Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (34 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
The same is true when you want your characters to deviate from the norm. We all know that if you don’t eat, you get hungry; if you don’t drink, you get thirsty; and if you don’t look both ways before you cross the street, you might get mowed down by a twit texting a tweet. As a result, when your protagonist does not conform to our basic cause-and-effect expectations, we get grouchy. We don’t have a choice; our brain uses its knowledge of how the world works as a default base to judge the credibility of characters.
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We don’t like having to ask (with apologies to Shakespeare), “Hey, when the protagonist gets mowed down, does he not
bleed
?”
This is not to say he has to bleed. Far from it. It means if he isn’t going to bleed, you better have already given us a pretty good reason why. It doesn’t cut it to tell us, as he lies there on the pavement, giggling: “Oh, by the way, John is really a Martian, and did I mention that they’re made of rubber, so when that car hit him it didn’t hurt; it tickled?”
Thus when characters are going to do something decidedly out of the ordinary, we need to already know one of two things:
1. They have the ability to do it, because we’ve seen them in action. For instance, we don’t want to learn that Donna can walk through reinforced steel walls at the very moment Wendy locks her in an airtight basement and flips the switch to suck all the remaining oxygen out of the room. But if we’ve watched
Donna walk through a wall or two before, preferably when nothing big hung in the balance, then we’re right there with her, breathing a sigh of relief as Wendy turns the lock, knowing that Donna has outsmarted her again.2. If we haven’t actually
seen
Donna walk through walls, we must have been given enough “tells” along the way that once she
does
, it’s not only believable, but also satisfying. No wonder Donna was so good at hide-and-seek as a kid! And that time she leaned against the wall and almost fell through it?
Now
I get it! (Of course, the caveat is that back when those things happened, they must have made sense in and of themselves, rather than standing out like a sore thumb with a neon tattoo reading: “Don’t worry, this will be explained later.”)
Even so, it can
still
be very tempting to goad a character into doing things they’d never do in a million years because the plot needs them to. This is something you see in movies a whole lot. Edgar has a double PhD in rocket science and applied psychology from Stanford, speaks six languages, is a black belt, and writes best-selling mystery novels in his spare time, yet when a nervous stranger breathlessly asks him to take a crudely sealed package across the border from Mexico into El Paso, he agrees without a moment’s hesitation. Because if Edgar isn’t arrested crossing the border, well, the entire third act would go up in smoke.
Resist this temptation. Listen to your characters, who will implore you to give them a believable reason for everything they do, every reaction they have, every word they say, and every memory that suddenly pops into their head and changes how they see everything. This is exactly what, when done right, foreshadowing, flashbacks, and subplots do for your reader. Readers go willingly on these seeming side trips because they know from their own lives that the remembrance of things past often offers up nuggets of wisdom they can’t afford to ignore.
CHAPTER 11
: CHECKPOINT
Do all your subplots affect the protagonist, either externally or internally, as he struggles with the story question?
Readers don’t want subplots just because they’re interesting or lyrical or provide a nice break from the intensity of the main action. Although they may be
all
these things, first and foremost, the reader expects they’ll be there for a story reason. So ask yourself: Even if it’s tangential, how does this subplot affect the protagonist’s pursuit of his goal? What specific information does it give your reader that she needs to know in order to really grasp what’s happening to the protagonist?
When you leap into a subplot or flashback, can the reader sense why it was necessary at that very moment?
Make sure the logic is on the page, not just in your head. When you leave the main storyline, you want the reader to follow you willingly, not kicking and screaming.
When returning to the main storyline, will your reader see things with new eyes from that moment on?
You want her to come back to the main storyline feeling as though she has new insight that gives her the inside track on what’s going on.
When the protagonist does something out of character, has it been foreshadowed?
Make sure you’ve given the reader solid tells along the way, so her reaction will be “Aha!” rather than “Give me a break!”
Have you given your reader enough information to understand what’s happening, so that nothing a character does or says leaves her wondering whether she missed something?
You never want your reader to have to pause, trying to figure out what she’s missed, and then—god forbid—leaf back through the book to try to figure it out.
WE’VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME
looking at story through the reader’s hardwired expectations. What about ours? How does the writer’s brain fit into the equation when it comes to creating a story that leaps off the page? Turnabout being fair play, perhaps it’s time we slid our own DNA under the microscope for a quick look-see. I’ll go first.
I noticed a strange thing not too long ago. When I misspell a word, the more I try to figure out how to spell it, the more mangled it gets. If, instead, I simply retype it without thinking—fast, like pulling off a Band-Aid—nine times out of ten it’s spelled correctly. For a while I went around telling people that my brain doesn’t know how to spell but my fingers do. Turns out it’s my brain, after all, which knows more than I think it does—provided I don’t think about it.
As neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak says, “In many cases we decrease accuracy and efficiency by thinking too hard.”
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He points to an example many of us remember with chagrin: taking multiple-choice tests back in school and constantly second-guessing our answers. According to studies, if we’d just stuck with our original gut instinct and moved on to the next question like the instructions suggested, we would have gotten that A we knew we deserved, instead of—well, never mind. The one lesson we can still take away from that frustrating experience is that often the harder we try, the worse we do.
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So, does that mean winging it really is the best bet? Should you forget everything we’ve been talking about and join the ranks of the “pantsers”—that is, writers who write solely by the seat of their pants?
Probably not before you read the fine print: Restak goes on to say that following your gut works only if you’ve prepared for the test and know the material.
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That notion might have been what prompted seventeenth-century writer Thomas Fuller to observe that all things are difficult before they are easy. Indeed, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon estimates that it takes about ten years to really master a subject. By then we’ve gathered upward of fifty thousand “chunks” of knowledge, which the brain has deftly indexed so our cognitive unconscious can access each chunk on its own whenever necessary. Simon goes on to explain that this is “why experts can … respond to many situations ‘intuitively’—that is, very rapidly, and often without being able to specify the process they have used to reach their answers. Intuition is no longer a mystery.”
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Antonio Damasio agrees: “Outsourcing expertise to the unconscious space is what we do when we hone a skill so finely that we are no longer aware of the technical steps needed to be skillful. We develop skills in the clear light of consciousness, but then we let them go underground, into the roomy basement of our minds.…”
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It’s through this process that story becomes intuitive for writers and that muscle memory is built. The good news is, the clock probably started ticking on your ten-year apprenticeship a long time ago. You likely already know—at least somewhere in your cognitive subconscious—that a huge part of the writing process is rewriting, with gusto, if possible.
That’s why in this chapter we’ll examine the deceptive thrill of finishing a first draft; discuss why seeking no-holds-barred criticism is crucial; explore why rewriting is an essential part of the writing process; consider the pros and cons of writers’ groups; look at the benefits of professional literary consultants; and finally discover a painless way to toughen your hide before heartless strangers begin mercilessly attacking the very essence of your being (read: critiquing your work).
You’ve finished your first draft. You’re elated. Giddy. You can’t believe it’s actually done. You wanted to give up a million times, but you didn’t. You slogged from the terrifying emptiness of the blank page to the two most beautiful words in a writer’s vocabulary: “The End.” You do exactly what you should: go out and celebrate.
The next morning, basking in the afterglow of this genuinely magnificent accomplishment, you decide it might be a good idea to reread your manuscript before submitting it to literary agents, just in case there are typos. But within a page or two, you’re facing the mystery of the ages:
how can scenes that seemed so insanely suspenseful when you wrote them, so completely engaging, so downright profound, suddenly sound so flat and banal?
Did monkeys get into your computer while you slept?
Before you hit the Delete key and decide to take up interpretive dance instead, you should know that this happens to everyone. It’s important (not to mention reassuring) to keep in mind that writing is a process. It is rarely possible to address all of a story’s trouble spots in a single draft, so don’t be hard on yourself. It’s not you; it’s the nature of the beast. If there is one thing every successful writer’s process includes, it’s rewriting. Talent aside, in my experience, what separates writers who break through from those who don’t is perseverance mixed with the wholehearted desire of a zealot to zero in on what isn’t working and fix it.
