Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (4 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
IN THE SECOND IT TAKES YOU
to read this sentence, your senses are showering you with over 11,000,000 pieces of information. Your conscious mind is capable of registering about forty of them. And when it comes to actually paying attention? On a good day, you can process seven bits of data at a time. On a bad day, five.
1
On one of
those
days? More like minus three.
And yet, you’re not only making your way in a complex world just fine, you’re preparing to write a story about someone navigating a world of your creation. So how important can any of those other 10,999,960 bits of information really be?
Very, as it turns out—which is why, although we don’t register them consciously, our brain is busy noting, analyzing, and deciding whether they’re something irrelevant (like the fact that the sky is still blue) or something we need to pay attention to (like the sound of a horn blaring as we meander across the street, lost in thought about the hunky guy who just moved in next door).
What’s your brain’s criterion for either leaving you in peace to daydream or demanding your immediate and total attention? It’s simple. Your brain, along with every other living organism down to the humble amoeba, has one main goal: survival. Your subconscious brain—which neuroscientists refer to as the
adaptive
or
cognitive unconscious
—is a finely tuned instrument, instantly aware of what matters, what doesn’t, why, and, hopefully, what you should do about it.
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It knows you don’t have the time to think, “Gee, what’s that loud noise? Oh, it’s a horn
honking; it must be coming from that great big SUV that’s barreling straight at me. The driver was probably texting and didn’t notice me until it was too late to stop. Maybe I should get out of the—”
Splat
.
And so, to keep us from ending up as road kill, our brain devised a method of sifting through and interpreting all that information much, much faster than our slowpoke conscious mind is capable of. Although for most other animals that sort of innate reflex is where evolution called it a day, thus relegating their reactions to what neuroscientists aptly refer to as
zombie systems
, we humans got a little something extra.
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Our brain developed a way to consciously navigate information so that, provided we have the time, we can decide on our own what to do next.
Story.
Here’s how neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sums it up: “The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable—in a word, of how to make it stick—was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution—storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly.… [I]t should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures.”
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We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us. Simply put, the brain constantly seeks meaning from all the input thrown at it, yanks out what’s important for our survival on a need-to-know basis, and tells us a story about it, based on what it knows of our past experience with it, how we feel about it, and how it might affect us. Rather than recording everything on a first come, first served basis, our brain casts us as “the protagonist” and then edits our experience with cinema-like precision, creating logical interrelations, mapping connections between memories, ideas, and events for future reference.
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Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters. Other people’s stories are as
important as the stories we tell ourselves. Because if all we ever had to go on was our own experience, we wouldn’t make it out of onesies.
Now for the really important question—what does all this mean for us writers? It means that we can now decode what the brain (aka the reader) is
really
looking for in every story, beginning with the two key concepts that underlie all the cognitive secrets in this book:
1. Neuroscientists believe the reason our already overloaded brain devotes so much precious time and space to allowing us to get lost in a story is that without stories, we’d be toast. Stories allow us to simulate intense experiences without actually having to live through them. This was a matter of life and death back in the Stone Age, when if you waited for experience to teach you that the rustling in the bushes was actually a lion looking for lunch, you’d end up the main course. It’s even more crucial now, because once we mastered the physical world, our brain evolved to tackle something far trickier: the social realm. Story evolved as a way to explore our own mind and the minds of others, as a sort of dress rehearsal for the future.
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As a result, story helps us survive not only in the life-and-death physical sense but also in a life-well-lived social sense. Renowned cognitive scientist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker explains our need for story this way:Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother? If my hapless older brother got no respect in the family, are there circumstances that might lead him to betray me? What’s the worst that could happen if I were seduced by a client while my wife and daughter were away for the
weekend? What’s the worst that could happen if I had an affair to spice up my boring life as the wife of a country doctor? How can I avoid a suicidal confrontation with raiders who want my land today without looking like a coward and thereby ceding it to them tomorrow? The answers are to be found in any bookstore or any video store. The cliché that life imitates art is true because the function of some kinds of art is for life to imitate it.
72. Not only do we crave story, but we have very specific hardwired expectations for every story we read, even though—and here’s the kicker—chances are next to nil that the average reader could tell you what those expectations are. If pressed, she’d be far more likely to refer to the magic of story, that certain
je ne sais quoi
that can’t be quantified. And who could blame her? The real answer is rather counterintuitive: our expectations have everything to do with the story’s ability to provide information on how we might safely navigate this earthly plane. To that end, we run them through our own very sophisticated subconscious sense of what a story is supposed to do: plunk someone with a clear goal into an increasingly difficult situation they then have to navigate. When a story meets our brain’s criteria, we relax and slip into the protagonist’s skin, eager to experience what his or her struggle feels like, without having to leave the comfort of home.
All this is incredibly useful for writers because it neatly defines what a story is—and what it’s not. In this chapter, that’s exactly what we’ll examine: the four elements that make up what a story is; what we, as readers, are wired to expect when we dive into the first page of a book and try it on for size; and why even the most lyrical, beautiful writing by itself is as inviting as a big bowl of wax fruit.
Is
a Story?
Contrary to what many people think, a story is not just something that happens. If that were true, we could all cancel the cable, lug our Barca-loungers onto the front lawn, and be utterly entertained, 24/7, just watching the world go by. It would be idyllic for about ten minutes. Then we’d be climbing the walls, if only there were walls on the front lawn.
A story isn’t simply something that happens
to
someone, either. If it were, we’d be utterly enthralled reading a stranger’s earnestly rendered, heartfelt journal chronicling every trip she took to the grocery store, ever—and we’re not.
A story isn’t even something
dramatic
that happens to someone. Would you stay up all night reading about how bloodthirsty Gladiator A chased cutthroat Gladiator B around a dusty old arena for two hundred pages? I’m thinking no.
So what
is
a story? A story is how what happens affects someone who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a difficult goal, and how he or she changes as a result. Breaking it down in the soothingly familiar parlance of the writing world, this translates to
“What happens” is the
plot
.
“Someone” is the
protagonist
.
The “goal” is what’s known as the
story question
.
And “how he or she changes” is
what the story itself is actually about
.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, a story is not about the plot or even what happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to
navigate
the plot. Thus story, as we’ll see throughout, is an internal journey, not an external one.
All the elements of a story are anchored in this very simple premise, and they work in unison to create what appears to the reader as reality, only sharper, clearer, and far more entertaining, because stories do what our cognitive unconscious does: filter out everything that would distract us from the situation at hand. In fact, stories do it better, because while in real life it’s nearly impossible to filter out all the annoying little interruptions—like leaky faucets, dithering bosses, and cranky spouses—a story can tune them out entirely as it focuses in on the task at hand:
What does your protagonist have to confront in order to solve the problem you’ve so cleverly set up for her?
And that problem is what the reader is going to be hunting for from the get-go, because it’s going to define everything that happens from the first sentence on.
Let’s face it, we’re all busy. Plus, most of us are plagued by that little voice in the back of our head constantly reminding us of what we really should be doing right now instead of whatever it is we’re actually doing—especially when we take time out to do something as seemingly nonproductive as, um, read a novel. Which means that in order to distract us from the relentless demands of our immediate surroundings, a story has to grab our attention fast.
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And, as neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer says, nothing focuses the mind like surprise.
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That means when we pick up a book, we’re jonesing for the feeling that something out of the ordinary is happening. We crave the notion that we’ve come in at a crucial juncture in someone’s life, and not a moment too soon. What intoxicates us is the hint that not only is trouble brewing, but it’s longstanding and about to reach critical mass. This means that from the first sentence we need to catch sight of the breadcrumb trail that will lure us deeper into the thicket. I’ve heard it said that fiction (all stories, for that matter) can
be summed up by a single sentence—All is not as it seems—which means that what we’re hoping for in that opening sentence is the sense that something is about to change (and not necessarily for the better).
Simply put, we are looking for a reason to care. So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on its way.
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This means that whether it’s an actual event unfolding or we meet the protagonist in the midst of an internal quandary or there’s merely a hint that something’s slightly “off” on the first page, there has to be a ball already in play. Not the preamble to the ball. Not all the stuff you have to know to really understand the ball. The ball itself. This is not to say the first ball must be the main ball—it can be the initial ball or even a starter ball. But on that first page, it has to feel like the only ball and it has to have our complete attention.