Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (24 page)

WE’RE OFTEN WARNED
not to make assumptions. Did you ever actually
try
it? It’s like saying, “Don’t breathe.” We make assumptions about everything, every second of the day—largely because, after breathing, our survival depends on it. We assume that if we cross the street without looking, we might be mowed down; we assume that eating the leftover creamed tuna we accidentally left on the counter overnight is probably not such a bright idea; we assume that if the phone rings after two a.m. it can’t be good. If we couldn’t assume the result of, well, anything, why would we chance getting out of bed in the morning? So we assume. As philosopher David Hume pointed out, as far as we’re concerned, causality is “the cement of the universe.”
¹

Are our assumptions sometimes wrong? Decidedly. Here’s an apt case in point, from Antonio Damasio: “Usually the brain is assumed to be a passive recording medium, like film, onto which the characteristics of an object, as analyzed by sensory detectors, can be mapped faithfully. If the eye is the passive innocent camera, the brain is the passive, virgin celluloid. This is pure fiction.” Instead, Damasio explains, “Our memories are
prejudiced
, in the full sense of the term, by our past history and beliefs.”
²

In other words, our assumptions are based on the consequences of our prior experiences. But we don’t stop there. While a few other species
take a rudimentary stab at observing and predicting what might happen next, we alone try to explain why.
³
Understanding why “this” caused “that” is what allows us to anticipate what might happen next and decide what the hell we’re going to do about it. It lets us theorize about the future and, better yet, try to change it to our advantage.

As for the wrong assumptions this sometimes begets? It’s our acceptance of fallibility that makes us human, as evidenced by the courage we muster to take risks, knowing things might not turn out as planned. It’s when they don’t that people usually tell us not to make assumptions. What they really mean is,
the assumption you’re making isn’t working; try another
. Because very often, as Kathryn Schulz of
Being Wrong
attests: “We think this one thing is going to happen, and something else happens instead.”
⁴

Story arises from the conflict between “this one thing we thought was going to happen” and “what happened instead.” It then plays out in a clear cause-and-effect trajectory from start to finish—otherwise, it would be “just one damn thing after another.” So in this chapter we’ll determine how to make sure your story follows one astonishingly simple mantra; we’ll explore how to harness the external cause and effect of your plot to the more powerful internal cause and effect of your story; we’ll take a look at why “show, don’t tell” is a matter of
why
rather than
what
; and we’ll introduce the all-important “And so?” test to guarantee that neither cause-and-effect trajectory ever goes off the rails.

As we know, both life and story are driven by emotion, but what they’re ordered by is logic. Logic is the yang to emotion’s yin. It’s no surprise that our memories—how we make sense of the world—are logically interrelated. According to Damasio, the brain tends to organize the profusion of input and memories, “much like a film editor
would, by giving it some kind of coherent narrative structure in which certain actions are said to cause certain effects.”
⁵

Since the brain analyzes everything in terms of cause and effect, when a story
doesn’t
follow a clear cause-and-effect trajectory, the brain doesn’t know what to make of it—which can trigger a sensation of physical distress,
⁶
not to mention the desire to pitch the book out the window. The good news is, when it comes to keeping your story on track, it boils down to the mantra
if, then, therefore. If
I put my hand in the fire (action),
then
I’ll get burned (reaction).
Therefore
, I’d better not put my hand in the fire (decision).

Action, reaction, decision—it’s what drives a story forward. From beginning to end, a story must follow a cause-and-effect trajectory so when your protagonist finally tackles her ultimate goal, the path that led her there not only is clear, but, in hindsight, reveals exactly why this confrontation was inevitable from the very start. Note the critical words
in hindsight
. Everything in a story should indeed be utterly predictable, but only from the satisfying perspective of “the end.”

This is not to say that a story has to be linear or that the cause-and-effect route it takes must be chronological—quite the contrary. It can take death-defying leaps in time and location and even be told backward: witness Martin Amis’s novel
Time’s Arrow
, Harold Pinter’s play
Betrayal
, and Christopher Nolan’s film
Memento
. But what must move forward from page one is the clear logic of the emotional arc—that is, the story the reader is following. Even a book as seemingly “experimental” as Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, which is told in standalone short stories that follow several characters back and forth in time, follows a novel’s arc. Egan herself says, “When I hear that something is experimental, I tend to think that means the experiment will drown out the story. If having a story that’s compelling—[that makes] you want to know what will happen—is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It’s what I care about as a reader.”
⁷

To create a story the reader will care about, the narrative must follow an emotional cause-and-effect trajectory from the outset. How? By obeying the basic laws of the physical universe. Thus the key thing to remember is, naturally, Newton’s first law of thermodynamics: you can’t get something from nothing. Or as the equally brainy Albert Einstein reportedly quipped, “Nothing happens until something moves.” In other words, no matter how much something catches you off guard, nothing ever really occurs out of the blue. Not in real life, not in a story. There is always a cause-and-effect trajectory, whether or not the protagonist—or in the case of real life, you and I—see it coming.

We tend to be blissfully clueless as to the fly ball that is about to bean us—a ball everyone else has been watching since the batter smacked it up into the air. So although Leslie has no idea that her boyfriend Seth is sleeping with Heidi in accounting, the whole office figured it out the instant he began misting up over the magnificence of Heidi’s spreadsheets. Hence, although when Leslie finally finds out that Seth’s a big fat cheater, it’ll be news to her, her coworkers will have spent weeks taking bets on who she’ll take down first—Seth or Heidi. Of course, once Leslie finds out about their little tryst, she’s going do some looking back herself, and damned if she won’t discover that there is, in fact, a pattern of telltale signs, which she’ll now see with dizzying clarity, as if they were dominoes neatly lined up to fall just so.

The one difference, however, between the way Newton’s law works in a story and the way it works in real life is that in real life there will be a million irrelevant things happening at the same time, whereas in a story
there will be nothing that does not in some way affect the cause-and-effect trajectory
. It’s the writer’s job to zero in on the story’s particular “if, then, therefore” pattern and stick with it throughout. This trajectory is the track that the story’s narrative train rumbles down. Sure, it might have twisty hairpin curves, switchbacks, harrowing ups and downs, even a few reversals, but the train itself never jumps track, derails or, hopefully, runs out of steam.

But wait—with all due respect to Jennifer Egan, what
about
experimental literature? What about avant-garde fiction? It doesn’t seem as bound by the laws of cause and effect, or by any laws at all, for that matter. In fact, some say its
raison d’être
is to prove that fiction doesn’t need a plot, a protagonist, characters, internal logic, or even actual events, to show that we’ve risen above all that. And hey, what about
Ulysses
, the first novel to leap headfirst into that seductively self-reflective stream of consciousness? Isn’t it widely acclaimed as the best novel ever written? That was a pretty experimental book in its time. Let’s dive into this question a wee bit deeper, shall we?