Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel

We don't turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.

Outlining the plot before you develop your protagonist traps you on the surface of your novel—that is, in the external events that happen.

Because the story, as I’m very fond of saying, is in the specifics.

The story you’re telling doesn’t start on page one. It started long before you got there.

In a nutshell: A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.

As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once noted, “Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

In fact, often the opposite is true, because we’re much better at teaching something that we’ve learned through experience than we are at teaching things we innately know. When we innately know how to do something, we assume it’s part of the standard operating package we’re all born with.

But the simple fact remains that without the first half of the story, there can be no second half. The first half establishes where the problem came from and who the protagonist is to begin with, so that the plot you then create can force her to struggle with that problem and, in the process, change.

According to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, functional MRI (fMRI) studies reveal that when we’re reading a story, our brain activity isn’t that of an observer, but of a participant.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke up to find myself alone in a dark wood.

Anything that doesn’t impact the protagonist’s internal struggle, regardless of how beautifully written or “objectively” dramatic it is, will stop the story cold, breaking the spell that captivated readers, and unceremoniously catapulting them back into their own lives.

We see the world through what feels true to us, and that dictates both what we notice and the meaning we read into it.

We’re all people who need people. Which means that in order to have a shot at prospering, we need to understand other people.

One question to ask yourself as you work this out is, Given her misbelief, what does she think the very worst thing that could happen would be? Try to picture it. Spend time exploring it, and don’t worry whether you’re “writing well.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Novelists are revered (and at times feared) because they have been able to go deeper than scientists, shedding light on the inner reaches of someone else’s mind, giving us insight into what makes people tick.

Clearly these are smart people who’ve seen a movie before. Why on earth would they think that they have to protect themselves from what’s happening on the screen? The answer is, they’re not thinking at all. They’re experiencing it as if it were happening to them. For as Gottschall goes on to point out, “Their brains are instructing their bodies to do all the things they’d do if they were actually under mortal attack.

Indeed, feelings don’t just matter, they are what mattering means.

Stories let us vicariously try out difficult situations we haven’t yet experienced to see what it would really feel like, and what we’d need to learn in order to survive.

Story was the world’s first virtual reality.

an effective story is, literally, an offer your brain can’t refuse. You didn’t decide to keep reading—it was a biological reaction. Nature made you do it.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. —URSULA K. LEGUIN

you have to know everything there is to know about the protagonist’s specific internal problem before you create the plot,

the protagonist’s impossible goal: to achieve her desire and remain true to the fear that’s keeping her from it.

We think in story. The brain evolved to use story as its go-to “decoder ring” for reality, and so we’re really expert at probing stories for specific meaning and specific info—and I mean all of us, beginning at birth.