Unlock the power of your pen with five essential writing tips, each one backed by scientific research. Discover how to captivate your audience, enhance your creativity, and elevate your writing skills to new heights.
In his latest book, “The Science of Storytelling,” journalist and novelist Will Storr opens with a simple yet disconcerting message:
“Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it.”
- We’re all hallucinating
- Reality is a construction we’ve created in an attempt to comfort ourselves that a master plan exists
- Becoming better at writing stories is a matter of looking inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it
- At its best, a story mirrors the complexity of human condition without the fear of danger that occurs in real life
Expose the Flaws
We are all flawed
- Flaws often derive from the fact that control is also an illusion
- A character’s “terrible power” comes from their belief that they’re right
- In that rightness they feel superior to others
The Many Us
The writer must be willing to expose their own flaws
- Humans are complex animals
- We are many people throughout the day
- To be heroic requires recognizing the many conflicting desires and thoughts that make us what we are
- “The difference,” Storr writes, “is that in life, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.”
Change Matters
All life is based on prediction
- Even unicellular organisms detect changes in the environment and either embrace them or flee
- Humans are no different
- We are primed for change
- Good stories require that a character changes
- The best require that the protagonist faces an ultimate challenge, forcing them to confront life-altering change
The Hero’s Journey
The modern storyteller is working with a different landscape than those past
- We’re no longer bound by the traditional tribal structure that dominated for hundreds of thousands of years, nor the caste system that commenced with the development of Harappan civilization
- Though we cannot write off tribalism completely, we’re still biologically Stone Age
- Just because we have an opportunity to grow does not mean everyone chooses to
- Stories are tribal propaganda
Cause and Effect
When a story is incomplete, our brain automatically fills in the gaps
- We need everything to mean something
- Religion is based on this neurological quirk: there must be a reason we’re here
- As a writer, show the cause, don’t tell it
- If you refuse the reader will grow uninterested
