Science and storytelling

 This week I’ve started reading Will Storr’s book The Science of Storytelling.  It’s a completely different way of looking at stories from the usual how-to approach.

He starts from the premise that the brain is fascinated by change.  That our senses don’t engage unless there’s change to detect.  And that change captures our attention because we turn our senses on it to work out what’s happening,

This leads into the idea of a story’s inciting incident.  An inciting incident is a change point in the world of the character.  It’s usually what jolts our main character out of their ordinary world and gets them involved in the world of our story.  But an inciting incident also hints at trouble ahead, more changes that the brain needs to pay attention to.

 We become curious when presented with incomplete information.  This is why crime books work.  We’re presented with a crime we know nothing about at the start, and our brains want to read on to piece together the clues and work out who did it.  

Storr says that psychology tests have confirmed “a positive relationship between curiosity and knowledge”.  In other words, the more we learn about a mystery, the more keen we become to solve it.  And this is exactly how the doling-out of clues in crime stories works.  Brain scans reveal that curiosity shows up as a kick in the brain’s reward system.  We actually have a craving to know the answer.

So how does this help the writer?  Storr quotes Professor George Loewenstein’s paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, in which he proposes four ways of getting readers hooked.  First - pose a question or a puzzle, which readers want to solve.  Second - expose your readers to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution.  (i.e., in a crime story, we expect the murderer to be identified and brought to justice, but at the start of the story we don’t know who that is).  Three - violate expectations, thus triggering a search for an explanation.  (This could be throwing red herrings into a story).  Four - knowing that someone else has the knowledge you need to solve the puzzle.  (In a crime story, someone knows who did it, but the reader doesn’t - yet.)

We can also play with the way we make sense of our world.  Storr says that our senses pick up clues about the world which are translated into millions of electrical signals which your brain reads.  But what our brain is constructing isn’t reality, it’s a “hallucination based on a reconstruction of reality” inside our heads.  So it’s easy to see how a storyteller can manipulate the world of a story by controlling the inputs a character receives, and thus manipulate the reader’s experience and expectations too.

I’m still working my way through the book, and I’m sure there’ll be many more discoveries to be made in the rest of the text.