Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (5 page)

For instance, how about this—the first paragraph of Caroline Leavitt’s
Girls In Trouble
—for a ball in play?

Trouble brewing? Yep. Longstanding trouble? At least nine months, probably longer. Can’t you feel the momentum? It pulls you forward, even as it grounds you in the unfolding moment. You want to know not only what happens next but also what led to what’s happening right now. Who’s the father? Was it consensual? Was she raped? Thus your curiosity is engaged, and you read on without consciously having made the decision to do so.

As readers we eagerly probe each piece of information for significance, constantly wondering, “What is this meant to tell me?” It’s said people can go forty days without food, three days without water, and about thirty-five seconds without finding meaning in something—truth is, thirty-five seconds is an eternity compared to the warp speed with which our subconscious brain rips through data. It’s a biological imperative: we are always on the hunt for meaning—not in the metaphysical “What is the true nature of reality?” sense but in the far more primal, very specific sense of:
Joe left without his usual morning coffee; I wonder why? Betty is always on time; how come she’s half an hour late? That annoying dog next door barks its head off every morning; why is it so quiet today?

We are always looking for the
why
beneath what’s happening on the surface. Not only because our survival might depend on it, but because it’s exhilarating. It makes us feel something—namely, curiosity. Having our curiosity piqued is visceral. And it leads to something even more potent: the anticipation of knowledge we’re now hungry for, a sensation caused by that pleasurable rush of dopamine. Because being curious is necessary for survival (
What’s that rustling in the bushes?
), nature encourages it. And what better way to encourage curiosity than to make it feel good? This is why, once your curiosity is roused as a reader, you have an emotional, vested interest in finding out what happens next.

And bingo! You feel that delicious sense of urgency (hello dopamine!) that all good stories instantly ignite.

So what happens when you can’t anticipate what might happen next, when you can’t even make sense of what’s happening now? Usually you decide to find something else to read, pronto. I’ve often thrown up my hands in frustration when reading a well-intentioned manuscript, wishing it came with an interpreter. I could feel the author’s burning intent; I knew she was trying to tell me something important. Trouble was, I had no idea what.

Think of how exasperating it is in the real world when someone begins a long rambling story:

By now you’re probably nervously jiggling your foot and thinking,
What are you talking about and why should I care?
That is, if you’re still listening. It’s the same with the first page of a story. If we don’t have a sense of what’s happening and why it matters to the protagonist, we’re not going to read it. After all, have you ever gone into a bookstore, pulled a novel off the shelf, read the first few pages and thought,
You know, this is kind of dull, and I don’t really care about
these people, but I’m sure the author tried really hard and probably has something important to say, so I’m going to buy it, read it, and recommend it to all my friends?

Nope. You’re beautifully, brutally heartless. I’m betting you never give the author’s hard work or good intentions a second thought. And that’s as it should be. As a reader, you owe the writer absolutely nothing. You read their book solely at your own pleasure, where it stands or falls on its own merit. If you don’t like it, you simply slip it back onto the shelf and slide out another.

What are you hunting for on that first page? Are you consciously analyzing each sentence one by one? Are you aware of what triggers the finely calibrated tipping point when you decide to either read the book or look for another? Of course not. That is, not consciously. In the same way you don’t have to think about which muscles you need to move in order to blink, choosing a book is a perfectly coordinated reflex orchestrated by your cognitive unconscious. It’s muscle memory—except in this case, the “muscle” in question is the brain.

Okay, let’s say that the first sentence has indeed grabbed you. What’s next?

The unspoken question that’s now bouncing around in your brain is this:
What is this book about?

Sounds like a big question. It is, which is why we’ll be exploring it in depth in the next chapter. So
can
you answer it on the first page? Rarely. After all, when you meet someone new, can you know everything there is to know about that person on the first date? Absolutely not. Can you feel like you do? Absolutely. Story, likewise. And to that end, here are the three basic things readers relentlessly hunt for as they read that first page:

Let’s examine these three elements and how they work in tandem to answer the question.

Everyone knows a story needs a main character, otherwise known as the protagonist—even ensemble pieces tend to have one central character. No need to discuss it, right? But here’s something writers often don’t know: in a story, what the reader feels is driven by what the protagonist feels. Story is visceral. We climb inside the protagonist’s skin and become sensate, feeling what he feels. Otherwise we have no port of entry, no point of view through which to see, evaluate, and experience the world the author has plunked us into.

In short, without a protagonist, everything is neutral, and as we’ll see in
chapter 3
, in a story (as in life) there’s no such thing as neutral. Which means we need to meet the protagonist as soon as possible—hopefully, in the first paragraph.

It stands to reason, then, that something must be happening—beginning on the first page—that the protagonist is affected by. Something that gives us a glimpse of the “big picture.” As John Irving once said, “Whenever possible, tell the whole story of the novel in the first sentence.”
¹²
Glib? Yeah, okay. But a worthy goal to shoot for.

The big picture cues us to the problem the protagonist will spend the story struggling with. For instance, in a classic romantic comedy it’s
Will boy get girl?
Thus we gauge every event against that one question.
Does it help him get closer to her or does it hurt his prospects? And, often, is she really the right girl for him?

Which brings us to the third thing that readers are hunting for on that first page, the thing that, together with the first two, ignites the all-important sense of urgency:

What hangs in the balance? Where’s the conflict? Conflict is story’s lifeblood—another seeming no-brainer. But there’s a bit of helpful fine print that often goes unread. We’re not talking about just any conflict, but conflict
that is specific to the protagonist’s quest
. From the first sentence, readers morph into bloodhounds, relentlessly trying to sniff out what is at stake here and how will it impact the protagonist. Sure, they’re not quite certain what his or her quest is yet, but that’s what they’re hoping to find out by asking these questions. Point being—something must be at stake, beginning on the first page.

Can all three of these things be there on the first page? You bet. In 2007, literary theorist Stanley Fish published an editorial in the
New York Times
that answers just that question. He was rushing through an airport with only minutes to spare and nothing to read. He decided to dash into the bookstore and choose a book based solely on its first sentence. Here is the winner, from Elizabeth George’s
What Came Before He Shot Her
:

Imagine that: all three questions were answered in a single sentence.

Who wouldn’t read on to find out? The fact that Joel is going to be involved in a murder not only gives us an idea of what the book is about, it provides the context—the yardstick—by which we are then able to measure the significance and emotional meaning of everything that “comes before he shoots her.”

Which is important, because after that first sentence, the novel follows the hapless, brave, poverty-stricken Joel through inner-city London for well over six hundred pages before the murder in question. But along the way we’re riveted, weighing everything against what we know is going to happen, always wondering if
this
is the event that will catapult Joel into his fate, and analyzing why each twist and turn pushes him toward the inevitable murder.

Here’s something even more interesting: without that opening sentence,
What Came Before He Shot Her
would be a very, very different story. Things would happen, but we’d have no real idea what they were building toward. So, regardless of how well written it is (and it
is
), it wouldn’t be nearly as engaging. Why?

Because, as neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak writes, “Within the brain, things are always evaluated within a specific context.”
¹³
It is context that bestows meaning, and it is meaning that your brain is wired to sniff out. After all, if stories are simulations that our brains plumb for useful information in case we ever find ourselves in a similar situation, we sort of need to know what the situation
is
.

By giving us a glimpse of the big picture, George provides a yardstick that allows us to decode the meaning of everything that befalls Joel. Such yardsticks are like a mathematical proof—they let the reader anticipate what things are adding up to. Which makes them even more useful for the intrepid writer, because a story’s yardstick mercilessly reveals those passages that don’t seem to add up at all, unmasking them as the one thing you want to banish from your story at all costs.

Elmore Leonard famously said that a story is real life with the boring parts left out. Think of the boring parts as anything that doesn’t relate to or affect your protagonist’s quest. Every single thing in a story—including subplots, weather, setting, even tone—must have a clear impact on what the reader is dying to know:
Will the protagonist achieve her goal? What will it cost her in the process? How will it change her in the end?
What hooks us, and keeps us reading, is the dopamine-fueled desire to know what happens next. Without that, nothing else matters.

But what about stunning prose?
you may ask.
What about poetic imagery?

Throughout this book we’ll be doing a lot of myth-busting, exploring why so many of the most hallowed writing maxims are often more likely to lead you in the wrong direction than the right. And this, my friends, is a great myth to start with.