Book Recommendation #4: The Science of Storytelling by Will Storen

Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

This week I am reading The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. t came highly recommended as one of the best books on storytelling, and it lived up to the hype.

Contrary to other books on storytelling, this one delves deep into human psychology. While researching another book, The Unpersuadable, Storr was also working on his first novel. Having struggled with fiction for years, he noticed something odd: some of the things story theorists were saying about narratives were strikingly similar to what the psychologists and neuroscientists he had been interviewing were saying about the brain and mind.

The storytellers and scientists had started from completely different places and had ended up discovering the same things.

Storr wondered if it might be possible to join the two fields and improve his own storytelling. This led him to start a science-based storytelling course for writers, which turned out to be unexpectedly successful.

The traditional approach to storytelling books is a preoccupation with structural recipes. Every writer is on the lookout for a perfect formula or plot structure to which every tale could be fitted. Storr’s approach is different. He believes plots can’t work in isolation; they should be centered on characters.

It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in.

It’s the plight of specific, flawed, and fascinating individuals that makes us cheer, cry, or ram our heads into cushions.

There are many things that attract and hold our attention. Good storytellers engage a number of neural processes—moral outrage, unexpected change, status play, specificity, curiosity, and so on—that play like an orchestra to create a symphony that evokes an emotional response from us.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

1. Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story.
   

2. We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor.’ Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips.
   

3. Nobody can agree which tree is the most photographed in the world. Some say it’s a Cypress in Monterey, California, others a Jeffry Pine in nearby Yosemite and others still a Willow in Lake Wanaka, New Zealand. Even if you’ve never seen them, you can probably guess what these trees look like. They stand alone in endless vistas of water, sky or rock. Millions of brains have been attracted to the hidden and half-hidden truths that emit from these solitary trees. They triggered something in the photographers’ subconscious which responded by giving their owners a pleasurable hit of feeling. Lonely, brave, relentless and beautiful, those who stop and snap are not taking pictures of trees, but of themselves.
   

4. As we move through the plots of our lives, we’re not only struggling against unruly, unpredictable and unhelpful versions of self. We’re also fighting to manage powerful drives that are wired deeply into us. These are the products of human evolution. Exposing these drives means travelling back tens of thousands of years, to the era in which we became a storytelling animal. The journey’s reward is the unburying of ancient yet critical lessons about story, not least the origin or purpose of the dramatic question.

5. There’s the second subconscious level in which characters are altered: Story analysts disagree on the nature of character change. Some say protagonists transform their essential character, others that they reveal some part that was previously hidden. Both positions have merit. When characters change, they’re forcing a better subconscious model of self into dominance, reinforcing the neural networks that conjure this self into being, so it more often wins the neural debates that ultimately control the character’s behaviour. In doing so the characters expand who they are, giving themselves greater elasticity around their core personality, which gives them a more varied collection of tools for controlling the world of humans.
   

6. For simplicity’s sake, our focus has been on the changeful journey of an individual protagonist. But, it hopefully hardly needs to be said that all the significant characters in story go through journeys of change, albeit possibly in ways subordinate to a protagonist. They’re all asked that subconscious question until the plot is done with them. They all keep changing. Those changes probably won’t be linear. They’ll move back and forth and up and down. But the change never stops. An immersive plot is a complex and beautiful symphony of change, because brains are obsessed by change.

Sighting examples from several novels (Emma, Mansfield Park), films (American Beauty, Another country, The Birth of A Nation), dramas (Breaking Bad, King Lear), Storr makes several observations to highlight elements of storytelling that have never been discussed before.

About Will Storr

Will Storr is a British author, journalist and former photographer. He has been a contributing editor at Esquire and GQ Australia. Besides The Science of Storytelling (which was a Sunday Times bestseller) Storr has written many books. Some of the famous ones are:

Will Storr versus The Supernatural, which an investigation into people who believe in ghosts. It included a behind-the-scenes exposé of the British television show Most Haunted and an interview with Vatican’s chief exorcist.

The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, an investigation into irrational beliefs. Why do obviously intelligent people believe things in spite of the evidence against them?

The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone, an adult fairy tale set in a Michelin starred kitchen in 1980s London.

The Status Game which is about Storr’s theory about the hidden structure of social life, focusing on the need for social status and its effects on individual human life and society.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-obsessed and What It's Doing to Us, a thesis on the Western ‘self,’ where Storr discusses the rise of social media and its harmful effects, taking the readers on a “terrific tour through the history of self-obsession.”

If you’re a fiction writer or aspiring to write fiction and don’t want to be limited by plots and structures, then this book is a must-read.

I recommend buying the audiobook along with the Kindle version because listening and reading (either side by side or separately) will reinforce the learning.

P.S.: This post contains affiliate links.

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