"The Science of Storytelling" by Will Storr (William Collins, 2019)

Unexpected change or the opening of an information gap makes the readers curious. Change can be clued at the start, even if only by stating that nothing's changed for ages - e.g. "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much".

It's light on science at first. The sections are about -

• "Creating worlds" - this section told me nothing new
• "The flawed world-creator" - "what we do in tiny interactions ... shows the same kinds of patterns as can be observed from examining a whole life" (Daniel Nettle). We try to justify and sustain the world we create. We know ourselves, so we know the tricks of persuasion that will work on ourselves.
• "The world-creator's subconscious" -
  • "Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator" (p.112)
  • "Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it" (p.156). Individuals can belong to more than one "tribe". They define status. "It's hard to conceive of an effective story that doesn't rely on some form of status movement to squeeze our primal emotions, seize our attention, drive our hatred or earn our empathy" (p.148).
  • "a psychological tribal threat is a threat to [the brain's] theory of control - its intricate network of millions of beliefs about how one thing causes another" (p.160)
  • "Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting" (p.169)
• "Meaning, purpose, endings"
  • "Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built" (p.183)
  • "When a player logs on [to Multiplayer online games, which are stories] they experience connection, earn status and are given a goal to pursue" (p.186)
  • "Textual analyses reveal the words 'do', 'need' and 'want' appear twice as often in novels that feature in the New York Times bestseller list as those that don't" (p.198)
  • "The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist" (p.190)
  • Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers (Stanford) ran a big data algorithm on 20,000 novels "the resulting data supported the life's work of Christopher Booker, whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge" (p.195)
  • The readers' curiosity isn't so much about what will happen, but who the protagonist will become.
  • Changing oneself (one's algorithm for satisfaction - one's means of prediction and control) may require changing a core belief, hence the need for a final battle in a novel
  • "Happy people have reassuring narratives of self that account for why bad things have happened to them and which offer hope for the future" (p.202)
• "The Sacred flaw approach" - a chapter showing how to employ the principles explained in earlier chapters. It's "a way of building a fictional story as a brain builds a life". The idea is to find a character's flawed principle, show an episode (from their teens?) which proves to the character that they're right (and that others lack the same insight), show how this belief arose (a childhood anecdote), then have that principle challenged (add a plot involving betrayal, etc). Does the person change or not?

Other reviews

• Alex Preston
• goodreads