Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (20 page)

For a look at just how much information you can convey in a mental passage before your protagonist delivers an actual response, here’s a revealing snippet from Eleanor Brown’s
The Weird Sisters:

By now you know the million-dollar question:
why
did Holly change her mind? And the answer can’t be “just because.” We want to be privy to her raging internal debate, and what it is that finally tips the scales.

Before we get carried away and load up our stories with specifics as if they’re plates at an all-you-can-eat buffet, it pays to keep Mary Poppins’ sage advice in mind: enough is as good as a feast. Too many specifics can overwhelm the reader. Our brain can hold only about seven facts at a time. If we’re given too many details too quickly, we begin to shut down. For instance, can you make it to the bottom of the following paragraph?

Quick, what color was the room? If you’re thinking,
What room?
I don’t blame you. I’m guessing your eyes glazed over about three lines
down. Because although the writer may have known why each detail was important, the reader doesn’t have a clue. And we can’t even pause to try to figure it out, because the details keep on coming. So by the end of the paragraph, we have lost track of not only the details, but the story itself.

Think of each detail as an egg. The writer keeps tossing them at us, one after another, seemingly unaware of the growing number of precariously balanced eggs we’re being asked to hold. So somewhere around the middle of the description—say, the huge brass lamp—it’s one egg too many. The trouble is, we don’t just drop that particular egg;
all
the eggs go crashing to the ground. The more details the writer gives us, the fewer we’ll remember, proving, once again, that as with most things in life, less is more. Take it from iconic singer Tony Bennett who, when asked what he can put into a song in his eighties that he couldn’t when he was younger, answered without missing a beat, “The business of knowing what to leave out.”
¹³
Why wait until you’re eighty to master that one?

But, popular wisdom goes, there’s one type of detail you can never have too many of: sensory details. Writers are advised to infuse their stories with abundant, sun-drenched, crunchy, tactile, savory sensory details, the better to draw readers into the story.

Really?

Like everything else in a story, details and specifics need a
story reason
to be there. This is especially true of sensory details. I remember reading the first page of a manuscript that waxed eloquent about how the warmth of the sun felt on the back of the protagonist’s hands as she drove down a quiet early morning lane, the way the taste of the sumptuous strawberry she’d eaten for breakfast lingered on her
tongue, how the coolness of the steering wheel beneath her palms made her shiver with delight … and that’s about all I remember because by then all I could think about was how refreshing a nice little catnap would be.

Just because the sun beat down on the protagonist’s skin, we don’t need to know it. Just because she could still taste the strawberry despite the fact she’d brushed her teeth, flossed, and gargled six times, we don’t need to know it. Just because the steering wheel felt cool to the touch, well, you know the drill. We need to know these things
only
if they supply a necessary piece of information. For instance, let’s say the protagonist—we’ll call her Lucy—thrills to the cool, pure sweetness of a rich vanilla malted. Who cares, right? Unless, with one last sip, Lucy passes out because she’s hypoglycemic—bingo, a consequence. It would be even better if it also gave us insight into Lucy, so perhaps by having her suck down the malted, the writer is telling us Lucy’s a hedonist who puts momentary pleasure over her long-term health. Or, just as effective, maybe Lucy’s love of vanilla is making the metaphorical point that while all the women in the steno pool simply adore chocolate, Lucy’s allegiance to vanilla implies that she’s not one of the pack and shudders at the marginalizing assumption that all women love chocolate.
Hell
, the reader might then think,
I bet Lucy doesn’t have a closet full of impulse-buy shoes either or spend all her spare time getting facials and catching up on key celebrity gossip
.

As Chip and Dan Heath point out in
Made to Stick
, while vivid details can boost a story’s credibility, they must be meaningful—that is, they need to symbolize and support the story’s core idea.
¹⁴
Remember those 11,000,000 bits of information our five senses are lobbing at us every second?
They
are sensory details. Yet our brain knows that we need to be shielded from at least 10,999,960 of them. The only details it lets through are the ones with the potential to affect us. The same is true of your story. Your job is to filter out the details that don’t matter a whit so you can have plenty of space left for the ones that do.

There are three main reasons for any sensory detail to be in a story:

In addition, the reader must be
aware
of the story reason for each detail’s presence. Plot-wise, that’s a no-brainer: while in the midst of savoring the malt, Lucy slips from consciousness and flops to the floor. The connection would be hard to miss. As for its telling us she’s a hedonist, first we’d need to know she’s hypoglycemic and is fully aware of the danger lurking in that innocent-looking malted. This is the sort of setup writers often overlook in a first draft, but which can easily be inserted in the second.

The third option—that it tells us something metaphorically—is the trickiest to convey. That’s because it doesn’t rely on something concrete—either physical action or our awareness of a specific fact—to make sense. Rather, it depends on the reader’s ability to grasp its subtext. That, in turn, depends on the writer’s ability to have laid the groundwork so we can intuit that Lucy’s chosen flavor of malt reveals the fact that she dances to the beat of her own drummer. Thus the reader would already need to know that the rest of the steno pool sees loving chocolate as something that defines their identity, which corresponds to a cultural conformity that Lucy finds stifling.
Lucy looked around the diner at all the women slowly sipping chocolate malts as if it was some kind of secret handshake, entrée into a club that she had no desire to join
. And so drinking the vanilla malted turns out to be a very courageous act indeed because of what it reveals about her character—it says Lucy is a woman with the courage of her convictions. A piece of information
that, from then on, will color the reader’s take on everything Lucy does and every situation she finds herself in.

Writers hoping for an exception to the needs-a-story-reason-to-exist rule often point to scenery. I mean, we have to know where the story takes place, right? The layout of the bedroom, the sagging porch floorboards, the weeping willow in the yard, the soaring mountain ranges—and who doesn’t love a beautiful sunset? As Elmore Leonard so shrewdly advised, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
¹⁵
And a large part of what readers skim, if not skip entirely, is scenery. Setting. Weather. Why? Because stories are about people, the things that happen to them, and how they react to it. And while setting is where those things take place, so of course it’s vitally important, merely describing the scenery, the town, the weather—regardless of how well written or how interesting it might be in and of itself—stops a story dead in its tracks.

This isn’t to say that you can’t mention the gothic architecture, that it was a dark and stormy night, or that the town dates back to 1793. But when you do, it helps to keep George S. Kaufman’s old Broadway saw in mind: “You can’t hum the scenery.” We need a story reason to care how ominous the clouds are, how vibrant the city, how quaint the white picket fence. Often, description of the scenery sets the tone. As Steven Pinker says, “Mood depends on surroundings: think of being in a bus terminal waiting room or a lakeside cottage.”
¹⁶
So if you go to great pains to describe the scenery—be it a room, a setting, an elaborate meal, or what your protagonist is wearing—you’d better actually be communicating something else. The description of a room should reveal something about the person who lives in it or hint at the whereabouts of the missing diamond or tell us something crucial about the zeitgeist of the community in which the story unfolds—or better yet, all three.

For example, let’s turn to a master, the unparalleled Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and crib something from
Love in the Time of Cholera
. The following paragraph is a quintessential example of how the mere description of a room can be harnessed to provide insight into a character. In this passage, Dr. Juvenal Urbino surveys the parlor of his good friend and chess partner, photographer Jeremiah de Saint-Armour, who has just committed suicide.

The snippet not only provides backstory and insight into how Dr. Urbino views the world, it also deftly sums up an aspect of the universal human condition that all of us struggle with—that someday the world will go on without us, perhaps as if we had never been. Which, ahem, is one of the reasons we write stories. It’s better than spray painting “Kilroy was here” on a rock.