spent “in town,” nor did his devoted mistress ever so much as threaten to Google his wife. Sure, occasionally there was the
possibility
of a little conflict. Bruno would be walking into an elaborate ambush replete with guns, knives, brass knuckles, and, in case all else failed, a car bomb. But just as he was reaching for the anthrax-coated doorknob, the rival thugs would get a call telling them everything had been resolved, so they’d yank the door open, give Bruno a bear hug, and then they’d all sit down for an espresso and some nice biscotti.
The author was a successful businessman who, at sixty-something, was still married to his childhood sweetheart and had several smart, well-adjusted kids. I asked him how he felt about conflict in his real life. He frowned. “I don’t like it,” he said, tensing. “Who does?”
The answer, of course, is no one (drama queens notwithstanding). That’s exactly why we turn to story—to experience all the things that in life we avoid, rationalize away, fear, or long to accomplish but for various and sundry reasons haven’t or can’t. We want to know what it would cost us emotionally, what it would really feel like, should we ever find ourselves, or someone we know, in a similar situation. It boils down to this: in real life we want conflict to resolve right now, this very minute; in a story we want conflict to drag out, ratcheting ever upward, for as deliciously long as humanly possible.
But wait!
I hear you asking:
If we’re wired to feel what the protagonist does, since conflict hurts, are you saying we’re masochists?
Not at all. In the same way that a vicarious thrill, being one crucial step removed, isn’t nearly as powerful as the real thing, neither is the pain we experience
when lost in a story. Sure, we’re literally
feeling
what the protagonist feels, but our trusty brain is also quite aware that what befalls the poor sap is not, in fact, literally
happening
to us. So, although we feel Juliet’s anguish on awaking to find Romeo lifeless by her side, we never once lose sight of the fact that our own beloved is, in fact, snoring peacefully in the theater seat next to us. And that, my friends, is what makes stories so deeply satisfying. We get to try on trouble, pretty much risk-free.