Review: The Science of Storytelling

 The Science of Storytelling is a book about applied neuroscience. The idea behind the book is to use our knowledge of the past few decades of neuroscience research and apply it to stories and characters, allowing us to analyze successful stories or create new ones. 

Will Storr's thesis is that we are interested in stories because of the main characters in them --- our internal experience of the world is that the kind of people who read novels are well aware that the human experience of the world is governed by an internal model of who we are and how the world works (i.e., how we control the outcome of our environment), and that character-driven stories are about how the character recognizes the flaws or changes of his or her model and either overcomes those flaws (by having an epiphany) or fails to change and get swept away by the resultant events.

Because the story event has been designed to strike at the core of this character’s identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest. The flawed models they’re required to shatter run so deep that it takes an act of almost supernatural strength and courage to finally change them for good. (kindle loc 2470)

Storr then applies this approach to many stories (including one of my favorites, The Remains of the Day), and shows how the main characters in them view the world, and the change or epiphany that governs the characters's realization of the flaw in the model, and the outcome.

The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us. (kindle loc 2642)

 Despite none of the neuroscience in the book being new to me, the application of the character/plot/story model to neuroscience gives me a new tool to analyze novels, and Storr's examples are fun and interesting. The only flaw that I can find in the book is that this tool isn't useful for most of science fiction, for instance, where it's the setting/situation/setup that's interesting and not the characters, nor is it useful for many genres like mystery novels. The author does recognize this limitation, and has an appendix with exercises on the applicability of his theories to those genres, but clearly those don't apply to the examples that he chose to use throughout the book.

Nevetheless, the book was a lot of fun and worth reading.