Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (29 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
10.
Do expose your characters’ flaws, demons, and insecurities
. Stories are about people who are uncomfortable, and as we know, nothing makes us more uncomfortable than change. Or, as Thomas Carlyle said, “By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.”
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This means that a story is often about watching someone’s house fall around their ears, beam by beam. After all, premises that begin, “I wonder what would happen if …” rarely postulate, “a happy, well-adjusted woman was contentedly married to a wonderful, happy man and had a great career and two equally happy, well-adjusted kids.” Why? Besides the fact that “perfection” is not actually possible (and thank god for that), things that are not falling apart are dull (unless, of course, it’s
your
house, in which case dull is good).
Thus it’s your job to dismantle all the places where your protagonist seeks sanctuary and to actively force him out into the cold. Writers tend to be softies, so when the going gets rough, they give their protagonist the benefit of the doubt. But a hero only becomes a hero by doing something heroic, which translates to rising to the occasion, against all odds, and
confronting one’s own inner demons in the process
. It’s up to you to keep your protagonist on track by making sure each external twist brings him face to face with something about himself that he’d probably rather not see.11.
Do expose
your
demons
. There’s another, trickier reason writers sometimes shield their protagonists and let them duck the really thorny questions. Rather than protecting the protagonist, sometimes it’s the
writer
who’s uncomfortable with the issue the protagonist faces. By allowing the protagonist to sidestep it, the writer, too, gets to avoid it. Because just as you “out” your characters, so will they out you. After all, if you make them do things propriety frowns on, you’re revealing that you’re no stranger to the uncivilized side of life yourself—that is, all those things we do and think when we’re pretty sure no one else is looking. This, of course, is precisely what the reader comes for. We all know what polite society looks like—no one needs to explain it to us; we get it. But beneath our very together, confident public persona, most of us are pretty much raging messes. Story tends to be about the raging mess inside, the one we struggle to keep under wraps as we valiantly try to make sense of our world. This is often the arena the
real
story unfolds in, and what causes the reader to marvel in relieved recognition,
Me too! I thought I was the only one!
And so, to both the writer
and
the protagonist, Plutarch offers this sage advice: “It must needs be that those who aim at great deeds should also suffer greatly.”
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Often in public.
Or, to put it a bit more philosophically, there’s Jung: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
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CHAPTER 9
: CHECKPOINT
Has everything that can go wrong indeed gone wrong?
Don’t be nice, even a little bit. Throw social conventions out the window. Does your plot continually force your protagonist to rise to the occasion?
Have you exposed your protagonist’s deepest secrets and most guarded flaws?
No matter how embarrassing or painful the revelation, have you forced him to fess up? Have you obliged him to confront his demons? How can he possibly overcome them (or realize that they aren’t so bad after all) unless he’s forced to come to grips with them?
Does your protagonist earn everything she gets, and pay for everything she loses?
This is another way of saying that there must be a consequence to everything that happens. Ideally, it’s a consequence that forces your protagonist to take an action she’d really rather not.
Does everything your protagonist does to make the situation better actually make it worse?
Good! The worse things get for your protagonist, the better for your story. By making sure that things go from bad to worse, you will keep your story’s pacing on track as the tension—and the stakes—ratchet ever upward.
Is the force of opposition personified, present, and active?
It doesn’t always have to be a giant, raging gorilla or a gun-toting psychopath, but readers want someone (or something) to root against. This means that vague threats, generalized “evil,” or unspecified possible disastrous events don’t cut it. The danger needs to be specific—and wired to a rapidly ticking clock.
RED ABOVE THERE JOKES GRAVEL
,
instant might round most
. Hard to read, huh? It feels like a train wreck inside your skull. With each new word it further defies the linguistic pattern you innately expect, which means no extra dopamine for you; instead, your neurotransmitters give you less of it than normal, in an effort to express their—that is, your—displeasure.
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Your brain doesn’t like anything that appears random, and it will struggle mightily to impose order—whether it’s actually there or not. Take a starry, starry night, for instance. As Nobel laureate in physics Edward Purcell wrote to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “What interests me more in the random field of ‘stars’ is the overpowering impression of ‘features’ of one sort or another. It is hard to accept the fact that any perceived feature—be it string, clump, constellation, corridor, curved chain, lacuna—is a totally meaningless accident, having as its only cause the avidity for pattern of my eye and brain!”
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But one thing that isn’t random is our passion for patterns, even if we do get carried away sometimes and see the face of our beloved etched in the clouds. Searching for patterns is a habit that began long before indoor plumbing, refrigerators, and doors, when home consisted of a nice cave, with maybe a comfy pile of leaves to bed down on, and being able to predict what might happen next was often a matter of life and death. Since lions and tigers and bare cavemen—oh my!—could walk in unannounced anytime, day or night, the brain had to become expert at translating any and all data into patterns, allowing us to determine what that bump in the night might be. After all, unless we know
what the normal pattern is, how can we possibly detect something out of the ordinary? “The brain is a born cartographer,” says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.
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From the moment we leave the womb, it begins charting the patterns around us, always with the same agenda:
What’s safe, and what had I better keep my eye on?
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Stories are about the things we need to keep an eye on. They often begin the moment a pattern in the protagonist’s life stops working—which is good, because, as scholars Chip and Dan Heath note, “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”
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Can you see the fine print? In order to break a pattern, we need to know what the pattern is. And as far as the reader is concerned,
everything
is part of a pattern—and the thrill of reading is recognizing those patterns. What’s more, the reader assumes there is an interrelationship among all the facets of a story—that the patterns interlock in the same way ecosystems, borders, and jigsaw puzzles do. Yet this is the level of story that writers sometimes dismiss as mere plot, while toiling away making sure they’ve woven in a perfectly nuanced leitmotif based on water dripping and a big spatula. It’s kind of like piling frosting onto a cake you haven’t baked yet. Because, while readers may savor nuance, unless it illuminates and deepens a clear-cut pattern they’ve been following, it’s nothing more than fancy window dressing in a vacant house.
It should be pretty evident by now that readers are a very demanding lot. We have specific expectations (which we’re rarely consciously aware of), and our brain wants them met or we’re taking our ball and going home. One of our most hardwired expectations is that anything that reads like the beginning of a new pattern—that is, a setup—will, in fact,
be
a setup, with a corresponding payoff. What’s more, we have a voracious appetite for setups. We love them because they’re intoxicating; they stimulate our imagination, triggering one of our favorite sensations: anticipation. They invite us to figure out what
might
happen next, which leads to an even
better
sensation: the adrenaline-fueled rush of insight that comes from making connections ourselves.
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When we identify a setup, guess what will happen, and end up being right,
we feel smart. Setups seduce us with the granddaddy of all sensations: engagement. They make us feel involved and purposeful, like we’re part of something—and an insider to boot. Readers see setups as the writer’s way of talking in code. We know from the instant we spot one that it’s now our job to feverishly track the pattern leading to the payoff; we tackle it with abandon, relishing every moment, even when it keeps us reading long past our bedtime.
To make sure your stories have lots of tired but satisfied readers, in this chapter we’ll explore just what a setup is and how to make sure the road from setup to payoff is actually visible on the page. We’ll examine how unintended setups derail a story and take a look at simple setups that pay off big time.
So what exactly
is
a setup? It is just what the word implies. It’s something—a fact, an act, a person, an event—that implies future action. In its most basic form, a setup is a piece of information the reader needs well in advance of the payoff so the payoff will be believable. It can be something as simple as letting us know early on that James speaks Swahili, so when it turns out the instructions for diverting the meteor before it slams into downtown Des Moines are written in Swahili, we won’t groan when James announces he can read them. It also means that because readers won’t know the
real
reason you’re telling them about James’ bilingual prowess in chapter one, there needs to be a credible story reason for it to come up at that moment so it’s not a total giveaway, in neon, that you’re Trying to Tell Us Something. There’s a fine line between giving the reader a tantalizing bit of information that piques her imagination and clobbering her over the head with something so obvious there’s no suspense whatsoever. Arouse her suspicion, though, and she’ll love you for it.