Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (27 page)

Now, for the math test: when evaluating the relevance of each scene in your story, ask yourself,
If I cut it out, would anything that happens afterward change?
To paraphrase the late Johnny Cochrane, “If the answer’s no, it’s got to go.” Hey, I didn’t say it was easy—but neither is pouring your heart and soul into a story only to have it waylaid by a couple of sweet-talking digressions.

Think back to the last time you read a novel that had you hooked. Remember the sensation in your stomach as you turned page after page, anxious to find out what happens next? That’s the feeling of momentum, and it’s visceral—it’s your brain’s way of keeping you hooked, the better to crib info that might come in handy later.

Okay, now imagine the story is a car and it’s zooming ahead at sixty miles an hour. You’ve completely surrendered to its momentum; you’re one with the story. Then a real nice field of flowers off to the left catches the writer’s eye. So he slams on the brakes, and you slam your head against the windshield as he hops out and frolics in the meadow. Just for a lovely, lyrical second. Then he’s ready to get back on the road. But will the story still be going sixty? No, because he just brought it to a dead stop, which means—provided he can coax you back into it—the story is now going zero. There’s a good chance it won’t ever get back up to speed, especially since you don’t quite trust the writer anymore. He stopped the story once for no reason at all; who’s to say he won’t do it again? Plus, since the digression broke the chain of cause and effect, you aren’t exactly sure what’s going on anymore. In fact, you’re probably still trying to figure out how frolicking in the meadow fits into the story, which of course it doesn’t. This means you’re now paying less attention to what’s actually happening on the page, so you might miss the very thing that would otherwise get the story back on track.

And that, my friends, is why, when it comes to digressions, heartless as it may seem, you have to kill them before they kill your story. I suspect this is what Mark Twain meant when he said, “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out.”
¹⁷

It pays to remain hypervigilant, because digressions come in all shapes and sizes. They can be misplaced flashbacks, they can be subplots that have nothing to do with the story itself, and they can be itty
bitty. A digression is any piece of information that we don’t need and therefore don’t know what to do with.

Arm yourself with the knowledge that everything in a story must be there for a story reason; it must be something that, given the cause-and-effect trajectory, the reader needs to know,
at that moment
. Thus there is a question you must ruthlessly ask about every last scrap in your story: “And
so
?”

Because if you don’t ask it, the reader will.

When you ask “And so?” you’re testing for story relevance. What does this piece of information tell us that we need to know? What’s the
point
? How does it further the story? What consequence does it lead to? If you can answer these questions, great. But often the answer is “Um, it doesn’t.”

For instance, imagine if in
It’s a Wonderful Life
there was suddenly a scene in which George Bailey learns to fly fish. You’d scratch your head, thinking, “And I need to know that—
why
?” Perhaps you’d even wonder if it was meant as a metaphor—something about the old “Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself forever” parable, maybe? And while you debated this, chances are you’d miss the bit where Uncle Billy absently wraps the eight grand in his newspaper and accidentally tosses it onto Potter’s lap, so for a long time after that,
nothing
would make sense. Thus, even though George might have had a great time fly fishing, we do not need to know about it. The fly fishing scene fails the “And so?” test, which is no doubt why Frank Capra wisely kept it to himself.

What about your story? Does it sometimes toddle off in interesting yet irrelevant directions likely to thwart the readers’ hardwired need to sense—if not see—the causal connections? Why not break out the red pen and have at it? Don’t be shy. You might want to keep Samuel
Johnson’s advice to writers tucked in the back of your mind as you slash and burn: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
¹⁸

THERE’S AN OLD SAYING:
good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. The trouble is, bad judgment can be deadly. It can lead you to ignore that funny squeak every time you hit the brakes, put off checking out that odd-shaped mole on your big toe, decide to invest every penny with that clever guy whose hedge fund always turns a hefty profit. Even worse, bad judgment can derail your social life—which is a much bigger deal than we often realize. As neuroscientist Richard Restak says, “We are social creatures, the need to belong is as basic to our survival as our need for food and oxygen.”
¹
So, since there are countless tricky situations in which good judgment comes in awfully handy, often the best—not to mention safest—experience to learn from is someone else’s. Could this be where story came from?

It’s a question neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary biologists spend a lot of time pondering: considering that the brain is always working overtime to figure out what’s safe and what isn’t, why would it permit us to put the oft-sneaky “real world” on hold and get lost in a story?
²
The brain never does anything it doesn’t have to, so as neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga notes, the fact that “there seems to be a reward system that allows us to enjoy good fiction, implies that there is a
benefit
to the fictional experience.”
³

What is the benefit, survival-wise, that led to the neural rush of enjoyment a good story unleashes, effectively disconnecting us from the otherwise incessant Sturm und Drang of daily life? The answer is
clear: it lets us sit back and vicariously experience someone else suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the better to learn how to dodge those darts should they ever be aimed at us.

As Steven Pinker says, in a story, “The author places a fictitious character in a hypothetical situation in an otherwise real world where ordinary facts and laws hold, and allows the reader to explore the consequences.”
⁴
Since we’re wired to feel what the protagonist feels as if it were happening to us, when it comes to experience, this is as close as we’re going to get to having our cake and eating it too. Which, of course, is precisely the point.

This means the protagonist is a guinea pig, and whether we like it or not, guinea pigs suffer so we don’t have to. But although guinea pigs have PETA to champion their rights, protagonists are on their own—and trouble really is their middle name. “For example,” cognitive psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar write, “a difficult breakup between a literary protagonist and his or her beloved cannot help but lead us to explore what it would be like were we in the same position. This knowledge is an asset when the time comes for us to cope with such an event in our own lives.”
⁵

The catch is, your protagonist really truly does have to suffer—otherwise not only will she have nothing to teach us, but we won’t have much reason to care about what happens to her, either. Like everything in life, this is much easier said than done. That’s why in this chapter we’ll explore why you’re actually doing your protagonist a favor by setting her up for a fall (or three or four); why in literary fiction, the protagonist must suffer even more than in a commercial potboiler; how to make sure your protagonist’s trouble builds; and why some writers find it impossible to be mean to their protagonist. Finally, we’ll go through eleven devious ways to undermine your characters’ best-laid plans.