As you scan any scene, then, you’re in a storm of feeling; positive and negative sensations from the objects you see fall over you like fine drops of rain. This understanding is the beginning of creating a compelling and original character on the page. A character in fiction, like a character in life, inhabits their own unique hallucinated world in

I believe that compelling, profound and original 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.

Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control.

To understand the basis of how the brain turns the super-abundance of information that surrounds it into a simplified story is to understand a critical rule of storytelling. Brain stories have a basic structure of cause and effect.

Curiosity is shaped like a lowercase n. It’s at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

We’re wired to find selfless behaviour heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis of all human morality.

These openers create curiosity by describing specific moments of change.

A character’s conviction in their rightness and superiority is precisely what gives them their terrible power. Great drama often forms itself around a clash of competing hero-maker narratives, one belonging to the protagonist, the other to their foe. Their respective moral perceptions of reality feel utterly genuine to their owners and yet are cata

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