The Science of Storytelling. Will Storr
micro-movements upwards, as if they were actively scanning the models their brains were generating of its scenes. When they heard ‘downward’ stories, that’s where their eyes went too.
The revelation that we experience the stories we read by building hallucinated models of them in our heads makes sense of many of the rules of grammar we were taught at school. For the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen, grammar acts like a film director, telling the brain what to model and when. He writes that grammar ‘appears to modulate what part of an evoked simulation someone is invited to focus on, the grain of detail with which the simulation is performed, or what perspective to perform that simulation from’.
According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters. This is perhaps why transitive construction – Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad – is more effective than the ditransitive – Jane gave her Dad a kitten. Picturing Jane, then the Kitten, then her Dad mimics the real-world action that we, as readers, should be modelling. It means we’re mentally experiencing the scene in the correct sequence. 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.
A further powerful tool for the model-creating storyteller is the use of specific detail. If writers want their readers to properly model their story-worlds they should take the trouble to describe them as precisely as possible. Precise and specific description makes for precise and specific models. One study concluded that, to make vivid scenes, three specific qualities of an object should be described, with the researcher’s examples including ‘a dark blue carpet’ and ‘an orange striped pencil.’
The findings Bergen describes also suggest the reason writers are continually encouraged to ‘show not tell’. As C. S. Lewis implored a young writer in 1956, ‘instead of telling us a thing was “terrible”, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.’ The abstract information contained in adjectives such as ‘terrible’ and ‘delightful’ is thin gruel for the model-building brain. In order to experience a character’s terror or delight or rage or panic or sorrow, it has to make a model of it. By building its model of the scene, in all its vivid and specific detail, it experiences what’s happening on the page almost as if it’s actually happening. Only that way will the scene truly rouse our emotions.
Mary Shelley may have been a teenager writing more than 170 years before the discovery of our model-making processes, but when she introduces us to Frankenstein’s monster she displays an impressive instinct for its ramifications: filmic word order; specificity and show-not-tell.
It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burned out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite care and pains I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great god! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth was of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Immersive model worlds can also be summoned by the evocation of the senses. Touches, tastes, scents and sounds can be recreated in the brains of readers as the neural networks associated with these sensations become activated when they see the right words. All it takes is deployment of specific detail, with the sensory information (‘a cabbagey’) paired to visual information (‘brown sock’). This simple technique is used to magical effect in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume. It tells of an orphan with an awesome sense of smell who’s born in a malodorous fish market. He takes us into his world of eighteenth-century Paris by conjuring a kingdom of scent:
the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots. The stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease … [the heat of day squeezed] its putrefying vapour, a blend of rotting melon and the fetid odour of burned animal horn, out into the nearby alleys.
The brain’s propensity for automatic model-making is exploited with superb effect by tellers of fantasy and science-fiction stories. Simply naming a planet, ancient war or obscure technical detail seems to trigger the neural process of building it, as if it actually exists. One of the first books I fell in love with as a boy was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. My best friend Oliver and I obsessed over the maps it contained – ‘Mount Gundabad’; ‘Desolation of Smaug’; ‘West lies Mirkwood the Great – there are spiders.’ When his father made photocopies of them for us, these maps became the focus of a summer of blissful play. The places Tolkien sketched out, on those maps, felt as real to us as the sweet shop in Silverdale Road.
In Star Wars, when Han Solo boasts that his ship the Millennium Falcon ‘made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs’ we have the strange experience of knowing it’s an actor doing gibberish whilst simultaneously somehow feeling as if it’s real. The line works because of its absolute specificity and its adherence to what sounds like truth (the ‘Kessel Run’ really could be a smuggling route while ‘parsecs’ are a genuine measurement of distance, equivalent to 3.26 light years). As ridiculous as some of this language actually is, rather than taking us out of the storyteller’s fictional hallucination, it gives it even more density.
By merest suggestion, the Kessel Run becomes real. We can imagine the dusty planet on which the route begins, hear the whine and blast of the engines, feel the hustle and violence of the piss-stinking smuggler’s haunts. This is just what happens in Bladerunner’s most famous scene, in which the replicant Roy Batty, on the edge of death, tells Rick Deckard, ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.’
Those C-beams! That gate! Their wonder lies in the fact that they’re merely suggested. Like monsters in the most frightening horror stories, they feel all the more real for being the creations, not of the writer, but of our own incessant model-making imaginations.
The hallucinated world our brain creates for us is specialised. It’s honed towards our particular survival needs. Like all animals, our species can only detect the narrow band of reality that’s necessary for us to get by. Dogs live