Will Storr is England’s Malcolm Gladwell–a polymath who uses stories to explore complex and compelling ideas. His books include The Heretics, Selfie, Will Storr vs. The Supernatural, and the Science of Storytelling. His latest, The Status Game, will be released in September. His is also author of a novel called The Hunger and The Howling of Killian Lone.
Everything Storr does informs his other work. The Heretics have him the idea for The Science of Storytelling, which in turn informed his research for The Status Game.
When not working on his own work, Storr teaches writing seminars to audiences ranging from journalists to members of the European parliament.
Charlie Euchner: How can we take the insights from brain science and behavioral science and apply it to the process of writing stories?
Will Storr: About 10 years ago, I was working on a book called the Unpersuadables about why clever people believe crazy things. And the answer, in a nutshell, is that the brain is not a logic processor—it’s a story processor. The brain makes us this hero at the center of the world and we’re overcoming.
I was also working on my first novel. I realized that what the experts were saying about stories were the same things the scientists were telling me about how the brain works. It was the big lightbulb moment. Then I started thinking, well, maybe I can use it to make my own storytelling better.
The basic idea is that the brain is a storyteller and the way it processes reality itself has a story. We are a hero overcoming obstacles. We experience life in three acts, with a crisis, a struggle, and resolution. And that’s why we tell stories. So if that’s true, then these great story theorists have got to have some basis in science.
CE: Aristotle’s Poetics—from 2,500 years ago—still offers a brilliant overview of this. He got it right.
WS: I’m currently writing a book about status and [Aristotle] crops up in there as well. This man was just unbelievably smart. The things that he was coming up a couple thousand years ago! In all these different areas, he’s now being proven right–and wrong in some too. He was quite extraordinary.
CE: When you started to look into the techniques of storytelling, before you got into the brain research, who were you reading?
WS: The big three were Robert McKee, Christopher Booker, and John Yorke. Christopher Booker was the main one. For all of them, [the message] is to the focus on structure, structure, structure. If you compare all the stories that are successful, what they’ve got in common is structure. There are all kind of recipe books. …
But there’s another way. If you take a character-first approach, the plot is designed for the character, rather than starting with the plot and then thinking of a character to plug into it.
CE: The character is where the energy comes from. You can have a perfectly plotted piece, but if you don’t care about the characters and if they have no energy and if you can predict everything they say, the plot is just one damn thing after another—and not a process of exciting exploration and danger and risk-taking.
WS: If you can imagine Breaking Bad with a [poorly drawn] character, it would have completely flopped. For me Walter White was the perfect character—a low-status, embittered, scared character. Breaking Bad was great because of Walter White.
CE: So plot can actually get in the way of a story, without a great character.
WS: For me it’s that marriage of plot and character. When I’m teaching students, they have this great idea. They say, ‘This happens and then this happens, then this happens.’ I say, ‘Well, who does it happen to?’ And they’re not sure. They’re vague or it’s a version of them. They’ve got carried away with plot, plot, plot. They’re convinced they’ve got this bestseller but they haven’t got the character. What matters is our goals in life—the things that we want more than anything, which come out of our character.
We are all flawed characters and we always butt up against our flaws. The plot has to be specifically designed to connect with the characters’ flaws and then test it. Or if it’s a tragedy, make them double down on it. Define your character’s flawed idea about the world in one line, preferably.
At the end of the first season of Fleabag, the [lead character] has this great cathartic moment where she realizes what her problem is—and that is that she only sees herself as a sexual creature, that’s her only value. That problem has created all of the drama. She had sex with her best friend’s boyfriend and her best friend killed herself and that’s destroyed everything. So you begin with that very specific character and that specific flaw.
Another example is The Godfather. Michael’s flaw is his belief that he’s not a gangster. And then his father is assassinated and that tests him. Or in Jaws, the shark comes and starts eating everybody. The protagonist Brody, who is terrified of water, can’t go near it. So that shark, coming into his patch, connects specifically with his flaw and tests it and forces him wrestle with his deepest fears.
So the hero has a flaw and something happens to test it. Once people have done that, the plot thing becomes so much clearer.
CE: When you say flaw, it’s the false story you tell about yourself. It’s like the myth that you believe and live by, which causes you to do all these flawed things. Is that, is that fair to say?
WS: That’s definitely, that’s brilliant. But yeah, the flawed belief about the world.
CE: Your discussion of Lawrence of Arabia was especially powerful. His myth about himself was true in lots of ways. That’s why the myth is so tenacious and why it’s such a worthy adversary—because it actually works, until it doesn’t. Is that what you’re getting at?
WS: Yeah. I ghostwrote a book a couple of years ago for Ant Middleton, who’s a celebrity over here. He used to be in the special forces. I asked why he wanted to do it. “Well,” he said, “I want to be the best.” But why? “Why wouldn’t I want to be the best?” he said. So I asked again. “Because I wanted to be tested.” OK, so why do you want to be tested? Was there somebody in your childhood that made you feel that you had to be the best? And then he tells this amazing story. His father died when he was five. Then the evil stepdad comes along; it’s like a fairy story. He insisted that his kids become the best on pain of physical punishment. And I said to him, you know, would it be fair to say that when you were growing up, you were taught that we’re only safe if you are the best under all circumstances?
And he sort of leaped and said, “Yes, that is exactly it!” And that’s how it works. The idea that “I have to be the best, I am the best,” saved his life. It drove him to incredible heights. Being in the FAS, it’s incredibly difficult. He was in Afghanistan and he was the point man. He was responsible for landing in Afghanistan, 2 in the morning, walking to a Taliban compound and killing somebody and then going home again. You know, he was a tough bastard and they’d be shooting with an AK-47. But he had absolute confidence in his ability. That absolute confidence, he said, saved his life. He sincerely believed that he was invincible. He could dodge bullets—that’s what he said, “I can dodge bullets so that I am the best.” But then once he’s out of the army, he becomes his own worst enemy because he’s not the best anymore. He’s just a guy. And he gets into an argument with a police officer who’s treats him with a certain amount of contempt and he picks him up and he throws him on the floor and he knocks him out and ends up in prison for 18 months.
So that’s how the sacred flaw works. It’s the character’s best friend—but then, usually at a break point, it suddenly it becomes an enemy. And that’s why it’s drama. It’s, “Oh my God, I can’t live this way anymore.”
This myth, as you put it, by which I’ve been living my life and has given me everything that I value, becomes untenable. That’s what happens in great storytelling
CE: Speaking of flaws … Is there a flaw that’s common for writers starting out?
WS: Two of them. The first one is defining your character without specificity, without the understanding that they’ve got to go on a journey of change and they’ve got to be flawed.
CE: The other writer’s flaw?
WS: The second one is related—that you don’t need to know about plot, about structure and process.
I was on a panel at a literary festival and people asked, “What’s your process?” And every single panelist, apart from me, said, ‘Oh, I just imagine a character and see where the character takes me,” and I just don’t believe it. I’m sure some people can write like that and end up with a publishable story. But there’s a lot of bullshit published. And there’s a lot of mythmaking. When [writers say] you’ve just got to close your eyes and let the magic emerge, I think it’s almost cruel, you know?
CE: In your work, you use a process that I call yo-yoing—moving back and forth from scene to summary, back and forth. In The Science of Storytelling, you’ll have several pages where you dig into the brain science and your thinking about technique, which is abstract and not so emotional, right? Then you break away and talk about Lawrence of Arabia or Remains of the Day or other works. You are an explainer on one side, but you are also a storyteller.
WS: The brain wants change. So if you’re going on for three paragraphs about one thing, you need to switch.
In The Science of Storytelling, I had to explain some abstract, complicated ideas. Having the novels and the films is such useful way of describing this complicated brain stuff. It was a real gift to be able to describe confabulation by using Citizen Kane. Storytellers are great because before the scientists got, they understood how this.
CE: Scientists—Darwin, Einstein, Stephen Hawking—have a knack for storytelling. To understand time, Einstein talked about standing on a platform and imagining when lightning struck the top of the train. He was seeing in pictures. He wasn’t seeing equations. Only later did he translate the pictures into equations. So there was a dialogue between the abstract and the concrete.
WS: Jonathan Haight’s a great communicator as well because he really understands the power of simplicity. The way he communicates complex ideas is just absolutely fantastic. So does Richard Dawkins.
CE: Let’s talk about detail and precision. I’m not sure how well people understand the need to amass enormous volumes of information.
When the average person walks into a room, what they see is not enough to describe anything interesting. They just see what they expect to see. As a writer, you have to stay there and just keep observing. You have to collect the most specific details about the character, about the background, about the room, about the conflict, about the other characters, about the situation, about the fears—the more details you get, you get all the building materials you need to build your house.
A lot of writers have an idea of what they want to say. But if they don’t have enough details, it’s like not having enough bricks to build the house and doesn’t stand up. It seems to me that a lot of what you’re talking about in your book is the power of precision—and that requires a lot of work.
WS: There’s precision on two levels. First, the more specific you are about a character at the beginning of a book, the more that character is going to explode out of that story.
In Lawrence of Arabia, he’s a very specific character. He’s an arrogant guy who thinks he’s extraordinary and that’s it. That’s Lawrence of Arabia. But when you put him through all that drama of the war, in all of these different scenarios, he becomes an incredibly complex, realistic character.
So there’s a paradox. I get pushback when I’m trying to define the character in a line or two. People say it’s simplistic. But it really isn’t—there’s something magical about it. You need to be precise about who the character is because you haven’t got the space to write someone’s whole life. You have to write about a precise character.
Also, when you are writing about a precise character, your book becomes about a precise idea. It becomes a deep investigation about how life should be lived. Ira Glass of This American Life once had a mentor who said that all story is an answer to the question: How should I live my life?
I think that’s really true. That’s what that precision in a character gives you. Your character represents a way of living life. And the story is a test of that idea of that—how should I live my life? How is this person living their life? And how is it working out for them? What does it mean? What are the ramifications?
Take Remains of the Day. In a really specific way, it’s about the whole English, stiff-upper-lip, cold, emotionless life. Stevens is very precise. He believes in emotional restraint—those two words, that’s him. That whole book brings out those two words, but it’s incredibly complex and nuanced—and believable. So that’s the first thing about precision.
CE: And the other way to think about precision?
WS: We read books and watch movies and the information comes into our brains in the form of words. The brain reconstructs the world that you’re describing. It’s much more automatic if you give specific details. If you say a monster, your brain doesn’t know what model to use. That’s why we “show, don’t tell.” If you’re just using abstract words, the brain can’t model it accurately.
CE: Then your brain compares the details to its vast database of other monsters. Then the story becomes a process of co-creation. You the author give that detailed portrait of the monster—it could be a dragon or it could be a sadist in a cabin in the woods. But you need to reader to relate it to something that they know. Even if they’ve never had to deal with a dragon or deal with a creep guy in a cabin in the woods, it becomes real to them because they connect something they know with something they don’t notice.
WS: Absolutely. That’s that beautiful thing. As you say, great art is an act of co-creation.
CE: Now let’s talk about the Two Plus Two Rule. If I say two plus two and immediately tell you it equals four, that’s an insult to you. But if I say two plus two and let you conclude, oh yes, that’s four, then the story is a lot more powerful. If I give you three details about that monster in the in the cabin in the woods, you can conclude yourself something about that character. But if I tell you what it means, it takes away the joy.
WS: You can’t spell everything out because then the reader has got nothing to do. The brain is a prediction engine. If the prediction’s unsure, that’s really fun. If there’s nothing to predict, there’s no participation from the reading brain. The more literary you get, the more writing is about hints and clues—the more gaps there are to fill. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, has very little actual story in it: A couple has bad sex and then breaks up. All the rest of it is like a smorgasbord of clues about what is it that triggered this terrible eventuality and why it’s there.
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