Jargogled Impressions.

I just finished this book The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. It’s an insightful read into what makes good stories work the way they do and is a good layman introduction to the craft of thinking about and structuring stories. 

The author approaches the decomposition of stories through the lens of philosophy – a look into how we have evolved through the ages and our storytelling brains have been attuned to the ebbs and flows of what defines a heroic tale of redemption and courage. We are, through the evolutionary pressures of the past ages, biased towards stories that provoke our moral outrage, that appeal to a heroic journey of challenges and obstacles, that appeal to the innermost emotions we have and cannot articulate, and those that bring forth the unique social dilemmas and our natural affinity to being part of a group. I came across this author through another book – The Status Game, which was a deep dive into the chase for status that peripherally drives much of our actions and our emotions. The author seems to have expounded upon some of the highlights about the status anxiety he unearths through dissecting the most popular and classical literary works of our age, and turned those insights into a book length format. 

Coming back to the science of storytelling, what struck me most about this book is the commonality it has with another storytelling book I read back in January “Story Worthy” by Matthew Dicks. Written by a multiple award winning Moth storyteller, the book was a deep introspection into the art of oral storytelling, and one that focuses more on personal stories – true, often misplaced and forgotten, autobiographical stories that we can all dig into to bring forth those shining moments of aha and regale the crowds with a life that is full of stories. 

Both these books, while focusing on stories, are directed towards different goals – one focused on literary/fictional accounts, and the other more directed towards turning our storytelling powers to ourselves. But both do emphasize on the need to anchor our stories around people, their interior monologues, their emotions, their truths, their flaws – and not on the external events and the milieu and the surroundings that bring them forth. Too often, while trying to write stories, we tend to focus on events and on a major incident and feel like those are the primary anchors of stories. But in most good stories, these events are just stages where the unique motions of human emotion and behavior pans out. These events are the mere backdrops for surfacing the various facets of our innermost thoughts and feelings and what makes us, well us. 

This is an important distinction and one that is very easy to miss. 

Further, another thing that struck me was they both emphasize the primary driver for what makes a novel a page-turner, a movie that is gripping, an article that provokes further scrolling – which is the ability to always focus on change, on making the character move, of making her decide, act, engage, react, believe, fall. The movement is where the engagement of the reader comes in. Once the story has created a hook for the protagonist, the reader is interested in knowing about what’s happening, who she really is, what it is that she wants, why she wants it, to what lengths is she going to go to get what she wants. In the protagonist, a reader borrows the world where things seem under control for a change, and is able to peek into the world of the protagonist. Storr talks about the concept of “theory of control” – basically the specific theory that we all have which is based on the mental model we have constructed for ourselves. The mental models that we subconsciously cherish and that which makes us believe we are right, we are doing the right thing, our actions are right, etc. In stories, what typically happens is the character’s ‘theory of control’ is challenged somehow – through an external event, an opportunity, a journey, a quest, an investigation, a misunderstanding, a revelation, a promotion, an enemy, an accusation, an onerous task, a discovery, etc. etc. (see The Thirty-six dramatic situations by Mike Figgis). When the theory is challenged, and repeatedly so, we as readers, are in. We sense the frustration and the world that the protagonist has fallen into, so very different from the world that had constructed her these mental models. And we see her struggle, we see her acting, we see her falling, we see her understanding, and we see her coming back to challenge her own understanding and finally, to the climax, the understanding. 

The story mythologist Joseph Campbell, in his book “The hero with a thousand faces”, depicts fastidiously how every story plot basically derives from a single big frame – an arc drawn to depict a hero’s journey as she navigates her goal of understanding herself. All myths, ancient stories, epic dramas, greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s plays, the modern potboilers, the pulp fiction page turners, the literary masterpieces – can all basically be framed as derivations of this central arc. This is fascinating to me, and yet, a bit off putting. Sure, the modern and the post-modern artists are bucking this, and in their formulations, trying to deny Campbell his satisfaction. But in what they exclude from their stories, the readers act as sleuths trying to piece the thing together like a good, ol’ fashioned story. While the author may deny the reader a typical story plot, relying instead on stream-of-consciousness, interior monologues, or scattered scenes – it becomes the reader’s job to piece it all together, and there’s fun in that because it expands the possibilities of what the story could be and could stand for. Regardless of who does it – the author or the reader, we are all, in some way, looking for that arc with which to relate to, that arc to position ourselves in, that arc to draw our own journeys.