We Are Wired For Story

Validation for your choices in life come in many flavors, but the best flavor is scientific backing.

In her TED talk, "Wired for story", Lisa Cron provided great insight into why we humans can't help ourselves from getting absorbed in a good story. It led to our very survival. Turns out we aren't wired too well to take in facts and figures with any level of detail if they are simply told to us; but wrap those same details up in a good story and we usually walk away remembering them, or even better, getting the point of what they were meant to imply upon us in the first place.

One day, long ago, one of our early ancestors was walking along a path in the forest. He'd been traveling for days and he'd run out of his rations two days prior. He was hungry, and the game in the forest wasn't cooperating in his hunting them. Now he came across a bush covered in small round pellet-like red berries with long narrow green leaves. His mouth watered in delight...

Now, if someone had set him down as a kid and given him a verbal list of berries, describing which kinds were edible and which were not, it might be very tough for him to remember years later if the berries he now found were okay or not. After all, remembering the many hundreds or thousands of different plants in the forest would be a challenge for anyone, and quite boring too when given just as naked facts.

But what if, as Lisa Cron suggests in her talk, the man had heard a story about Caveman Bob, a family neighbor from his days a kid in Bedrock, and how Caveman Bob had eaten a handful of red deer pellet-like berries growing on a green bush with leaves that looked like the fingers of a small forest creature? And at the end of that story, Caveman Bob never came out of his cave again?

Chances are our protagonist would remember such a tale involving red deer poop-like looking berries with small forest creature fingers for leaves. It's interesting and draws our attention more than "red berry about the width of a small fingernail and with four to five green leaves about two small twigs in width and one slimy slug in length.

Story saved our lives and let us evolve into who we are today.

But we take away many more things from story than just how to live in a forest. We grow up with stories in books and movies, learning about love and loss, and how to handle and deal with both respectively. They teach us sometimes about how to be good parents or deal with adversity. Story does a lot for us without us even realizing it, though marketers sure understand the value of it! Of course, story can also teach us how to be bad, and that's not such a great thing.

As a writer, though, (and for all those other writers out there) there's another takeaway from Lisa's TED talk. It's near the end, and number two of her three last thoughts she leaves us with. Look for it around 16:43 in the talk.

To paraphrase: Don't explain something to someone, when you can better deliver the information in the form of a story. It'll stick with them longer.

From the writer's perspective that validates the age old advice about not using the expository, because you're better off passing along information to readers showing them through story.

The Building Blocks of Imagination

There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a good book.  Movies and television can do something similar, but I think they come up short in the "all engrossing" department; that degree of capture that makes you lose your sense of time and place in reality.  I think it's because books force you to engage the stories in them in ways visual media does not.  When you read a book or listen to a story on the radio (or over a campfire, for that matter) you must use your mind to conjure up the images being described.  YOU assign faces and hair colors to the characters as prescribed by the storyteller.  YOU decide how big that "monolithic mountain" is in the story.

I guess what I'm saying is that it is the reader or listener who fills in the gaps and creates the internal visuals that the story takes place in.  The storyteller is the guide, but the story reader or listener is the set designer and director of the movie that is taking place in their own mind.

When you watch a show on the big screen or the boob tube, however, 95% of your mind gets the day off.  You are presented with nearly every facet of the story without having to work for it.  You are given the landscape the director chooses to use as his/her preferred backdrop, and the characters are as they're played by the casted actors.  You as the viewer can neither add nor detract from what's presented.  It requires much less of your brain to process a story in this fashion.  It's kind of a lazy way to get the story and, what is more, we dull our creative muscles by not exercising them collaborating in the creative process.  By virtue of this, our imaginations are dying slow deaths.

Maybe this is why many of the great classics - those stories that have enduring qualities - occurred with greater frequency before movies and television became a mainstay of entertainment.  People's ability to envision, to imagine were greater.  They lived in a day and age when if you wanted a story to entertain yourself with, you either had to listen to it on the radio or read a book to get it.  And before that there were only the oral traditions of storytelling.  People developed their imaginations because they had to if they were to enjoy the full experience of the story.

Technology is great, and it's made for some pretty nifty presentations on the screen.  Stuff that might even seem magical if presented to earlier generations.  But for my money there's still no better way to get a story than by sharing in the creative experience of building that movie in our minds with the help of a good storyteller.

A different kind of story from a bygone era was standard fare once upon a time

My book, The Missionary Position, was born out of the voice of one of its characters – the protagonist, Jack Halloway – barging in on my mind whilst in the middle of writing another story. But the point I want to get to now has more to do with the tone and style of how that story is told, than Jack's intrusion.

If you’ve read it, you’ll note the difference from many of today’s reads write away. And I think this has to do with the influence I felt from the old pulps that were once popular in the early to middle part of the twentieth century. I was introduced to them by Louis L’Amour, the famous writer known most for his Western stories. But what many don’t know is that Mr. L’Amour got his start writing for pulp magazines in the 30s and 40s. Maybe earlier – I’m not sure. Many of these stories were high tales of adventure, set in distant locales that to an American reader of that day were often too far off to be comprehendible.

The stories of this era – and not just Louis’ – were a simple fare, with good guys and bad guys, and plots you probably had figured out pretty early on, but it didn’t matter because the story was so rough-and-tumble fun that you couldn’t help yourself but to keep reading on. Think Indiana Jones, since these same pulp fiction stories were the inspiration for George Lucas bringing Indie to our local theaters.

That was the kind of story that popped into my mind with TMP, and I had immense fun writing it. It flowed onto the keyboard so fast out of my fingers that I hardly had time to eat or drink. It was finished, I’d guess looking back on it now, in a matter of a week or two.

And then it sat. 

I began a graduate program. I moved across the country. Life got in the way. And then one day out of boredom I went back to look at some old files and there it was, in all its shining, debacled (is that a word?) glory. I read it again, and loved it, though I did see it needed some tweaking. A buddy read it for me a while back and he made some recommendations. I decided to re-edit it, add some of those recommendations in, have others edit/look at it, and then stepped back to see what I had. 

I liked it again. Loved it, even. I hope you do too!