The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

characters in story aren’t only at war with the outside world. They’re also at war with themselves. A protagonist is engaged in a battle fought largely in the strange cellars of their own subconscious mind. At stake is the answer to the fundamental question that drives all drama: who am I?

Because our models make up our actual experience of reality, it’s little wonder that any evidence which suggests they are wrong is profoundly unsettling.

The ‘Sacred Flaw Approach’ is a character-first process, an attempt to create a story that mimics the various ways a brain creates a life, and which therefore feels true and fresh, and comes pre-loaded with potential drama.

As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads, we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are.

Meaning is created by just the right change-event happening to just the right person at just the right moment.

The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient information to include in its stream of consciousness.

An ignition point is the first event in a cause-and-effect sequence that will ultimately force the protagonist to question their deepest beliefs.

This use of narrative to simplify the complex is also true of memory. Human memory is ‘episodic’ (we tend to experience our messy pasts as a highly simplified sequences of causes and effects) and ‘autobiographical’ (those connected episodes are imbued with personal and moral meaning).

Our beliefs feel personal to us because they are us.

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.