Notes from The Science of Storytelling

Some people are natural storytellers. They immediately captivate their audience and pull them through laughter, anticipation, and joy.

Other people read books about storytelling. Spoiler alert! Here are my notes on everything I found interesting in The Science of Storytelling.

Many stories begin with unexpected change and then continue with that. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains.
Storytellers create moments of unexpected change that sees the attention of their protagonist and, by extension, their readers.
- Moments of unexpected change can create curiosity, for example, “where’s papa going with that ax?“
- The unsaid threat of change can be just as effective.
The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it.
The place of maximum curiosity is when people think they have some idea about the dramatic question, but aren’t quite sure.
We experience the stories we read by building hallucinated models of them in our head.
Transative and active sentence construction make the scene more realistic because they make it easier for our brains to visualize, e.g. “Sarah opened the door” instead of “the door was opened.”
Don’t say something was “delightful”; say it in such a way that the reader thinks “that was delightful“ after reading it.
We are wired to be fascinated by others and get valuable information from their faces.
Our ability to develop a “theory of mind” enables us to imagine what others are thinking, feeling, and plotting, even when they’re not present. But, we tend to dramatically overestimate our ability to understand others. Our errors about what others are thinking are major cause of human drama.
Cause and effect is a fundamental way that brains understand the world. “Bananas.” “Vomit.”” Your mind automatically forms an association between the two.
Cause and effect are ambiguous in high literature to give the reader more to ponder and decode. However, they’re much more literal in commercials for mass appeal.
The gaps in explanation are all of the places where the audience inserts themselves. Good stories meld the reader’s world with the story’s world.
Characters are interesting because of their flaws.
“Naïve realism” is where you see your reality as true and everyone else’s perception of reality as flawed
When designing a character it’s helpful to think of them from the perspective of their theory of control. How do they handle the unexpected? The theory of control is often challenged at the story start.
Personality is measured on five spectrums: neuroticism, extra version, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Men tend to be more disagreeable and less neurotic than women.
Personality is significantly heritable.
Our habit of leaving details in our environment is why journalist prefer to interview people at home.
Western culture has a three part story arc: crisis, struggle, resolution. Stems from Aristotle in ancient Greece.
in Asia, a story typically involves a character who makes a grand sacrifice for everyone else. There’s typically no ending and you have to find the answer for yourself.
Stories are lessons in control.
We react to foreign ideas with the same fight or flight response we might use for a physical attack. The beliefs we fight to defend are those that we’ve centered our identity, values, and theory of control around.
Good stories have an ignition point, the first step in the cause and effect series.
Our sense of moral superiority is one of the strongest hallucinations our mind imposes upon us. Our mind craftily rewrites the past to center us as the hero in the story. Our sense of who we are is heavily dependent on our memories, and our memories aren’t to be trusted.
Our brains also confabulate or invent lies to explain our behavior, lies that are perfectly believable.
We ourselves aren’t just one person. Multiplicity is all of the characters that we hold within ourselves competing for control of how we act. These are expressed as anger, depression, rage, happiness.
Characters tend to have both conscious and subconscious desires, often contradicting one another.
We’ve spent more than 95% of our time on Earth existing in tribes, and much of the neural architecture we still carry around today evolved when we were doing so. For example, people still prefer to sleep as far from their bedroom door as possible and with a clear view of it.
Most gossip is about moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.
“A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this – relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and character of someone deserving of a great deal more.”
Hubris is when unsound claims are made to status. Status is always earned. Humiliation is the removal of any ability to claim status.
“Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built. The basic Darwinian aim of all life forms is to survive and reproduce. Because of the peculiarities of our evolutionary history, human strategies to attain these goals centre on achieving connection with tribes, and on status within them. On top of these deep universals sits everything else we desire. […] What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get – when we’re caught in the street in a downpour, we don’t see shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter.”
Multiplayer video games are so popular because they feed three important cravings: connection, status, and a goal to pursue.
“The fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal.”
When all of the good is on your side and all of the bad is on theirs, that’s your storytelling brain running in full.
The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist. The hostile and alien environment will test their theory of control again and again. All along, the character can change, the character’s goal can change, the reader’s understanding of the character can change, etc.
A gripping plot keeps asking the dramatic question, or the big, central question that drives suspense (e.g. “will they or won’t they catch the murderer?”)
The five act plot structure is equivalent to the 3.5 minute pop song.
One common story shape: ‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’