Уилл Сторр – The Science of Storytelling (страница 3)
This, I hope, is an approach that will prove more creatively freeing. One benefit of understanding the science of storytelling is that it illuminates the ‘whys’ behind the ‘rules’ we’re commonly given. Such knowledge should be empowering. Knowing
But none of this is to say we should disregard what story theorists such as Campbell have discovered. On the contrary. Many popular storytelling books contain brilliant insights about narrative and human nature that science has only recently caught up with. I quote a number of their authors in these pages. I’m not even arguing that we should ignore their valuable plot designs – they can easily be used to complement this book. It’s really just a question of emphasis. I believe that compelling and unique plots are more likely to emerge from character than from a bullet-pointed list. And the best way to create characters that are rich and true and full of narrative surprise is to find out how characters operate in real life – and that means turning to science.
I’ve tried to write the storytelling book I wish I’d had, back when I was working on my novel. I’ve tried to balance
This book is divided into four chapters, each of which explores a different layer of storytelling. To begin, we’ll examine how storytellers and brains create the vivid worlds they exist within. Next, we’ll encounter the flawed protagonist at the centre of that world. Then we’ll dive into that person’s subconscious, revealing the hidden struggles and wills that make human life so strange and difficult, and the stories we tell about it so profound, compelling, unexpected and emotional. Finally, we’ll be looking at the meaning and purpose of story and taking a fresh look at plots and endings.
What follows is an attempt to make sense of some of what generations of brilliant story theorists have discovered in the face of what equally brilliant women and men in the sciences have come to know. I am infinitely indebted to them all.
Will Storr
September, 2018
Where does a story begin? Well, where does anything begin? At the beginning, of course. Alright then:
It’s not working. A birth may be the beginning of a life and, if the brain was a data processor, that’s surely where our tale would start. But raw biographical data have little meaning to the storytelling brain. What it desires – what it insists upon, in exchange for the rare gift of its attention – is something else.
Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And that’s how they continue too. Whether it’s a sixty-word tabloid piece about a TV star’s tiara falling off or a 350,000-word epic such as
It’s from such neural activity that your experience of life emerges. Everything you’ve ever seen and thought; everyone you’ve loved and hated; every secret you’ve kept, every dream you’ve pursued, every sunset, every dawn, every pain, bliss, taste and longing – it’s all a creative product of storms of information that loop and flow around your brain’s distant territories. That 1.2-kg lump of pink computational jelly you keep between your ears might fit comfortably in two cupped hands but, taken on its own scale, it’s vast beyond comprehension. You have 86 billion brain cells or ‘neurons’ and every one of them is as complex as a city. Signals flow between them at speeds of up to 120 metres per second. They travel along 150,000 to 180,000 kms of synaptic wiring, enough to wrap around the planet four times.
But what’s all this neural power
Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomorrow. When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.
Now think of your face, not as a face, but as a machine that’s been formed by millions of years of evolution for the detection of change. There’s barely a space on it that isn’t somehow dedicated to the job. You’re walking down the street, thinking about nothing in particular, and there’s unexpected change – there’s a bang; someone calls your name. You stop. Your internal monologue ceases. Your powers of attention switch on. You turn that amazing change-detecting machine in its direction to answer the question, ‘What’s happening?’
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. Aristotle argued that ‘peripeteia’, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John Yorke has written that ‘the image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.’
These changeful moments are so important, they’re often packed into a story’s first sentences:
These openers create curiosity by describing specific moments of change. But they also hint darkly at troubling change to come. Could Spot be under a bus? Where
But threatening change doesn’t have to be as overt as a psycho’s knife behind a shower curtain.
Rowling’s line is wonderfully pregnant with the threat of change. Experienced readers know