Hi writers! I hope you had a wonderful and relaxing Labor Day Weekend. I always associate this time of year with the bittersweet end of summer and heading back to school. So, let’s hit the books! For our challenge this month, in addition to toting around our prompt books and generating a lot of raw material to inspire us for NaNoWriMo in November, we are taking some lessons on what makes a great story from Lisa Cron’s Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel. Every few days I’ll post some thoughts and comments on the book here, but I highly recommend you pick up a copy (published in 2016, it is available in paperback and maybe at your local library) and follow along.
I received Story Genius from a fellow writer in my neighborhood Facebook group. The thing that hooked me is this quote by Flannery O’Connor, which appears in the book’s introduction: “Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” True, right? We all know, after just a few pages, whether we’re going to read a book and enjoy it. Pulp fiction or literary classic, there has to be a good hook to draw us in and keep us in. When we sit down to write, we may be very good at assembling all of the pieces of a novel–interesting characters, cool settings, a “neat” plot twist–but there is often something missing. The whole thing feels flat and disjointed. The idea had so much potential, but it didn’t go anywhere.
In Chapter 1 of Story Genius, Cron sets out the premise of her book: that we are all, by virtue of years of evolution, hard-wired for story. Stories are not purely for entertainment. That is just nature’s bait; the sweet dopamine surge you get when you settle in with a good book and completely lose yourself in the story. But stories are so much more than that. As social animals, we learned a long time ago that, to not only survive but prosper, we needed to understand our fellow humans. Stories let us do that, by stepping into the shoes of a protagonist and exploring an unfamiliar world. This is seductive and satisfying. MRIs reveal that readers’ brains are those of participants, not observers. With a good story, we are not watching things unfold. Reality is suspended for us. We are in it.
And so the key to a great story is not what is happening externally (a/k/a the plot) but what is happening internally, to the protagonist. Cron describes this as the electrified third rail of a subway train. Without it, you have a nice train, full of passengers, and tracks leading off into the distance, but you are going absolutely nowhere. In a good story “[e]verything–action, plot, even the ‘sensory details’–must touch the story’s third rail.” They must have some impact that the protagonist (and the reader staring out of the protagonist’s eyes from his or her virtual reality suit) can feel. Only then does the story begin to chug out of the station. Only by feeling what the protagonist is feeling, experiencing her struggles, and undergoing her internal learning and growth process in real time do we escape into the world of story. This is what makes us turn the page.
Um. Yes. Yes! So how do we make that happen? Check back with me as we read on and find out. Happy writing, guys.