Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (26 page)

Since story, both internally and externally, revolves around whether the protagonist achieves his goal, each turn of the cause-and-effect wheel, large and small, must bring him closer to the answer. How? By relentlessly winnowing away everything that stands in his way—legitimate reasons and far-fetched rationalizations alike—until the clock runs down to “now or never.” It’s sort of like musical chairs, except each chair, and the reason it’s yanked out of play, is unique. There’s a method to the madness, because each cause-and-effect pairing specifically—and logically—spurs the next. Each scene’s decision point is tested by the next scene’s action. In other words, each scene makes the next scene inevitable.

Think of it as the “put your money where your mouth is” test. Every time the protagonist makes a decision, saying to herself,
Yep,
this is the right choice, and here’s why …
the story then sits back with a great big grin and says,
Oh yeah? Prove it
.

Here’s an example most of us can relate to: It’s Thanksgiving, and once again you overate, big time. As you peel off your formerly loose clothes, still stuffed to the gills and feeling a wee bit sick, you vow to forgo so much as a single bite of the leftovers tomorrow—who says you don’t have will power? You feel pretty confident about your ability to reach this goal, especially since, at the moment, even the thought of food makes you queasy. And there you have it: action, reaction, decision.

Cut to the next morning. Your plan works really, really well—for a while. And then, as if the possibility never crossed your mind, you get hungry. Thus today’s action puts last night’s decision to the test. What do you do? If you’re anything like me, you tell yourself that being a little chubby is your way of resisting restrictive societal norms, and you chow down with gusto until even your elastic-waist fat pants are tight. Which leads you to the decision that first thing tomorrow, you’re going to find out what a lap band procedure is and whether or not your insurance covers it. Which ups the ante nicely, don’t you think?

To guarantee that the stakes ratchet ever upward, you want to make sure you’ve infused each cause with enough firepower to trigger an effect that packs an unexpected, yet perfectly logical, wallop. For instance, in the movie
The Graduate
, the last thing Benjamin Braddock wants to do is date Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine. So when his parents force the issue, he comes up with a plan: he’ll take Elaine out and be such a cad she’ll never want to see him again. Problem solved. Confidently armed with this decision, he takes action. His plan works perfectly, except for one rather large, unexpected wallop: he falls for Elaine, whom he has now completely alienated. In short, by solving one problem he’s created an even bigger one. Which catapults him into a new decision: find
a way to win Elaine’s love (without dwelling too much on what he’ll say, should she ever ask about how he lost his virginity).

In the same way, your goal is to be sure each individual scene effectively uses its specific “action, reaction, decision” to evoke maximum tension and to up the odds. At the beginning of the scene, it helps to ask yourself,
What does my protagonist want to have happen during this scene?
That established, ask yourself, “What is at stake here?” What will it cost her to get what she wants? Armed with this info, you’re ready to write the scene. When you finish it, before diving into the next scene, ask yourself these questions:

Notice that once again it’s the protagonist’s
internal
reaction to what happens that not only dictates what happens next but also gives it meaning. I hit on this so hard because this tends to be a spot where many stories go irrevocably south. Something happens, but we have no idea how it affects the protagonist or what he makes of it, thus it has no emotional impact—and so no firepower. Since the reason for his external reaction is therefore opaque—we have no idea what it is or how he arrived at it—although things definitely
happen
, the story itself coasts to a standstill.

Lest you think all this will make your story hopelessly unsurprising, take heart. Although your story’s course may be fated from the moment that first domino teeters and falls, that doesn’t mean it’s predictable. Mastering the relationship between internal and external cause and effect allows you to tease the reader in ways she will actually enjoy. Here are four areas of delicious unpredictability:

Note that because story is driven by the protagonist’s internal struggle, all these possible plot twists tend to stem from her attempt to get the most by giving up the least. And just like in real life, as we’ll explore in depth in the next chapter, this usually only succeeds in making the situation worse. After all, there are so many really creative ways the protagonist can shoot herself in the foot. The goal is to establish her motivation beforehand so that the instant she pulls the trigger, readers will be both surprised and sheepish.
Of course!
we say to ourselves.
I should have seen it coming
.

What happens when a story
isn’t
governed by the laws of cause and effect? The answer is quite sobering.

Let’s say the writer needs to get his protagonist, Barbara, out of an unexpected tight spot. So he devises a scenario that saves her in the moment and then promptly forgets all about it without stopping to consider that introducing a fact or character to solve a problem in one scene generates ongoing expectations in the reader’s mind
that never go away
. As we’ll discuss in detail in
chapter 10
, we’re wired to predict what will happen next, and the way we do this is by charting patterns. Familiar patterns are safe. Deviate from a pattern, and bingo, like the robot in
Lost in Space
, it’s “Danger, Will Robinson!” and you have our attention. The deviation then becomes the lens through which we filter the action.
¹³

For instance, let’s say Ronald, Barbara’s condescending womanizer of a boss, insists on driving her home after they’ve worked into the wee hours. Her heart sinks, but she accepts—she needs the job. She breathes a sigh of relief as he pulls into her driveway, but when he quickly hops down from his huge black SUV and trots around to open her door, she knows she’s in trouble. Noticing his lecherous grin, she assures him that she can see herself in. But Ronald stands firm; he wouldn’t
dream of leaving a defenseless woman alone until he’s absolutely sure her home is intruder free. With that, he slips his arm snugly around her waist, and Barbara knows she’d better act fast or she’ll be in big trouble.

This means the writer now has to get Barbara out of the situation, without offending Ronald. So he has Barbara turn to Ronald with a sufficiently demure smile and purr, “Not to worry, I’m packing. Sure, I may be a bit rusty since my stint as a sharpshooter in special ops back in ’06, but I’m pretty sure I can still hit a moving target dead on anywhere from, say, right about where you’re standing to a half mile in any direction.” And with that she purposefully reaches into her purse. Not waiting to see whether she’s going for a snubnose .38 or her house keys, Ronald dashes back to the safety of his massive Hummer, climbs inside, and screeches away. Problem solved.

Except that from there on out, the reader will be actively wondering when something is going to happen that will make Barbara have to either whip out a gun and save the day or fess up that she doesn’t actually know what special ops is; it just sounded like something she read once in a Tom Clancy novel. But the damage doesn’t stop there. The fact is, raising expectations that have nothing to do with the story we’re reading changes the way we interpret absolutely
everything
that happens from that moment on.

Let’s say Babs’s story is meant to be a lighthearted chick lit romance in which her biggest problem is convincing Kyle, the idealistic young doctor she is trying to land, that she is not having an affair with her sleazy boss, Ronald. Trouble is, the minute she mentions her special ops background, we’re in an entirely different story. One far less lighthearted. Since a huge part of the pleasure of reading is trying to figure out what’s going to happen, readers will be spinning possible scenarios all on their own—and you want those scenarios to relate to the actual story you’re telling. The last thing you want the reader wondering is,
Gee, if Babs really is a member of special ops, then why is she working as a receptionist in a fertilizer factory in Des Moines for a low-class creep like Ronald? Hmmm, don’t they make bombs out of fertilizer, and isn’t
her boyfriend Kyle just a little too cagey about his past? Sure, he says he worked for Doctors Without Borders, but who’s to say he didn’t do a little drug running on the side? Could it be …
and with that, the reader is off and running in a story that the writer never in his wildest dreams envisioned.

Each thing you add to your story is like a drop of paint falling into a bowl of clear water. It spreads and colors
everything
. As with life, new information causes us to reevaluate the meaning and emotional weight of all that preceded it, and to see the future with fresh eyes.
¹⁴
In a story, it influences how we interpret every single thing that happens—how we read every nuance—and in so doing raises specific expectations about what might occur in the future. Since what makes stories so compelling is the thrill of actually making these connections (we’re all dopamine addicts!), the connections must actually
be
there. When they’re not—when the writer inadvertently plants a piece of information that has nothing whatsoever to do with the narrative itself—the story in the reader’s mind veers in an entirely different direction than where the story is actually headed. So although the author may have completely forgotten about Babs’s supposed special ops training the minute Ronald drove away, the reader won’t. This is exactly the sort of situation that prompted Chekhov to note to S. Shchukin, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
¹⁵

The cause-and-effect imperative can feel daunting to a writer. How
do
you keep track of everything? How can you be sure that you aren’t accidentally leading the reader astray? Since, as Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert says, “every action has a cause and a consequence,”
¹⁶
perhaps we can transform it into a good old-fashioned, genuinely simple math test.

But first, let’s recap what we already know about the laws of cause and effect as they apply to story. To wit, every scene must

This means you can gauge whether a particular scene is part of the great chain of cause and effect by asking yourself these questions: