Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (6 page)

Few notions are more damaging to writers than the popular belief that writing a successful story is a matter of learning to “write well.” Who could argue with that? It sounds so logical, so obvious. What would the alternative be—learning to write poorly? Ironically, writing
poorly can be far less damaging than you’d think. That is,
if you can tell a story
.

The problem with this, along with numerous other writing myths, is that it misses the point. In this case, “writing well” is taken to mean the use of beautiful language, vibrant imagery, authentic-sounding dialogue, insightful metaphors, interesting characters, and a whole lot of really vivid sensory details dribbled in along the way.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Who’d want to read a novel without it?

How about the millions of readers of
The Da Vinci Code
? Regardless of how beloved his books may be, no one says author Dan Brown is a great writer. Perhaps most succinct, and scathing, is fellow author Philip Pullman’s assessment that Brown’s prose is “flat, stunted and ugly,” and that his books are full of “completely flat and two-dimensional characters … talking in utterly implausible ways to one another.”
¹⁴

So why is
The Da Vinci Code
one of the best-selling novels of all time? Because, from the very first page, readers are dying to know what happens next. And that’s what matters most. A story must have the ability to engender a sense of urgency from the first sentence. Everything else—fabulous characters, great dialogue, vivid imagery, luscious language—is gravy.

This is not to disparage great writing in any way. I love a beautifully crafted sentence as much as the next person. But make no mistake: learning to “write well” is not synonymous with learning to write a story. And of the two, writing well is secondary. Because if the reader doesn’t want to know what happens next, so what if it’s well written? In the trade, such exquisitely rendered, story-less novels are often referred to as a beautifully written
“Who cares?”

Now that we know what hooks a reader on the first page, the question is, how do you craft a story that actually does it? Like everything in life, it’s easier said than done, which is why it’s the question we’ll spend the rest of the book answering.

HERE’S A DISCONCERTING THOUGHT:
marketers, politicians, and televangelists know more about story than most writers. This is because, by definition, they start with something writers often never even think about—the point their story will make. Armed with that knowledge, they then craft a tale in which every word, every image, every nuance leads directly to it.

Look around your house. Chances are you bought just about everything you see (even Fido) because while you weren’t looking, a clever story snuck in and persuaded you to. It’s not that you’re easy to boss around, but a well-crafted story speaks first to your cognitive unconscious
¹
—which marketers hope will then translate it into something conscious, like,
It may be midnight, but I really do deserve a Big Mac. Gee, she looks so happy; I wonder if I can get my doctor to prescribe that pill. It’d sure be fun to have a beer with that guy, I think I’ll vote for him
.

Scary, huh?

So to take back some of that power, writers would do well to embrace this counterintuitive fact: the defining element of a story is something that has little to do with writing. Rather, it underlies the story itself and is what renowned linguist William Labov has dubbed “evaluation” because it allows readers to evaluate the meaning of the story’s events. Think of it as the “So what?” factor.
²
It’s what lets readers in on the point of the story, cluing them in to the relevance of everything that happens in it. Put plainly, it tells them what the story is about. As literary scholar Brian Boyd so aptly points out, a story
with no point of reference leaves the reader with no way of determining what information matters: is it “the color of people’s eyes or their socks? The shape of their noses or their shoes? The number of syllables in their name?”
³

Thus your first job is to zero in on the point your story is making. The good news is that this is one of the few things that can actually cut down on time spent rewriting. Why? Because from the get-go it allows you to do for your story what your cognitive unconscious automatically does for you: filter out unnecessary and distracting information.
⁴

To that end, in this chapter we’ll explore how weaving together the protagonist’s issue, the theme, and the plot keeps a story focused; what theme really means and how it defines your story; and the ways in which plot can get in your way. Then we’ll put these principles through a test run, focusing on that literary classic,
Gone with the Wind
.

A story is designed, from beginning to end, to answer a single overarching question. As readers we instinctively know this, so we expect every word, every line, every character, every image, every action to move us closer to the answer. Will Romeo and Juliet run off together? Will Scarlett realize Rhett’s the man for her before it’s too late? Will we find out enough about Charles Foster Kane to know what the hell Rosebud means?

Thus it would seem that when you’re writing a story, defining what it’s about should be simple—obvious, almost—yet it often proves to be maddeningly elusive. Despite our best intention, the narrative meanders, spending way too much time wandering aimlessly down back roads. So in the end, although a lot of interesting events take place, they don’t add up to anything. No question is asked, let alone answered. The story is so full of things the reader doesn’t need to know that it has no focus, so it isn’t really a story. It’s just a collection of things that happen.

Stories that lack focus often aren’t about anything at all. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But I can’t tell you how many manuscripts I’ve read where if someone asked, “What’s it about?” my only answer would be, “It’s about three hundred pages.” As one editor put it, “If you can’t summarize your book in a few sentences, rewrite
the book
until you can.”

I agree. Years of reading query letters, synopses, and countless manuscripts and screenplays have taught me that writers who can’t sum up the story they’re telling in a clearly focused, intriguing sentence or two probably haven’t written a clearly focused, intriguing story. It wasn’t a lesson that came easy. I’d read a summary that seemed promising but was jumbled and a little disjointed and think,
Hey, the ability to write a good story is very different from the ability to write a good summary
. So I’d start reading the manuscript. I rarely got far, however, because it usually turned out that the summary did present an accurate picture of the story, which was itself disjointed and jumbled.

Here are just a few telltale signs that a story is going off the rails:

All these problems have the same effect on the reader’s brain: not only does the dopamine surge we felt when we started reading dry up, but the part of our brain always busily comparing the reward we expected with what we actually got lets us know it is not pleased. In short, we feel frustrated.
⁵
This is evidence that the author hasn’t zeroed in on the essence of the story she’s telling, so even though it may be brimming with exquisite prose, it feels directionless and uninvolving. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to tell us what happens next. We stop reading. End of story.