1.0
Where does a story begin? Well, where does anything begin? At the beginning, of course. Alright then: Charles Foster Kane was born in Little Salem, Colorado, USA, in 1862. His mother was Mary Kane, his father was Thomas Kane. Mary Kane ran a boarding house âŚ
Itâs not working. A birth may be the beginning of a life and, if the brain was a data processor, thatâs surely where our tale would start. But raw biographical data have little meaning to the storytelling brain. What it desires â what it insists upon, in exchange for the rare gift of its attention â is something else.
1.1
Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And thatâs how they continue too. Whether itâs a sixty-word tabloid piece about a TV starâs tiara falling off or a 350,000-word epic such as Anna Karenina, every story youâll ever hear amounts to âsomething changedâ. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. âAlmost all perception is based on the detection of changeâ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. âOur perceptual systems basically donât work unless there are changes to detect.â In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.
Itâs from such neural activity that your experience of life emerges. Everything youâve ever seen and thought; everyone youâve loved and hated; every secret youâve kept, every dream youâve pursued, every sunset, every dawn, every pain, bliss, taste and longing â itâs all a creative product of storms of information that loop and flow around your brainâs distant territories. That 1.2-kg lump of greyish-pink computational jelly you keep between your ears might fit comfortably in two cupped hands but, taken on its own scale, itâs vast beyond comprehension. You have 86 billion brain cells or âneuronsâ and every one of them is as complex as a city. Signals flow between them at speeds of up to 120 metres per second. They travel along 150,000 to 180,000 kms of synaptic wiring enough to wrap around the planet four times.
But whatâs all this neural power for? Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce. These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us. Convincing a member of the opposite sex that weâre a desirable mate is a challenge that requires a deep understanding of social concepts such as attraction, status, reputation and rituals of courting. Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control. Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. Itâs by learning how to control the world that they get what they want.
Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. Itâs the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. Itâs our winding path to a more successful tomorrow. When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.
Now think of your face, not as a face, but as a machine thatâs been formed by millions of years of evolution for the detection of change. Thereâs barely a space on it that isnât somehow dedicated to the job. Youâre walking down the street, thinking about nothing in particular, and thereâs unexpected change â thereâs a bang; someone calls your name. You stop. Your internal monologue ceases. Your powers of attention switch on. You turn that amazing change-detecting machine in its direction to answer the question, âWhatâs happening?â
This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers. Those whoâve tried to unravel the secrets of story have long known about the significance of change. Aristotle argued that âperipeteiaâ, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John Yorke has written that âthe image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.â
These changeful moments are so important, theyâre often packed into a storyâs first sentences:
These openers create curiosity by describing specific moments of change. But they also hint darkly at troubling change to come. Could Spot be under a bus? Where is that man going with that axe? The threat of change is also a highly effective technique for arousing curiosity. The director Alfred Hitchcock, who was a master at alarming brains by threatening that unexpected change was looming, went as far as to say, âThereâs no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.â
But threatening change doesnât have to be as overt as a psychoâs knife behind a shower curtain.
Rowlingâs line is wonderfully pregnant with the threat of change. Experienced readers know something is about to pop the rather self-satisfied world of the Dursleys. This opener uses the same technique Jane Austen employs in Emma, which famously begins:
As Austenâs line suggests, using moments of change or the threat of change in opening sentences isnât some hack trick for childrenâs authors. Hereâs the start of Hanif Kureishiâs literary novel Intimacy:
Hereâs how Donna Tarttâs The Secret History begins:
Hereâs Albert Camus starting The Outsider:
And hereâs Jonathan Franzen, opening his literary masterpiece The Corrections in precisely the same way that Eric Hill opened Whereâs Spot?
Neither is it limited to modern story:
Or fiction:
And even when a story starts without much apparent change âŚ
⌠if itâs going to earn the attention of masses of brains, you can bet change is on the way:
In life, most of the unexpected changes we react to will turn out to be of no importance: the bang was just a lorry door; it wasnât your name, it was a mother calling for her child. So you slip back into reverie and the world, once more, becomes a smear of motion and noise. But, every now and then, that change matters. It forces us to act. This is when story begins.
1.2
Unexpected change isnât the only way to arouse curiosity. As part of their mission to control the world, brains need to properly understand it. This makes humans insatiably inquisitive: nine-week-old babies are drawn to, unfamiliar images over ones theyâve seen before; between the ages of two and five, itâs thought children ask around 40,000 âexplanatoryâ questions of their caregivers. Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowledge. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers everything about them.
The secrets of human curiosity have been explored by psychologists, perhaps most famously by Professor George Loewenstein. He writes of a test in which participants were confronted by a grid of squares on a computer screen. They were asked to click five of them. Some participants found that, with each click, another picture of an animal appeared. But a second group saw small component parts of a single animal. With each square they clicked, another part of a greater picture was revealed. This second group were much more likely to keep on clicking squares after the required five, and then keep going until enough of them had been turned that the mystery of the animalâs identity had been solved. Brains, concluded the researchers, seem to become spontaneously curious when presented with an âinformation setâ they realise is incomplete. âThere is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,â wrote Loewenstein, âeven for questions of no importance.â
Another study had participants being shown three photographs of parts of someoneâs body: hands, feet and torso. A second group saw two parts, a third saw one, while another group still saw none. Researchers found that the more photos of the personâs body parts the participants saw, the greater was their desire to see a complete picture of the person. There is, concluded Loewenstein, a âpositive relationship between curiosity and knowledgeâ. The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it. As the stories reveal more of themselves, we increasingly want to know, Where is Spot? Who is âBunnyâ and how did he die and how is the narrator implicated in his death?
Curiosity is shaped like a lowercase n. Itâs at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity â the zone in which storytellers play â is when people think they have some idea but arenât quite sure. Brain scans reveal that curiosity begins as a little kick in the brainâs reward system: we crave to know the answer, or what happens next in the story, in the way we might crave drugs or sex or chocolate. This pleasantly unpleasant state, that causes us to squirm with tantalised discomfort at the delicious promise of an answer, is undeniably powerful. During one experiment, psychologists noted archly that their participantsâ âcompulsion to know the answer was so great that they were willing to pay for the information, even though curiosity could have been sated for free after the session.â
In his paper âThe Psychology of Curiosityâ, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the âposing of a question or presentation of a puzzleâ; (2) âexposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolutionâ; (3) âthe violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanationâ; (4) knowledge of âpossession of information by someone elseâ.
Storytellers have long known these principles, having discovered them by practice and instinct. Information gaps create gnawing levels of curiosity in the readers of Agatha Christie and the viewers of Prime Suspect, stories in which theyâre (1) posed a puzzle; (2) exposed to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution; (3) surprised by red herrings, and (4) tantalised by the fact that someone knows whodunnit, and how, but we donât. Without realising it, deep in the detail of his dry, academic paper, Loewenstein has written a perfect description of police-procedural drama.
Itâs not just detective stories that rely on information gaps. John Patrick Shanleyâs Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play Doubt toyed brilliantly with its audienceâs desire to know whether its protagonist, the avuncular and rebellious Catholic priest Father Flynn, was, in fact, a paedophile. The long-form journalist Malcolm Gladwell is a master at building curiosity about Loewensteinian âquestions of no importanceâ and manages the feat no more effectively than in his story âThe Ketchup Conundrumâ, in which he becomes a detective trying to solve the mystery of why itâs so hard to make a sauce to rival Heinz.
Some of our most successful mass-market storytellers also rely on information gaps. J. J. Abrams is co-creator of the longform television series Lost, which followed characters who mysteriously manage to survive an airline crash on a South Pacific island. There they discover mysterious polar bears; a mysterious band of ancient beings known as âthe Othersâ; a mysterious French woman; a mysterious âsmoke monsterâ and a mysterious metal door in the ground. Fifteen million viewers in the US alone were drawn to watch that first series, in which a world was created then filled until psychedelic with information gaps. Abrams has described his controlling theory of storytelling as consisting of the opening of âmystery boxesâ. Mystery, heâs said, âis the catalyst for imagination ⌠what are stories but mystery boxes?â
1.3
In order to tell the story of your life, your brain needs to conjure up a world for you to live inside, with all its colours and movements and objects and sounds. Just as characters in fiction exist in a reality thatâs been actively created, so do we. But thatâs not how it feels to be a living, conscious human. It feels as if weâre looking out of our skulls, observing reality directly and without impediment. But this is not the case. The world we experience as âout thereâ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. Itâs an act of creation by the storytelling brain.
This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. Itâs this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. Itâs this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. Youâll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it. âConsider that whole beautiful world around you, with all its colours and sounds and smells and textures,â writes the neuroscientist and fiction writer Professor David Eagleman. âYour brain is not directly experiencing any of that. Instead, your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull.â
This hallucinated reconstruction of reality is sometimes referred to as the brainâs âmodelâ of the world. Of course, this model of whatâs actually out there needs to be somewhat accurate, otherwise weâd be walking into walls and ramming forks into our necks. For accuracy, we have our senses. Our senses seem incredibly powerful: our eyes are crystalline windows through which we observe the world ...
