The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How To Tell Them Better. Will Storr. Abrams Press. NY. 2020.
Soft Cover. Glued. 291 pages. 0.75 lbs. With appendix titled “The Sacred Flaw Approach.” Notes and Sources. Index.
Found and purchased at Pearl’s Books
Whodunnit? You wouldn’t believe what my boss did today! What you up to today? Stop me if you’ve heard this one already. Where ya going? You’ll never believe who I saw today! Well, what’d ya think?
We all tell stories, all the time. Around the dinner table. On the phone. In the elevator making that pitch.
But in “The Science of Storytelling,” to write an engaging story first involves learning about oneself. This is Storr’s main—though unspoken—thesis. He repeatedly emphasizes the fact that living humans are hallucinating all the time. Once writers understand how so, then they can create believable characters who are also mistaking their realities.
The subtitle “Why Stories Make Us Human” indicates his intention to explore this hallucinatory life. He uses the sciences of perception, cognition, and consciousness to show how humans create their own reality, everyday. We are human, he contends, because we create stories; stories that help us make sense of an otherwise senseless world. And note, he’s not saying we create stories because we are human; the storytelling is what makes us human.
And the first stories we tell? To ourselves. The stories are based on a completely made-up notion of reality taught to us right from birth by means of our five senses. Our personal experiential sensations influence what we think of the world. What we think of the world gives us our feeling of consciousness.
This model of the world—of our conscious brains hallucinating reality—is also Storr’s model for constructing stories. The following passage shows his line of reasoning:
“In order to tell the story of your life, your brain needs to conjure up a world for you to live inside, with all its colours and movements and objects and sounds. Just as characters in fiction exist in a reality that’s been actively created, so do we. But that’s not how it feels to be a living, conscious human. It feels as if we’re looking out of our skulls, observing reality directly and without impediment. But this is not the case. 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.”
He explores the various senses to help us comprehend this strange notion of humans constructing their own reality.
As an example: “Take the eye, our dominant sense organ. If you hold out your arm and look at your thumbnail, that’s all you can see in high definition and full colour at once. Colour ends 20 to 30 degrees outside that core and the rest of your sight is fuzzy. You have two lemon-sized blind spots and blink fifteen to twenty times a minute, which blinds you for fully 10 per cent of your waking life. You don’t even see in three dimensions.”
That’s a lot to take in. Pause a minute. We have an actual blind spot in our vision that is lemon-sized. Ten per cent of our waking life we are blind. What we think of as reality ‘out there’ is not, it’s just our brains processing sensory input inside our skulls.
The first chapter alone, “Creating a World,” is worth the price of the book or the effort of getting it from the library. It is full of science-backed explanations of human perception, cognition, and consciousness, and I am only touching the surface. The rest of the book, the next three chapters, brings a story’s hallucinating character to life.
Why this emphasis on a hallucinatory view of reality in order to create a story? That’s where the second half of the sub-title comes in: “How To Tell Them Better.” Understanding how real humans experience life will inform and support the writer’s crafting of a character’s experience of their life and world.
The protagonist in a story is blind but believes they see. They are especially blind to their own flaw. The fatal flaw, the tragic flaw, or the “sacred flaw” is discussed in the second chapter and workshopped for the writer in the appendix.
This flaw is based on the character’s belief that they are seeing the world as it really is, with no understanding of just how constructed that reality is; a reality built by a brain locked inside a dark soundless shell. A reality built by their experiences growing up in a particular culture with specific sense experiences over a given time-frame.
Even when the writer does not include all this background in their story, having these traits for their character clearly in mind will help them craft a believable and compelling story for the reader.
This constructed reality gives the protagonist the belief that they have a way to control their surroundings. They have the world defined ‘just so’ and it is accurate and complete and true. Oh sure, Storr explains, there may be specific topics the character is open to learning about or improving upon, but the overall construct of reality has been largely defined by the end of their adolescence.
They have it all figured out; and now, to convince others of that fact.
This social aspect of human life is the set up for the ignition point of the story, a dramatic turn that poses the essential question: who is this person, really? The character constructs a reality for themselves that clashes with the reality others have constructed for their own selves. And from that initial conflict onward, in the character’s every action and interaction, they are confronted with that question: who am I, really?
Storr helps the writer examine this question from various points of view in the third chapter.
Will the protagonist escape from their limitations of birth and upbringing; will they learn how they are blind to what others see; will they get what they want or will it be what they need; will they overcome their fatal flaw; will they become a full-rounded hero; will they—in some way—change? And along the way, will the reader buy into and travel along the protagonist’s trajectory of change?
This trajectory is the plot, the subject of the fourth, last and shortest chapter.
From the ignition point to the final resolution, the protagonist, the antagonist, and the supporting cast, are all in some fashion or other continually answering the question, “Who am I really?” The dialogue supports asking and answering these questions; the settings provide the context for that question; and the various supporting cast become proxies for some aspect of the protagonist’s own character traits—all in support of this dramatic question.
Storr’s main outline can be summarized thus: build the story around a character with a fatal flaw answering a dramatic question inside a plot. He contrasts this with the now-infamous approach popularized by Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, which builds the story around the journey, or the plot with a character in it.
While Storr is quick to point out that his approach is not better, he does state it is justifiably different and therefore insightful to any storyteller. He’s correct.
What is astonishing to me is just how correct he is on multiple levels. Personally, I am the hallucinating character in my own story. My life is a constructed story about me, with my own fatal flaw(s), answering the dramatic question of just who am I—really?—through the course of my life. What will be the final answer, my resolution?
On a social level, from reading this book I’ve learned to actually tell stories better. Even a short vignette of some event I experienced in my day requires a protagonist (even if me) who is in some way blind to the current reality and is surprised by a change in the environment that in turn changes the protagonist: a story to share around the dinner table.
On the reading level, the best novels are character-driven. I certainly like the dramatic hero-myth stories for entertainment purposes; but the compelling stories, the ones I continue to ponder about after finishing reading, the ones that even years later I might wonder what that character is up to now—those character-based stories become the classics of literature.
And further—a character with a fatal flaw answering the dramatic question inside a plot—can be adapted to look at non-fiction as well. This aspect will be examined more fully in the next article.
I cannot relate just how much this book has moved me: introspectively, socially, in my reading, and even as a non-fiction writer. I highly recommend “The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How To Tell Them Better.”
Other Posts that mention this Review: Essay Part II, Essay on Perception