Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (10 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
Readers intuitively know what neuroscientists have discovered: everything we experience is automatically coated in emotion. Why? It’s our version of a computer’s ones and zeros, and it’s based on a single question:
Will it hurt me, or will it help me?
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This humble equation underlies every aspect of our rich, elegant, complex, and ever-changing sense of self, and how we experience the world around us. According to Damasio, “No set of conscious images of any kind on any topic ever fails to be accompanied by an obedient choir of emotions and consequent feelings.”
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If we’re not feeling, we’re not breathing. A neutral protagonist is an automaton.
When your protagonist’s reaction is up close and personal, it catapults us into his skin, where we become “sensate,” feeling what he feels, and there we remain throughout the entire story. This isn’t to say we won’t feel what other characters feel as well. But ultimately, what other characters do, think, and feel will
itself
be measured by its affect on the protagonist. It is the protagonist’s story, after all, so we evaluate everyone and everything else based on how they affect him. Because ultimately what moves a story forward are the protagonist’s actions, reactions, and decisions, rather than the external events that trigger them.
Your protagonist’s reaction can come across in one of three ways:
1.
Externally:
Fred is late; Sue paces nervously, stubbing her toe. It hurts. She hops on one foot, swearing like a sailor, hoping she didn’t chip the ruby red polish Fred loves so much.2.
Via our intuition:
We know Sue’s in love with Fred, so when we discover that the reason he’s late is because he’s with her BFF, Joan, we instantly feel Sue’s upcoming pain, although at the moment she has no idea Fred even knows Joan.3.
Via the protagonist’s internal thought:
When Sue introduces Fred to Joan, she instantly senses something is going on between them. Watching them pretend to be strangers, Sue begins to plot the intricate details of their grisly demise.
When the events of the story are filtered through the protagonist’s point of view—allowing us to watch as she makes sense of everything that happens to her—we are seeing it through her eyes. Thus it’s not just that we
see
the things she sees—it’s that we grasp what they
mean
to her. In other words, the reader must be aware of the protagonist’s personal spin on everything that happens.
This is what gives narrative story its unique power. What sets prose apart from plays, movies, and life itself is that it provides direct access to the most alluring and otherwise inaccessible realm imaginable: someone else’s mind. Lest the significance of this be lost, bear in mind that our brain evolved with just that goal—to see into the minds of others in order to intuit their motives, thoughts, and thus, true colors.
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(We’ll explore this further in
chapter 4
.) Even so, in life the key word is
intuit
; movies have the raw power to convey thoughts visually, through action; plays, via dialogue. While all three can be incredibly compelling (especially life), ultimately, they still leave us guessing. In prose, those thoughts, clearly stated, are where the story lives and breathes, because they directly reveal how the protagonist is affected by—and how she interprets the meaning of—what happens to her.
That’s what readers come for. Their unspoken hardwired question is,
If something like this happens to me, what would it feel like? How should I best react?
Your protagonist might even be showing them how
not
to react, which is a pretty handy answer as well.
So how do you clue the reader into the protagonist’s thoughts so we’re privy to how he is making sense of what befalls him? That is, how do you let us know what he is
actually
thinking, especially since it’s often the opposite of what he says? This is a doubly crucial question, since very often a character’s reaction to what happens is solely internal—be it an unspoken monologue, a sudden insight, a recollection, or an epiphany. How you weave it into your story depends on whether you’re writing in the first person or the third person. Let’s take a quick look at each.
Conveying the protagonist’s thoughts when writing in the first person sounds like a no-brainer. After all, since he’s telling us his story,
everything
reflects what he thinks, right? Exactly. This is what makes
it tricky. Why? Because it means that every single thing in a story told in the first person must have a direct, implicit, and illuminating spin. Thus the narrator’s opinion is laced into everything he tells you. Each detail he chooses to convey reflects his mindset and reveals something about him and how he sees the world. Think of it as the
Rashomon
effect: if four people witness the same event, you end up with four very different accounts of it—each one believable. Is one account true and the other three not? Nope, it’s just that given each person’s worldview, they processed what happened differently; each found certain aspects compelling, assigned them meaning as
each
saw it, and so drew different conclusions.
Is there an objective truth? Maybe. But considering that by definition we experience everything subjectively, how would we know? Which means that in a first-person account, everything the narrator tells us is imbued with his own subjective meaning, simply by virtue of the fact that
these
are the details he’s picked to tell his story.
How is this different from the spin things have when writing in the third person? It’s a difference in distance. In a third-person narrative, there are times when the
reader
evaluates the meaning of things relayed by the omniscient narrator (that’s you, by the way), based on what he or she knows about the protagonist. For instance, the fact that Ted decided to surprise Ginger with a brand new plush Day-Glo orange couch is in and of itself neutral. But if we know that Ginger loved her old couch, hates orange, and don’t even ask her about plush, then we’ll have a pretty good idea how she’ll feel when she sees it—regardless of what she says to Ted.
In a first-person account, on the other hand, nothing is ever neutral, even for a moment. This means the narrator will never tell us about anything that does not in some way affect him. He won’t give us long objective passages about what the town looked like, what Edna wore to the office, how great the madeleine tasted, or how the Reagan administration ruined the country. Sure, he might tell us all these things but
only
because they have a specific effect on the story he’s telling. It
might help to think of the narrator as a narcissist (but in a good way). Everything in the story relates to him or else why would he be telling us about it?
Thus the narrator’s thoughts are laced through everything he chooses to report, and he draws a conclusion about everything he mentions. But he doesn’t stop there. He isn’t the least bit shy about directly expressing exactly what he thinks about, well, everything. Of course, he could be completely wrong about everything he says—first-person narrators are often unreliable, and part of the reader’s pleasure is figuring out what’s really true.
The only thing a first-person narrator can’t tell us is what someone else is thinking or feeling. So if Fred is talking about his breakup with Sue, he can’t say, “When I told Sue I was in love with Joan, she felt as if she’d been gut punched.” But what he can say is, “When I told Sue I was in love with Joan, the color drained from her face as if she’d been gut punched.” Fred can infer or guess how Sue felt, but he can’t come out and say it with certainty—unless, of course, Fred is the type of character who always assumes he knows exactly how everyone else is feeling, in which case we’ll know that Fred’s assertion about Sue feeling gut punched is meant to tell us something about
Fred
, rather than how Sue actually felt.
But what if Fred feels nothing? Because, you see, he’s in denial. So naturally he doesn’t react to Sue’s rapidly escalating hints that she knows all about him and Joan. Right? Sounds like a real Catch-22, doesn’t it? After all, if you
know
you’re in denial, the cat’s sort of out of the bag. So, when writing in the first person—or the third for that matter—how on earth can you convey all the things Fred is
not
thinking?
It goes without saying that the one thing you don’t want to do is have Fred think nothing. Instead, the way to convey that he’s in denial is to show how he interprets all those hints Sue’s giving him. In other words, how does he rationalize them? Being in denial isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s not a “blank” state; rather, it takes a good bit of work. When it comes to maintaining our coveted sense of well-being, each
of us is a quintessential spin doctor.
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This means that Fred will work overtime to make sense of things that, to the reader, clearly have an altogether different meaning than the one he’s just assigned to them.
To sum up, when writing in the first person, it helps to keep these things in mind:
• Every word the narrator says must in some way reflect his point of view.
• The narrator never mentions anything that doesn’t affect him in some way.
• The narrator draws a conclusion about everything he mentions.
• The narrator is never neutral; he always has an agenda.
• The narrator can never tell us what anyone else is thinking or feeling.
One of the beauties of writing in the first person is that you never have to worry whether the reader will know whose thoughts you’re trying to convey. Every thought belongs to the narrator. But writing in the third person is another story, especially because there are several variations. First, here’s a quick rundown of the three most frequently used:
1.
Third-person objective:
The story is told from an objective external standpoint, so the writer never takes us into the characters’ minds at all, never tells us how they feel or what they think. Instead, as with film (long rambling voiceovers not withstanding), that information is implied solely based on how the characters behave. If you’re writing in third-person
objective, you’ll show us the protagonist’s internal reactions through external cues: body language, clothes, where she goes, what she does, who she associates with, and of course, what she says.2.
Third-person limited (aka third person close):
This is very much like writing in first person, in that you can tell us only what one person—almost always the protagonist—is thinking, feeling, and seeing. Thus the protagonist must be in every scene, and aware of everything that happens; the only real difference is that you’re using “he” or “she” rather than “I.” And as with first person, you can’t tell us definitively what anyone but the protagonist thinks or feels unless that person pipes up and actually says it out loud.3.
Third-person omniscient:
Here, the story is told by an all-seeing, all-knowing, objective and (traditionally) trustworthy narrator (you), who has the power to go into every character’s mind and tell us what they are thinking and feeling, have done, and will ever do. The trick, of course, is to keep track of all of it. And to stay behind the curtain at all times. Even a fleeting glimpse of the puppet master completely ruins the illusion that there are no strings attached.
Okay, so how do you convey thoughts when writing in either third-person omniscient or limited? You do this by using something that, as far as the reader is concerned, is akin to telepathy. Good stories do it so well that we don’t even notice they’re doing it. In fact, I’d venture to say you’ve probably read hundreds of books written in the third person that clued you into what the characters were thinking so deftly that when it comes to figuring out exactly how they did it, you’re
still
wondering whether you should italicize or put quotation marks around sentences that must then be clearly tagged as thoughts. The answer is, none of the above. No italics. No quotation marks. No tags.
Once you master the art of slipping your characters’ thoughts onto the page, the reader will be able to automatically differentiate a character’s inner thoughts from the narrator’s voice. Readers intuitively expect the protagonist to have an opinion, whereas you, as narrator, don’t even exist as far as they’re concerned—that is, as long as you keep your opinions to yourself. The narrative voice is almost always neutral, meaning that as omniscient narrator, you’re invisible and just reporting the facts. Your characters, on the other hand, are free to express their opinion on whatever they so desire. As long as the reader knows whose head we’re in—that is, who the point-of-view character is—you rarely need a preamble at all. For instance, this is from Elizabeth George’s
Careless in Red:
Alan said, “Kerra.”
She ignored him. She decided on jambalaya with dirty rice and green beans, along with bread pudding. It would take hours, and that was fine with her. Chicken, sausage, prawns, green peppers, clam juice … The list stretched on and on. She’d make enough for a week, she decided. The practice would be good, and they could all dip into it and reheat it in the microwave whenever they chose. And
weren’t
microwaves marvelous? Hadn’t they simplified life? God, wouldn’t it be the answer to a young girl’s prayers to have an appliance like a microwave into which
people
could be deposited as well? Not to heat them up, but just to make them different to what they were. Whom would she have shoved in first? she wondered. Her mother? Her father? Santo? Alan?
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