Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (7 page)

What was missing in all those failed manuscripts is focus. Without it, the reader has no way to gauge the meaning of anything, and since we’re wired to hunt for meaning in everything—well, you do the math. A story without focus has no yardstick.

So, what is this thing called focus? It’s the synthesis of three elements that work in unison to create a story: the protagonist’s issue, the theme, and the plot. The seminal element—the protagonist’s issue—stems from something we mentioned in the last chapter: the story question, which translates to the protagonist’s goal. But remember what we said? The story isn’t about whether or not the protagonist achieves her goal per se; it’s about what she has to overcome
internally
to do it. This is what drives the story forward. I call it the protagonist’s issue.

The second element, the theme, is what your story says about human nature. Theme tends to be reflected in how your characters treat each other, so it defines what is possible and what isn’t in the world the
story unfolds in. As we’ll see, it’s often what determines whether the protagonist’s efforts will succeed or fail, regardless of how heroic she is.

The third element is the plot itself—the events that relentlessly force the protagonist to deal with her issue as she pursues her goal, no matter how many times she tries to make an end run around her issue along the way.

Taken together, these three elements give a story focus, telling readers what it’s about and allowing them to interpret the events as they unfold and thus anticipate where it’s heading. This is crucial because “minds exist to predict what will happen next.”
⁶
It’s their
raison d’être
—the better to keep us on this earthly plane as long as humanly possible. We love to figure things out and we don’t like being confused. For writers, focus is of utmost importance as well: the first two elements (the protagonist’s issue and the theme) are the lens through which we determine what the events (the plot) will be.

How do they do this? By setting the story’s parameters and zeroing in on the particular aspect of the protagonist’s life it will chronicle. After all, our characters live their lives 24/7 just like we do; they eat, sleep, argue with insurance companies, get annoyed when the Internet goes down, veg out in front of the TV, and spend time trying to remember whether that dentist appointment is Tuesday or Thursday. Would you put all of that in a story? Of course not. Instead, you cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.

Done right, we have another mathematical proof, a concrete frame of reference against which everything that happens is measured. After all, this is exactly how our brain processes information when we’re confronted with a sticky situation in real life. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrates, this is what literature is modeled on:

In other words, the center—here, how the question of what to do about said inheritance affects our friend in the restaurant—is the singular reference that everything else relates to. If this
were
a story, our friend would have an internal issue he would need to work through in order to navigate this inherently thorny situation. Would he be successful? That’s where the theme comes in.

There’s a lot of talk about what theme is, and how it’s revealed, which can result in esoteric discussions capable of parsing it down to the thematic use of margarine as a metaphor for innocence lost. Happily, theme actually boils down to something incredibly simple:

Theme often reveals your take on how an element of human nature—loyalty, suspicion, grit, love—defines human behavior. But the real secret to theme is that it’s not general; that is, the theme wouldn’t be “love” per se—rather, it would be a very specific point you’re making about love. For instance, a love story can be sweet and lyrical, revealing that people are good eggs after all; it can be hard-nosed and edgy, revealing that people are intense and quirky; it can be cynical and manipulative, revealing that people are best avoided, if possible.

Knowing the theme of your story in advance helps, because it gives you a gauge by which to measure your characters’ responses to the situations they find themselves in. They’ll be kind, gruff, or conniving depending on the universe you have created for them. This, then, affects how the story question is resolved, because it governs the type of resistance the protagonist will meet along the way. In a loving universe, she may discover that, with a little gumption, she’ll find her true love. In an impersonal universe, she’ll find no one she can really relate to, and in a cruel universe, she’ll end up married to Hannibal Lecter.

Theme often reveals the point your story is making—and all stories make a point, beginning on page one. But that doesn’t mean you have to hit readers over the head with it.

Think about advertising. An ad’s goal is to deliver a very specific punch without letting us know exactly how it’s doing it, even though when it comes to ads, we
know
what their intention is: to get us to buy the product. As corporate consultants Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman say in their book
The Elements of Persuasion
, “For those of us whose business depends on being able to persuade others—which is all of us in business—the key to survival is being able to cut through all the clutter and make the sale. The good news is that the secret of selling is what it has always been—a good story.”
⁸

Knowing your story’s point is what helps you cut through all the clutter.

Not that you’re as calculating as an advertising executive or that your story has so literal a purpose, which is why writers often have to stop and think about what it is they’re trying to say and what point their story is making. It’s crucial, because the instant a reader opens your book, his cognitive unconscious is hunting for a way to make life a little easier, see things a little clearer, understand people a bit better.
⁹
So why not take a second to ask yourself,
What is it I want my readers to walk away thinking about? What point does my story make? How do I want to change the way my reader sees the world?

It’s not surprising that of the three elements that combine to create focus, writers often dote on only one of them—the plot. Because it’s the element that, by definition, is the vehicle for the other two, it’s easy to forget they’re there. Trouble is, without them the plot ends up an empty vessel—things happen, but no one is really affected by them, especially the reader. This brings us to another common myth in need of shattering:

While thus far it’s been implied, it helps to say it flat out: plot is not synonymous with story. Plot
facilitates
story by forcing the protagonist to confront and deal with the issue that keeps him from achieving his goal. The way the world treats him, and how he reacts, reveals the theme. So at the end of the day, what the protagonist is forced to learn as he navigates the plot is what the story is about. It’s important to always keep this in mind since the plot, when taken by itself, can
suggest that a story is about one thing when in reality, it’s about something else.

A great example of this can be found in the movie
Fracture
—which, like many movies, makes a great case study for overarching story concepts. Why? Because story-wise, film is often a simpler, more straightforward medium than prose (not to mention that people are far more likely to have seen the same movies than to have read the same books). In
Fracture
, we don’t meet the protagonist, Willy Beachum, for a full seventeen minutes. Until then we assume the protagonist is Ted Crawford, whom we watch mortally wound his wife in cold blood a few minutes into the film. We believe the story will be about whether or not Crawford goes to jail for it, and in fact, that
is
what the plot chronicles.

But it’s
not
what the story is about. Instead,
Fracture
is about whether Beachum—a hotshot prosecutor who gets the case just as he’s about to leave the public sector and take a cushy job in a white-shoe law firm—will end up compromising his integrity by selling out, or whether he’ll fight the good fight and stay on in the prosecutor’s office (
adios
, dreams of wealth and prestige). Thus the plot—Crawford and his trial—occurs solely to test Beachum’s moral fiber. So although Beachum doesn’t appear until almost twenty minutes into the film, everything that happens up to that moment occurs, story-wise, solely to put him to the test.

In other words, even when the protagonist doesn’t appear on the first page, everything that happens before he shows up must occur with a clear eye toward how it will affect him when he finally ambles in. This is not to say readers will be aware of it until then. How could they be? After all, in
Fracture
we have no idea the story isn’t about Crawford until Beachum makes his entrance. But the writers knew. So they made sure everything Crawford did would come back to test Beachum’s resolve (and “test” it not in the general sense, but in a very specific, focused way). Because each of Crawford’s very calculated actions was devised to challenge Beachum’s view of himself, of the world, and of his place in it. As the story progresses, these actions “fracture” his otherwise cocksure,
self-absorbed persona, allowing something far more meaningful, and gritty, to emerge.

What does
Fracture
have to say about the human condition? That at the end of the day, integrity is worth far more than wealth, even if it means that you have to live out of your car for a while. Ah, but how is this message delivered? In the guise of a compelling, fast-moving plot that allows us to burrow deeply into Beachum’s skin as he wrestles with what is thrown at him. Thus we have a bird’s-eye view of the battle between the protagonist and the plot, which we’ll be discussing in more detail a little further on.

Since theme is the underlying point the narrative makes about the human experience, it’s also where the universal lies. The universal is a feeling, emotion, or truth that resonates with us all. For instance, “the raw power of true love” is something everyone (okay, almost everyone) can tap into, whether the story is about a saloon owner in Casablanca, a mermaid under the sea, or a knight in Arthur’s court. The universal is the portal that allows us to climb into the skin of characters completely different from us and miraculously feel what they feel.

Given the primacy of the universal, it’s ironic that only when embodied in the
very specific
does a universal become accessible, as we’ll explore in depth in
chapter 6
. In the abstract, universals are so vast they’re impossible to wrap your mind around. It’s only when expressed through the flesh-and-blood reality of a story, that we’re able to experience a universal one-on-one, and so
feel
it.