The Science of Storytelling

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language evolved principally to swap ‘social information’ back when we were living in Stone Age tribes. In other words, we’d gossip. We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behaviour, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check. Stories about people being heroic or villainous, and the emotions of joy and outrage they triggered, were crucial to human survival. We’re wired to enjoy them.

Change --> Impetus to Act

Creating a World

Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And that’s how they continue too.

every story you’ll ever hear amounts to ‘something changed’. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’

‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.

Starting a story from change does sounds like a good storytelling technique

Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control. Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. It’s by learning how to control the world that they get what they want.

This is a good mental model. The ability to perceive and understand the environment is important in controlling it and achieving goals and that is why humans do not do well with uncertainty

This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers.

But, every now and then, that change matters. It forces us to act. This is when story begins.

There is, concluded Loewenstein, a ‘positive relationship between curiosity and knowledge’. The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it.

So I would guess a technique is to gradually give more and more of the context of the story but not enough to put all the pieces together to solve it. That's what builds the anticipation of the end

Curiosity is shaped like a lowercase n. It’s at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: 
(1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’;  Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; See No Evil
(3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’;  Extraterrestrial, Conspiracy
(4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’. Gone Girl

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.

Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better (pp. 20-21). Abrams Press. Kindle Edition.

According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters. This is perhaps why transitive construction – Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad – is more effective than the ditransitive – Jane gave her Dad a kitten. Picturing Jane, then the Kitten, then her Dad mimics the real-world action that we, as readers, should be modelling. It means we’re mentally experiencing the scene in the correct sequence. Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence. For the same reason, active sentence construction – Jane kissed her Dad – is more effective than passive – Dad was kissed by Jane. Witnessing this in real life, Jane’s initial movement would draw our attention and then we’d watch the kiss play out.

Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better (p. 28). Abrams Press. Kindle Edition.

A further powerful tool for the model-creating storyteller is the use of specific detail. If writers want their readers to properly model their story-worlds they should take the trouble to describe them as precisely as possible. Precise and specific description makes for precise and specific models. One study concluded that, to make vivid scenes, three specific qualities of an object should be described, with the researcher’s examples including ‘a dark blue carpet’ and ‘an orange striped pencil.’

Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better (p. 29). Abrams Press. Kindle Edition.

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