NotitiesThe Science of Storytelling
Will Storr
Dit boek, "The Science of Storytelling", onderzoekt hoe verhalen de menselijke ervaring vormen en benadrukt het belang van verandering en nieuwsgierigheid in verhalen. Het stelt dat sterke verhalen voortkomen uit karakterontwikkeling in plaats van alleen plotstructuur, en benadrukt de rol van het brein bij het creëren van narratieve modellen van de werkelijkheid.
It’s story that makes us human. (Page 9)
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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. (Page 10)
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Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. (Page 10)
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Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it. (Page 10)
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For me, the problem with the traditional approach is that it’s led to a preoccupation with structure. (Page 12)
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I believe the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. 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, weep and ram our heads into the sofa cushion. The surface events of the plot are crucial, of course, and structure ought to be present, functional and disciplined. But it’s only there to support its cast. (Page 12)
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Knowing why the rules are the rules means we know how to break them intelligently and successfully. (Page 13)
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I believe that compelling and unique plots are more likely to emerge from character than from a bullet-pointed list. And the best way to create characters that are rich and true and full of narrative surprise is to find out how characters operate in real life–and that means turning to science. (Page 13)
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raw biographical data have little meaning to the storytelling brain. (Page 16)
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Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And that’s how they continue too. (Page 16)
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Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. (Page 16)
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In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity. (Page 16)
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Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control. (Page 17)
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Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. (Page 17)
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This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers. Those who’ve tried to unravel the secrets of story have long known about the significance of change. Aristotle argued that ‘peripeteia’, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John Yorke has written that ‘the image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.’ (Page 17)
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These openers create curiosity by describing specific moments of change. But they also hint darkly at troubling change to come. (Page 18)
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But, every now and then, that change matters. It forces us to act. This is when story begins. (Page 20)
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Unexpected change isn’t the only way to arouse curiosity. As part of their mission to control the world, brains need to properly understand it. (Page 20)
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Brains, concluded the researchers, seem to become spontaneously curious when presented with an ‘information set’ they realise is incomplete. ‘There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,’ wrote Loewenstein, ‘even for questions of no importance.’ (Page 21)
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The place of maximum curiosity–the zone in which storytellers play–is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure. (Page 22)
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In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity 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’. (Page 22)
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Abrams has described his controlling theory of storytelling as consisting of the opening of ‘mystery boxes’. Mystery, he’s said, ‘is the catalyst for imagination (Page 23)
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The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain. (Page 24)
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Note: Reality
This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it. (Page 24)
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‘Consider that whole beautiful world around you, with all its colours and sounds and smells and textures,’ writes the neuroscientist and fiction writer Professor David Eagleman. ‘Your brain is not directly experiencing any of that. Instead, your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull.’ (Page 24)
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There’s a surprising limit to how much our brains can actually process. Pass that limit and the object is simply edited out. It’s not included in our hallucinated reality. (Page 26)
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‘Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive,’ the cognitive scientist Professor Donald Hoffman has said. ‘But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.’ (Page 27)
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Our brain rebuilds the model world that was originally imagined by the author of the story. This is the reality of Leo Tolstoy’s brilliant assertion that ‘a real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.’ (Page 29)
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The revelation that we experience the stories we read by building hallucinated models of them in our heads makes sense of many of the rules of grammar we were taught at school. For the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen, grammar acts like a film director, telling the brain what to model and when. He writes that grammar ‘appears to modulate what part of an evoked simulation someone is invited to focus on, the grain of detail with which the simulation is performed, or what perspective to perform that simulation from’. According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters. This is perhaps why transitive construction–Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad–is more effective than the ditransitive–Jane gave her Dad a kitten. Picturing Jane, then the Kitten, then her Dad mimics the real-world action that we, as readers, should be modelling. (Page 29)
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Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence. (Page 30)
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Markeren(Geel) - 1.3 The model-making brain; how we read; grammar; filmic word order; simplicity; active versus passive language; specific detail; show-not-tell > Pagina 30 · Locatie 421 (Page 30)
Active grammar means readers model the scene on the page in the same way that they’d model it if it happened in front of them. It makes for easier and more immersive reading. (Page 30)
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A further powerful tool for the model-creating storyteller is the use of specific detail. If writers want their readers to properly model their story-worlds they should take the trouble to describe them as precisely as possible. Precise and specific description makes for precise and specific models. (Page 30)
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The findings Bergen describes also suggest the reason writers are continually encouraged to ‘show not tell’. As C. S. Lewis implored a young writer in 1956, ‘instead of telling us a thing was “terrible”, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. (Page 30)
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In order to experience a character’s terror or delight or rage or panic or sorrow, it has to make a model of it. (Page 31)
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All it takes is deployment of specific detail, with the sensory information (‘ a cabbagey’) paired to visual information (‘ brown sock’). (Page 31)
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Simply naming a planet, ancient war or obscure technical detail seems to trigger the neural process of building it, as if it actually exists. (Page 32)
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In Star Wars, when Han Solo boasts that his ship the Millennium Falcon ‘made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs’ we have the strange experience of knowing it’s an actor doing gibberish whilst simultaneously somehow feeling as if it’s real. The line works because of its absolute specificity and its adherence to what sounds like truth (the ‘Kessel Run’ really could be a race while ‘parsecs’ are a genuine measurement of distance, equivalent to 3.26 light years). As ridiculous as some of this language actually is, rather than taking us out of the storyteller’s fictional hallucination, it manages to give it even more density. (Page 32)
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Our hyper-social brains are designed to control an environment of other selves. (Page 33)
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We’re wired to be fascinated by others and get valuable information from their faces. (Page 35)
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Just as the brain models the outside world it also builds models of minds. This skill, which is an essential weapon in our social armoury, is known as ‘theory of mind’. It enables us to imagine what others are thinking, feeling and plotting, even when they’re not present. We can experience the world from another’s perspective. (Page 36)
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Our errors about what others are thinking are a major cause of human drama. (Page 37)
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The influential post-war director Alexander Mackendrick writes, ‘I start by asking: What does A think B is thinking about A? It sounds complicated (and it is) but this is the very essence of giving some density to a character and, in turn, a scene.’ (Page 38)
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As the eye darts about, building up its story world for you to live inside, the brain’s choosy about where it tells it to look. We’re attracted to change, of course, but also to other salient details. Scientists used to believe attention was drawn simply to objects that stood out, but recent research suggests we’re more likely to attend to that which we find meaningful. (Page 38)
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That hallucinatory neural model of the world we live inside is made up of smaller, individual models–we have neural models of park benches, dinosaurs, ISIS, ice cream, models of everything–and each of those is packed with associations from our own personal histories. (Page 40)
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A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. (Page 41)
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Analyses of language reveal the extraordinary fact that we use around one metaphor for every ten seconds of speech or written word. (Page 42)
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‘The more familiar the expression, the less it activated the motor system,’ writes the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen. (Page 45)
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Estimates vary, but it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits of information at any given moment, but makes us consciously aware of no more than forty. (Page 46)
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Human memory is ‘episodic’ (we tend to experience our messy pasts as a highly simplified sequences of causes and effects) and ‘autobiographical’ (those connected episodes are imbued with personal and moral meaning). (Page 47)
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When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. (Page 48)
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As Kahneman’s test shows, the brain makes cause and effect connections even where there are none. (Page 49)
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Cause and effect is the natural language of the brain. It’s how it understands and explains the world. Compelling stories are structured as chains of causes and effects. A secret of bestselling page-turners and blockbusting scripts is their relentless adherence to forward motion, one thing leading directly to another. (Page 49)
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In 2005, the Pulitzer prizewinning playwright David Mamet was captaining a TV drama called The Unit. After becoming frustrated with his writers producing scenes with no cause and effect–that were, for instance, simply there to deliver expository information–he sent out an angry ALL CAPS memo, which leaked online (I’ve de-capped what follows to save your ears): ‘Any scene which does not both advance the plot and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous or incorrectly written,’ he wrote. ‘Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.’ (Page 50)
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An essential difference between commercial and literary storytelling is its use of cause and effect. Change in mass-market story is quick and clear and easily understandable, while in high literature it’s often slow and ambiguous and demands plenty of work from the reader, who has to ponder and de-code the connections for themself. (Page 50)
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While it’s dangerous to leave readers feeling confused and abandoned, it’s just as risky to over-explain. Causes and effects should be shown rather than told; suggested rather than explained. (Page 51)
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Only by the reader insinuating themselves into a work can it create a resonance that has the power to shake them as only art can. (Page 51)
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So our mystery is solved. We’ve discovered where a story begins: with a moment of unexpected change, or with the opening of an information gap, or likely both. As it happens to a protagonist, it happens to the reader or viewer. (Page 51)
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Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. (Page 53)
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Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws. (Page 53)
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These distortions in our cognition make us flawed. Everyone is flawed in their own interesting and individual ways. Our flaws make us who we are, helping to define our character. But our flaws also impair our ability to control the world. They harm us. At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way. The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them. We’ll warm to their vulnerability. We’ll become emotionally engaged in their struggle. When the dramatic events of the plot coax them to change we’ll root for them. The problem is, in fiction and in life, changing who we are is hard. (Page 55)
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Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. (Page 56)
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People accuse us of being ‘in denial’. Of course we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws at all, but as virtues. (Page 56)
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The mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a common plot moment in which protagonists ‘refuse the call’ of the story. This is often why. Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing. We’ll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those who manage it ‘heroes’. (Page 56)
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The insidious thing about your biases, errors and prejudices is that they appear as real to you as Mr B’s delusions appear to him. It feels as if everyone else is ‘biased’ and it’s only you that sees reality as it actually is. Psychologists call this ‘naive realism’. (Page 57)
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The characters we meet at the start of story are, like most of us, living just like this–in a state of profound naivety about how partial and warped their hallucination of reality has become. They’re wrong. They don’t know they’re wrong. But they’re about to find out (Page 58)
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Note: Theory of control
Taken in sum, the vastly intricate web of beliefs can be seen as the brain’s ‘theory of control’. It’s this theory of control that’s often challenged at the story’s start. (Page 58)
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It’s characters like Stevens, who inhabit their flaw with such concentrated precision, that often prove to be the most memorable, immediate and compelling. (Page 59)
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For us hyper-social domesticated creatures, there’s little more fascinating than the cause and effect of other people, the ‘why’ of what people do as they do. (Page 60)
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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 high in neuroticism means you’re 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. Psychologists have applied these domains to fictional characters. 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): Alexei Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky) Agreeableness (low): Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë) Conscientiousness (high): Antigone (Antigone, Sophocles) Conscientiousness (low): Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole) (Page 61)
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These ‘big five’ personality traits aren’t switches–we’re not one thing or the other. Rather, they’re dials, with us having more or less of each trait, our particular highs and lows combining to form our own peculiar self. Personality has a powerful influence over our theory of control. Different personalities have different go-to tactics for controlling the environment of people. (Page 62)
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Storytellers can show the personality of their characters in almost everything they do: it’s in their thoughts, dialogue, social behaviours, memories, desires and sadnesses. (Page 64)
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‘Human personalities are rather like fractals,’ writes the psychologist Professor Daniel Nettle. ‘It is not just that what we do in the large-scale narratives of our lives–love, career, friendships–tends to be somewhat consistent over time, with us often repeating the same kinds of triumph or mistakes. Rather, what we do in tiny interactions like the way we shop, dress or talk to a stranger on the train or decorate our houses, shows the same kinds of patterns as can be observed from examining a whole life.’ (Page 64)
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Human environments are rich with clues about those who occupy them. People make ‘identity claims’ to broadcast who they are. (Page 64)
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‘Behavioural residue’ is what psychologists call the things we accidentally leave behind: the stashed wine bottle, the torn-up manuscript, the punch dent in the wall. The psychologist Professor Sam Gosling advises the curious to ‘look out for discrepancies in the signals that people send to themselves and others’. Broadcasting one version of self in their private spaces and another in their hallways, kitchens and offices can hint at a tortuous ‘fractionating of the self’. (Page 65)
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The protagonist’s point of view orients us in the story. It’s a map of clues, full of hints about its owner’s flaws and the plot they’re going to create. For me, it’s the single most underrated quality of fiction writing. Too many books and films begin with characters that seem to be mere outlines: perfect, innocent human-shaped nothings, perhaps with a bolt-on quirk or two, waiting to be coloured in by the events of the plot. (Page 67)
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In most of the best contemporary fiction, objects and events aren’t usually described from a God-like view, but from the unique perspective of the character. (Page 68)
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One study into the backgrounds of sociopathic murderers found no connection between them apart from an extreme lack of play, or a history of abnormal play such as sadism and bullying, in the childhoods of 90 per cent of them. (Page 70)
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Stories weren’t like this in Ancient China. This was a realm so other-focused there was practically no real autobiography for two thousand years. When it did finally emerge, life stories were typically told stripped of the subject’s voice and opinions and they were positioned not at the centre of their own lives but as a bystander looking in. Rather than following a straightforward pattern of cause and effect, Eastern fiction often took the form of Ryu–nosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In A Bamboo Grove’, in which the events surrounding a murder are recounted from the perspectives of several witnesses–a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman, an elderly woman, the accused murderer, the victim’s wife, and finally from a spirit medium channelling the victim himself. All these accounts somehow contradict each other, with the reader left to puzzle out their meaning for themselves. In such stories, according to the psychologist Professor Uichol Kim, ‘you’re never given the answer. There’s no closure. There’s no happily ever after. You’re left with a question that you have to decide for yourself. (Page 72)
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The Japanese form known as Kishõtenketsu comes with four acts: in act one (‘ ki’) we’re introduced to the characters, in act two (‘ sho’) the actions follow on, in act three (‘ ten’) a twist that’s surprising or even apparently unconnected takes place and in the final act (‘ ketsu’) we’re invited, in some open-ended way, to search for the harmony between it all. (Page 72)
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