The science of storytelling by Will Storr

[Wonderful book to understand why we like stories and good for who wants to write stories]

‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. 

Or what’s a heaven for’ by Robert Browning.

Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And that’s how they continue too. Almost all perception is based on the detection of change says the neuroscientist Prof Sophie Scott. Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect. When it detects a change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.

Storytellers create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and by extension their readers and viewers. Aristotle argues that ‘peripeteia’ a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in the drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John York has written that ‘ the image every TV director in fact or fiction always look for is the close up of the human face as it registers the change. 

The human brain seems to become spontaneously curious when presented with an ‘information set’ they realize is incomplete. In his paper, ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’ Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiously in humans: 

1. The ‘posing’ of a question or presentation of a puzzle

2. ‘Exposure’ to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution

3. The violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation

4. Knowledge of possession of information by someone else. 

There is no color out there. Atoms are colorless. All the colors we do see are a blend of three cones that sit in the eye: red, green, and blue. Some birds have 6 cones, mantis shrimp have 17, bees can see the electromagnetic structure of the sky. Even the colors we do see are mediated by culture. Russians are raised to see two types of blue and as a result, they see 8 striped rainbows.

One study concluded that to make vivid scenes, three specific qualities of an object should be described with the researcher's example including ‘a dark blue carpet’, and ‘an orange striped pencil’. Writers are continually encouraged to show not tell/ Instead of telling us a thing was terrible, describes it so that we will be terrified. Don’t say it was delightful, make us say  ‘delightful’ when we have read the description.

Psychologists measure personality across five domains, which can be useful for writers doing character work to know. Those high in extraversion are gregarious and assertive, seekers of attention and sensation. Being in neuroticism means you are anxious, self-conscious, and prone to depression, anger, and low self-esteem. Lots of openness makes for a curious soul, someone artistic, emotional, and comfortable with novelty. High agreeable people are modest, sympathetic, and trusting while their disagreeable opposites have a competitive and aggressive bent. Conscientious people prefer order and discipline and value hard work, duty, and hierarchy.  One academic paper included the following examples:

Neuroticism (high): Miss Havisham (Great expectations, Charles Dickens)

Neuroticism (low): James Bond (Casino Royale, Ian Fleming)

Extraversion (high): The Wife of Bath ( The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer)

Extraversion (low): Boo Radley (To kill a mockingbird, Harper Lee)

Openness (high): Lisa Simpson(The Simpsons, Matt Groening)

Openness(low): Tom Buchanan (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Agreeableness(high): Alexi Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

Agreeableness (low): Heathclidd (Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte)

Conscientiousness (high): Antigone (Antigone Sophocles)

Conscientiousness (low): Ignatius, J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole)

Researchers have found that violence and cruelty have four general causes: greed & ambition; sadism; high-esteem and moral idealism. 

We still have primitive cognition. We think in tribal stories. It's our original sin. Whenever we sense the status of our tribe is threatened by another, these foul networks fire up. At that moment. To the subconscious brain, we are back in the prehistoric forest of savannah. The storytelling brain enters a state of war. It assigns the opposing group purely selfish motives. 

When a group’s collective status feels threatened and they fear even the possibility of humiliation by another group, the result can be a massacre, crusade, and genocide. In such times, tribes deploy the explosive power of the story, with all its moral outrage and status play, in order to galvanize and motivate their memes against the enemy. In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation presented African Americans as unintelligent brutes who sexually bullied white women. The 3-hour long story played to sold-out crowds and recruited thousands to the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1940, the film Jew Suss portrayed Ezra’s descendants as corrupt and showed a high-status Jewish banker, Suss Oppenheimer, raping a blonde German woman, before being hanged in front of grateful crowds in an iron cage. It premiered at the Venice Film festival, where it won plaudits, was seen by 20 million, and caused viewers to pour en masse into the streets of Berlin chanting “Throw the last of the Jews out of Germany”. 

Stanford University’s literary lab, whose algorithm was set to work on 20K novels and taught itself to predict the New York Times bestseller with an accuracy of 80%. The most frequently occurring and important theme of bestsellers was ‘human closeness and human connection’, an apposite interest for a hyper-social species. 

In archetypal storytelling, esp. As it emerges in fairytales, myths, and Hollywood movies, this event often takes the form of some life-or-death challenge or fight in which the protagonist comes face to face with all the most dread. This occurrence on the surface is symbolic of what’s taking place in the second, subconscious layer of the story. Because the story event has been designed to strike at the core of this character’s identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest. 

The gift of a story is wisdom. For tens of thousands of years, stories have served to pass down lessons in how to live from one generation to another. The lessons of the story that we have no idea how wrong we are. Discovering the fragile parts of our neural models means listening to their cry. The consolation of the story is true. The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we are surrounded by people who are trying to control us. 

Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we are subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half-smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures, and torments. It is only in the story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it is not only us.

It is not only us who are broken; it is not only us who are conflicted; it is not only us who are confused; it is not only us who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets and feel possessed, at times, by hateful sleeves. It is not only us who are sacred. The magic of the story is its ability to connect the mind with the mind in a manner that’s unrivaled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone, in that dark none vault, after all.