Charges of Geresy

Stories have been told and retold for millennia. They have comforted those in grief; motivated those who are down; and inspired all manner of acts of kindness, jealousy, hatred, love, and impossible feat. Stories help us to understand the actions of others, and in doing so help us to better understand ourselves, and to process our own emotions and struggles.

The Science of Storytelling focuses on what it considers to be the core elements of a good tale – the characters. Indeed, the science of the minds of characters translates to the science of minds of humans themselves. Fiction, like any form of art, is an exploration and an exhibition of the human condition: the nature of existence in this universe and the problems and triumphs that characterise human life.

Rather than being a book giving prescriptive advice for structuring a plot, this is more of a book about human psychology and what makes people interesting. Since stories are only as good as the characters that inhabit them, this seems reasonable. Any book that attempts to address the nature of storytelling is inevitably going to end up landing in the realms of psychology. It is unavoidable. Stories are about human beings and thus a book about the science of stories is a book about the science of the human mind – its desires, emotions, and flaws.

Storr introduces this book by talking about change. Change is interesting to humans because it tells us about cause and effect and thus helps us to understand how to control the world around us. Storytelling is a case study in cause and effect, particularly what causes other humans to act in the way they do. The purpose of storytelling may originally have been to gossip to find out new information about other people that one knew – perhaps indirectly through tales of their heroic (selfless and beneficial to the tribe) or antiheroic (selfish and destructive) actions. Learning how people responded to events told us about their mental models and helped us form theories about how they would react to our own actions – it gave us more control over selves external to us. Thus, according to Storr, the most interesting stories may be the ones that answer the question: “who is this person”?

The most interesting change is that of the flawed hero. Flawed models may develop as a result of distorted experiences and may continue to mislead a person until a particularly dramatic event results in their being forced to reconsider their theory of control. A hero who has one very salient flaw, which Storr terms the “sacred flaw”, can recognise the errors of his or her ways through another dramatic, life-changing experience, and thus develops as a person.

One thing to be aware of is that this book should have had “spoiler alert” as a subtitle: Storr ruthlessly tears apart the plots of classic and modern tales alike and manages – in the short space of a paragraph or two – to efficiently summarise (and potentially ruin for the reader) the plots of many interesting pieces of fiction.

I did come across one other review that seemed to describe this book as a hodgepodge of random scientific titbits, not strung together particularly coherently. To some extent, this does seem to be true – although this does also seem to be an unfairly harsh judgment due to the nature of the subject. The science of the self is unique in that it is an attempt to objectively study a subjective matter. Any book that ventures into the realms of anything concerning human psychology or neuroscience is only ever going to be able to look at the subject from a few different, restrictive, angles since the way the human mind works remains, to a large extent, poorly understood. I think that Storr does a pretty good job at explaining things, staying true to a few key themes: the importance of the sacred flaw, the essence of the story being the character and their struggle to fix that flaw, the multiplicity of the self, and the contradictions that exist within human beings as well as how the human mind tries to cobble together a logical chain of events to tell us why we feel the way we feel.

Reading this book will broaden your understanding of how and why good stories work, but more importantly, it will allow you to form a deeper understanding of your own self and the workings of your own mind. Why it reacts in the way it does, why it seeks out the things that it does, and even how and when it can mislead you. We are all the heroes of our own tales and perhaps our search for a glimpse of that understanding – of who exactly we are and how we think – is why we read other people’s stories. Maybe it’s why we do anything.