Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (12 page)

If your protagonist is a trumpet-playing-neurosurgeon-turned-CIA-agent stationed in Antarctica, yes, you’d better know something about each of those things. But in the larger sense, “Write what you know” doesn’t refer as much to facts as to what you know
emotionally
, which translates to your knowledge of what makes people tick.

Writing what you actually know, however, is a dangerous game given our natural propensity to tacitly assume that others have the same knowledge and beliefs that we do.
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This tendency drives what communication scholars Chip and Dan Heath have dubbed “the Curse of Knowledge.” They explain, “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”
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When writers unconsciously assume the readers’ knowledge of—not to mention interest in—what the writers themselves are passionate about, their stories tend to be wildly uneven. On the one hand, the writer is so familiar with his subject that he glosses over things the reader is utterly clueless about. On the other, it’s way too easy for the writer to get caught up in the minutiae of how things “really work” and lose sight of the story itself. This is something that, for some reason, lawyers seem particularly prone to. Over the years, I’ve read myriad manuscripts in which the story comes to a screeching halt while the writer outlines the legal ramifications of every single thing,
as if the reader might sue, should some fine point of jurisprudence be overlooked.

Equally treacherous is the common misconception that just because something “really happened” it’s believable (read: makes sense). That’s why it’s always helpful to have Mark Twain’s pithy observation close at hand: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
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How do you make it make sense? By tapping into what you know about human nature and how people interact, and then consistently showing us the emotional and psychological “why” behind everything that happens. Do you have to hammer this out to the
n
th degree before you start writing? Of course not. As novelist Donald Windham so astutely says, “I disagree with the advice ‘write about what you know.’ Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.”
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And speaking of understanding, here’s a final word to the wise: the bigger the word, the less emotion it conveys. In fact, the less it tends to convey, period, beyond the vague notion that the author is showing off. This is something that both fledgling writers and winners of the National Book Award can easily forget. To best illustrate the point, here’s said award winner Jonathan Franzen talking about a letter he received from a reader: “She began by listing thirty fancy words and phrases from my novel, words like ‘diurnality’ and ‘antipodes,’ phrases like ‘electropointillist Santa Claus faces.’ She then posed the dreadful question: ‘Who is it that you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read.’ ”
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We are all that average person, and the enjoyment we get isn’t frivolous; it’s rooted in our biology. It’s what allows us to leave our real life behind and tap into how it would actually feel to experience life in someone else’s shoes. Big words? They’re pebbles in those shoes, ironically, distracting the reader from the very story they’re meant to tell.

BEFORE THERE WERE BOOKS
, we read each other. We still do, every minute of every day. We instinctively know everyone has an agenda, and we want to be sure that agenda isn’t to clobber us, either metaphorically or with a hammer. What we’re hoping for is kindness, empathy, and maybe a nice big box of chocolates. So it’s interesting to note that the term “agenda” often carries a negative connotation, implying something decidedly Machiavellian, as in duplicitous, manipulative, and cunning. Truth is, agenda is just another word for goal—making it completely neutral and utterly necessary to survival.

In fact, Steven Pinker defines intelligent life as “using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles.”
¹
Almost sounds like the definition of story, doesn’t it? It’s interesting, too, that the most common obstacle in both life and story is figuring out what other people
really
mean. That’s no doubt why, as neuroscientists have recently discovered, our brain comes equipped with something they believe might be akin to X-ray glasses:
mirror neurons
.

According to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, who pioneered the research, our mirror neurons fire when we watch someone do something
and
when we do the same thing ourselves. But it’s not just that we register what it would feel like physically; our real goal is to
understand
the action.
²
As Michael Gazzaniga has noted, thanks to mirror neurons, “Not only do you understand someone is grabbing a candy bar, you understand she is going to eat it or put it in her purse or throw it out or, if you’re lucky, hand it to you.”
³

Mirror neurons allow us to feel what others experience almost as if it were happening to us, the better to infer what “others
know
in order to explain their desires and intentions with real precision.”
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But here’s the kicker. We don’t just mirror other people. We mirror fictional characters too.

A recent study, in which subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain while reading a short story, revealed that the areas of the brain that lit up when they
read
about an activity were identical to those that light up when they actually experience it. Yes, yes, I can see those of you who’ve read steamy novels nodding sagely and thinking,
Uh, you needed a brain scan to tell you that?

Here’s what Jeffrey M. Zacks, coauthor of the study, has to say about the physical effect a story has on us: “Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story.” But it goes much deeper than that. As lead author of the study Nicole Speer points out, the “findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.”
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In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist’s skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don’t know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.
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