William Collins 2019
Book Review by K.S.Loganathan
Will Storr is an award winning author based in London. This book is based on his writing courses. It deconstructs the science of storytelling with research on psychology by George Lowenstein and on neural models by Benjamin Bergen and Michael Gazzinaga and others .It shows how to craft compelling narratives with a step- by- step guide based on his own analyses of popular novels and films and on the methods laid down by screenwriter Christopher Booker(‘ The Seven Basic Plots’) and John Yorke (‘Into the Woods’).
Our beliefs are based on our brain’s creation of the idea that we are the moral heroes at the center of the unfolding plots of our lives. Like our brains, storytellers too create the vivid worlds they exist within. Our storytelling brain uses electrical pulses from our senses in various forms- light waves, changes in air pressure chemical signals etc.- to construct our reality and makes us believe this controlled hallucination is real. Reading words on a page likewise builds a model of the picture conveyed by the author in our brains . When we are listening to a good story , rich in detail, full of metaphor and expressive of character ,we tend to imagine ourselves in the same situation. The storytelling is enhanced by the writer by using a filmic word order, crafting precise descriptions and drawing the reader into the story through information gaps embodied in the “show, not tell” principle.

It is the flaws in the characters that arouses our curiosity about them. In every story, the hero has a problem, and his default response is to defend his core beliefs and world view, and sometimes the contradictions between his consciousness and subconscious needs come to the surface. The story usually ends with the hero either thwarted or educated that another way exists. A playwright like Shakespeare creates an enduring obsession with his characters and plays by leaving the audiences to guess why people behave the way they do.
Life is one’s pursuit of a noble goal , and it is this pursuit that makes the plot in the story. Christopher Booker lists seven recurring plots in storytelling: a Stanford University big data study of 20,000 novels confirms this classification . Other studies of New York Times bestsellers show that a roller coaster cycle of five crests and four troughs in the plot make for popular ‘page turners’. David Robinson ,a data analyst who researched 112,000 plots in books ,movies, television serials and video games, found a common story pattern: “things get worse and worse, until at the last minute, they get better”. The ending shows how control over the inner and external worlds have been restored.
The book ends with a practical appendix which offers a step- by-step guide to writing a novel .Characters like Michael Corleone in Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’, Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’, T.E.Lawrence, Citizen Kane, and Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol ‘ , are analyzed in detail. Even if you do not intend to write a story, these reveal psychological insights into the human condition to make us better in what we do.