[Audiobook]
The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
I have, for a while, been interested in the process of the generation of fictional stories. My interested was piqued by a screenwriting session at Em-fest before Christmas and I wanted to find out more.
Also, for a long time, I have been thinking that fiction is flawed, and I wanted to understand why I thought that. Now I do.
The book starts out being a bit of a showing off about how many books the author has read, giving a lot of examples of the first few sentences of books. After a while, though, it settles down into some actual content about the importance of stories in the historical context, how and why they developed, and what makes stories interesting. The first sentences are important, they are the reason you want to read the rest of the book, they pose a question in your mind, one which you must find out more about, even if it is not answered by the rest of the book.
There is a slant toward fiction but the techniques here would apply just as well to telling of true stories, perhaps even better, since there is no need for the invention of plot devices to keep the story together, the history is the plot device. It becomes, instead, a question of picking the starting and ending points, and drawing the arc between them.
Some of the neuroscience is covered and some communications theory, with explanations of how to paint vivid pictures in the readers mind, how to communicate what you are thinking to someone else’s brain.
The development and change of characters takes a lot of coverage, with the background of characters being important to how they are changed by their challenges through your story.
The book ends with a recipe for generating characters whole enough they can be easily written about, he calls this the ‘sacred flaw’ approach, which can be summarised – your character has some characteristic core to their being which hinders them in their travails during the story and the story challenges this flaw. The real story is about how they change in response to these challenges.
All in all, a good book about how to write stories, worthy of a second listen. I will come back to it in six months or a year.