(Please understand that when I say "racism" I mean "...and xenophobia, sexism, ableism, general misanthropy, etc." …We'll get there. )
Abstract
For the third entry of my "Fair and Balanced™ Reviews of Craft Books" series, I read The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr. In my Fair and Balanced™ opinion, this book hates science as much as it hates storytelling, but not as much as it hates human people. When I say this, I'm not making a glib joke about the poor quality of the book and how painful of an experience it was to read it. I'm actually saying this book is dripping with contempt for humanity, and I cannot fathom why the author chose a career in the arts if the mere idea of genuine human connection is so foreign to him as to seem risible.
Introduction: Life is meaningless and people are horrible
The main conceit in this book is that "reality is not real, man..." It's all made up by your "storytelling brain". Isn't it spooky? Your brain, which is you, is locked inside your dark, dark skull, making up what you think of as "reality" based on electrical impulses sent by your nervous system.
Even spookier, we can't be sure of what is real or not! We can't really perceive anything so there may be a real reality out there that we have no way of knowing! We have science about it:
‘Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive,’ the cognitive scientist Professor Donald Hoffman has said. ‘But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.’
Storr introduces this idea with great dramatic flair and relentlessly returns to it throughout the book. He defamiliarizes the most basic aspects of perception in order to make this book feel more profound than it actually is: He explains, for example, that there is no such thing as "color", you fool, you absolute buffoon. It's just different wavelengths of light. You ignorant, naïve child. Sound? Also not real, simply vibrations picked up by your ear bones. Don't you feel silly for believing the hallucinations of your own brain.
Of course, there is no color or sound in the same way there is no "Sun". It's just a giant burning ball of hydrogen and helium located 150 million km away from Earth, dumbass.
But if you're not sufficiently terrified by the realization that things are what their definitions say they are, maybe you'll feel appropriate despair when you realize life has no objective meaning and the only goals evolution gave us are "fuck" and "not die until you fuck":
Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it. We beetle away happily, into our minutes, hours and days, with the fact of the void hovering over us. To look directly into it, and respond with an entirely rational descent into despair, is to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition, categorised as somehow faulty. The cure for the horror is story. [...] Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them. What we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all. It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread.
Now here's the thing I realized while organizing my notes: the reason I had such a strong, visceral reaction while reading this book is not that it's bad. I've read plenty of bad craft books. It's not that it's uniquely wrong in its facts: most of the actual info about how brains work is more or less true (see Methodology and References). It's not that the writing advice is bad (see Appendix). It's that the book has a philosophical position exactly opposite of mine, and does not examine it for a single second (see Limitations of the Study).
You see, I broadly agree that there is no "objective" purpose or meaning of life, that evolution gave us the twin goals of fucking and not dying, and that everything else we made up. I just happen to think of this fact as liberating and joyful, when the author is assuming anyone would find it as horrible and depressing as he does. Storr seems to resent reality for not giving him a fucking to-do list, and humans for making their own:
It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread.
Why is it an illusion of meaning, if it's meaningful? If it affects how people feel, make, behave, connect, think... how is that meaning illusory? What would make it "real"? (see fig. 1)
Storr brings the same "pessimism disguised as objectivity" to his analysis and explanations of human behavior and relationships. He is enamored with the concept of control theory, but instead of treating it as a neutral lens to explain and predict behavior, he latches onto the "control" vocabulary and writes about it like it proves humans are evil and manipulative megalomaniacs, if left to our own devices.
Every time he talks about human relationships he does it in an adversarial way. When he is forced to acknowledge the human tendency for cooperation and how pro-social behavior is actually the norm for us, he makes sure to point out our motives are selfish (fucking and not dying). Empathy, for Storr, is always a ruse. It's not necessarily that we're tricking others into thinking we care about them. It's more insidious than that: our brains are tricking us into thinking we care. And this is what storytellers exploit when making compelling characters.
Limitations of the Study: Done by a cishet white guy with zero introspection
content warning for racism, xenophobia, ableism... general bigotry. I'm not going super in detail or being graphic, but I am listing examples of this dude being bigoted while maintaining a "benevolent" tone and it gets infuriating
A particularly irritating experience when reading this book is that Storr takes great care to highlight the fact we all have biases that color the way we see and experience the world. He mentions studies (see References) about how biases make people experience and recall the same event in entirely different ways. He is clear that this isn't a metaphor: we truly live in different realities. Even more concerning, we cannot see our own biases, we assume everyone is wrong and biased, but not us. Aren't we silly, evil creatures that think we're above it, somehow.
Then he proceeds to be above it, somehow.
Will Storr exposes himself by assuming his own biases are universal (we all do this horrible thing, right guys? The only thing keeping us from doing shitty things to others is the implicit threat of starvation and death ostracism would bring, right??). But also by making a very half-assed attempt at acknowledging people Not Like Him exist, without taking the crucial step to acknowledge he is not automatically above them.
The worst (and most frequent) example of this is his inability to speak about Native Americans in anything but past tense. He only mentions Native Americans as a monolith, and as an example to illustrate "natural" human tendencies, presumably without the corrupting influence of civilization. For example, when talking about "theory of mind", he brings up "primitive" shamanistic religions that "used to be" animist, which proves humans have such a strong tendency to assign thoughts and feelings to others, we do it to inanimate objects as well (for how much this is not related to the concept of "theory of mind", see Methodology). He then compares this to children playing with stuffed animals and imaginary friends... yeah.
The only times people Not Like Him seem to matter is when he's explaining how biases make everyone (but him) bad. He comments on how eating a burger would "get you killed" in India, and how Jewish women think everyone is below them, but don't worry, we shouldn't judge too harshly because they are human like you and I. Their biases just make them live in a different reality! Speaking of, he starts a chapter with a description of a patient experiencing psychosis as a cute way to explain we're all delusional. We all live in different realities, so aren't we all a little bit schizophrenic, in the end?
Of course, his biases are still present (and unacknowledged) when he's strictly talking about storytelling as well. I won't list every example, but I will list one that illustrates this very well: In the first chapter, he explains (with science!) that grammar is like a "film director" and the right word order mimics a movie so the reader can picture the scene correctly.
Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence. For the same reason, active sentence construction – Jane kissed her Dad – is more effective than passive – Dad was kissed by Jane. Witnessing this in real life, Jane’s initial movement would draw our attention and then we’d watch the kiss play out. We wouldn’t be dumbly staring at Dad, waiting for something to happen. Active grammar means readers model the scene on the page in the same way that they’d model it if it happened in front of them. It makes for easier and more immersive reading.
At no point does he stop to think that there are literally dozens of people out there writing and reading stories in Not English, with grammar that doesn't conform to this specific word-order. Grammar, to him, is simply biologically mandated by the way our brains work. And grammar, to him, is "modern English grammar".
Not to mention the singular reason to use active voice, according to Storr, is to facilitate visualization. Never mind the fact that a lot of people don't visualize when reading and don't feel the need to. This is even before we account for people without the capacity to visualize (such as people born blind or with aphantasia) that still enjoy reading.
This also assumes the goal of the writer is always to be "immersive" in a way that means "like a movie". Fuck poetry and literary fiction, I guess. Besides, what if you were staring at Dad because you were waiting for something to happen? What if the writer's goal was to emphasize Dad's reaction or something?
He does this sort of thing often. At best he gives lip service to the idea of other people and cultures experiencing storytelling differently, but when it matters, when it comes to explain with "brain science" what makes stories good, the only evolutionarily approved story structure is the Hero's Journey, naturally.
Methodology: the Ben Shapiro method of building an argument
The Science of Storytelling is a book that tries to cover a lot of ground. This is understandable, human brains are complex, and storytelling is never an individual act, which means sociological, cultural and historical factors also play a part on how we tell stories. This is a lot of information to try to organize in a coherent way, which is why Storr didn't even fucking try.
The book is divided in four chapters:
- Creating a World.
- The Flawed Self.
- The Dramatic Question.
- Plots, Endings and Meanings
Yeah, just four. If you thought that's a lot to include in every chapter, you are correct, which is why every chapter is subdivided seemingly at random and they all are mostly about the same things anyway. This is a very repetitive book.
But that's neither here nor there. The important thing is that this book is about science, so it's important to understand what this book means by "science" and how it approaches it.
Science, for Storr, is an aesthetic at best and a tool to lend the veneer of objectivity to his subjective experiences at worst. I gave up on trying to refute individual arguments at around page five, because I realized this write-up was going to end up being ten times longer than the book. His preferred method of scientific inquiry is to go over multiple facts that are unrelated to each other, mention "studies" or "scientists" (see References), and give generic writing advice (see Appendix), implying by proximity that it is related and supported by the "studies" mentioned, without that being the case.
For example:
‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.
This concept is repeated in different ways for the better part of the chapter, really drilling down the fact that, because evolution wants us to survive, we are "optimized" and "hard wired" and "other verbs that don't apply to humans" to detect change: movement, sudden noises, changes in temperature, etc. Then:
This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers. Those who’ve tried to unravel the secrets of story have long known about the significance of change.
And then we go to twelve individual examples of stories with first lines that "promise" change. Yes this is tedious. No, it doesn't actually connect the concept of "our perception systems detect change in the environment" to "narrative about change in a character's circumstances is interesting".
This is the bulk of the "science" in the book. Out of context facts, vague references to studies, misunderstood or misrepresented neurological and psychological processes. Things that sound like they might have something to do with storytelling, if you don't think about it. Which you won't, because the book already moved on.
He conflates "theory of mind" with "animism" because they are both about minds other than our own, and then he conflates "animism" with "children playing", and then he conflates that with being frustrated at IKEA furniture, which is also the exact same thing as feeling happy when the sun is out, and giving a name to your car or trading stocks. These are all examples of different phenomena, none of which are "theory of mind", but the book already moved on to how anticipating other people's feelings is hard and that makes for great drama in stories.
(Hilariously, Storr does mention that humans love to find patterns where there are none, as if this entire book wasn't "Apophenia: a Memoir")
Results: thanks to the objectivity of science, you too can rationalize your bullshit as if it was truth handed to you by the gods, and if people don't agree it's because they're irrational monkeys
The neat thing about art is that it's not a science. You can't extrapolate anything about human nature from a single book. But you can definitely learn a lot about the nature of the human that wrote it.
When you wrap yourself in the aesthetic of science to present opinion as fact and pessimism as rationality, you end up betraying your worst biases by assuming they are universal. And this book's biases are so plain and so common, they are tiresome. This book is that Enlightened Centrist explaining there is no difference between good or bad things:
Late adolescence sees many choosing a political ideology, left or right – a tribal master-story that fits over our unconscious landscape of feelings and instincts and half-formed suspicions and makes sense of it, suddenly infusing us with a sense of clarity, mission, righteousness and relief. When this happens it can feel as if we’ve encountered revealed truth and our eyes have suddenly been opened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Tribal stories blind us. They allow us to see only half the truth, at best.
This book is the apolitical opinion piece writer letting you know if you have ideals, you are the problem because all war is about ideology, so all ideology is equally bad:
The evil truth about humans is that we don’t just compete for status with other people inside our tribes. The tribes we belong to also compete with rival tribes. We’re not harmlessly groupish like starlings or sheep or shoals of mackerel, but violently so. In the twentieth century alone, tribal conflict killed 160 million, whether by genocide, political oppression or war.
This book is the podcaster telling you that it's actually natural and evolutionary science for "males" to be violent and "females" to be attracted to that, because hey, other animals do it:
The primatologist Professor Frans de Waal writes that ‘it cannot be coincidental that the only animals in which gangs of males expand their territory by deliberately exterminating neighbouring males happen to be humans and chimpanzees. What is the chance of such tendencies evolving independently in two closely related mammals?’
This book is the nice English teacher telling you that the pen is mightier than the sword, the history teacher explaining "nobody" thought women deserved rights "back then", and the liberal politician calling for peace because the only way to get treated fairly is to ask nicely:
The historian Professor Lynn Hunt argues that the birth of the novel helped precipitate the invention of human rights. Prior to the eighteenth century, it was unusual for someone to think to empathise with a member of a different class, nationality or gender. God put us in our rightful place, and that was simply that. But then authors of popular tales such as Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–48) and Julie (1791) ‘encouraged a highly charged identification with the characters and, in doing so, enabled readers to empathise across class, sex and national lines’
It's the comedian with a "cancelled" special and the established author complaining nobody wants to read things by white guys anymore. It's the right-wing commentator scoffing "so much for the tolerant left":
And yet it’s sometimes argued that a storyteller who climbs into the skin of a person of a different gender, race or sexuality is guilty of a kind of theft – that of appropriating and unjustly profiting from another’s culture (...) I fear it’s those who rage against them who’ll end up dividing us further. Smart people will always be able to construct persuasive moral arguments to defend their beliefs, but calls to keep strictly within the bounds of one’s group seem to me to be little more than chimpish xenophobia.
References: My kingdom for a footnote
Full disclosure: I read an ebook version of this book. I do not know if the print editions are better about this and I already spent too much time on this thing, so I will not check.
Storr loves to mention "studies" and "scientists" and "research" without actually citing anything. At first, I assumed this book had no sources but I was wrong: there are sources. They are all tacked at the end under "Notes And Sources", in a single list that includes the claim the source is supporting, but without any of the context. There's also no indication in the body of the book about which claims are sourced and where, because footnote technology is still not widely available, I guess.
The result is that while you read the book you just have to take "trust me, bro" as a source, OR you can identify every time Storr makes a claim, go to the back of the book, try to find where it would be sourced and then pursue the source to see the context of the claim.
This is a paragraph I highlighted on chapter 2 because... well, look at it:
Western children are raised in a culture of individualism which was birthed around 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece. Individualists tend to fetishise personal freedom and perceive the world as being made up of individual pieces and parts. This gives us a set of particular values that strongly influence the stories we tell. According to some psychologists, it’s a mode of thinking that arose from the physical landscape of Ancient Greece. It was a rocky, hilly, coastal place, and therefore poor for large group endeavours like farming.
You know how that's sourced? Again, no footnote, no link, no anything. Way at the back of the book, there is a list of sentence fragments next to some titles for books or papers. They also don't link back to their context, all of this you have to do by hand because you think "maybe it's bullshit that all of Western Thought (which is not defined anywhere) happened because Ancient Greece was rocky:
According to some psychologists: ‘The Geography of Thought’, Richard E. Nisbett (Nicholas Brealey, 2003). A fuller exploration of these ideas features in my book Selfie (Picador, 2017) in Book Two: The Perfectible Self.
It's worth noting that the book "The Geography of Thought" was widely criticized for doing the whole "East/West" dichotomy and having shitty methods.
So that bodes well for the rest of the sources.
Tables and Figures
Figure 1
Appendix: so what about the actual writing advice?
It's fine.
The writing advice is sort of scattered through the book, as we have seen, but at the 60% mark the book ends and we have the Appendix. This is where all the writing advice is systematized in a step by step guide to... write a five act structure.
The crux of his method is to start with character and, specifically, come up with a "flaw" in the way the character sees the world. Then you make it so the character's worldview is tested by the story events and then they're changed by the end.
It's fine. It's nothing you won't find on twitter or an old blog that won't charge you money or try to make sweeping generalizations about human nature. This book has nothing new to say about writing (which is fine, neither do I), but it needs to pretend that it does. So it points at random neuroscience to make it seem like this generic writing advice is special, because it's objectively true.
I do not think it succeeds.
Conclusion: yes I know it should go before 'references', what are you going to do, call the APA police?
So who cares?
I mean, obviously, I do, or I wouldn't have written checks notes almost 4k words about this. But why. Why do I care?
I guess I'm tired. I'm tired of this cult of "rationality" that coincidentally presents the hegemonic, neoliberal perspective as an objective law of nature. I'm tired of the extremely christian assumption that humans are innately evil, sinful, wretched. That our base instincts are all violent and lustful, as if our impulses to hug a crying child and share our food with a friend weren't instinctual as well.
And I'm tired of trying to take the subjectivity out of art.
I'm not categorically against writing advice. Or advice of any kind when it comes to art. It's good to share your experience! It's good to look at others that are where you want to be and pay attention to what they do and why. It's good to have guidance if you want it, so you can experiment with art in a way that feels fruitful to you.
But that's not why this book is titled "The Science of Storytelling". It doesn't want you to experiment. This book, and its target audience, wants a systematic, reproducible methodology with zero ambiguity and guess work. The promise of this book is, in essence, that you won't have to waste time writing stories that aren't scientifically guaranteed to be impactful and meaningful and, I guess, profitable. It's the promise of finding the cheat codes to the human brain.
If you want your writing to genuinely connect with other humans, all you need to do is stop thinking of them as people, and start thinking of them as contemptible chimps.
btw if you like what I write, why not buy me a coffee about it?
