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

by Lisa Cron

  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.

  What’s Your Point?

  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?

  Don’t Bury Your Story in an Empty Plot

  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:

  MYTH: The Plot Is What the Story Is About

  REALITY: A Story Is About How the Plot Affects the Protagonist

  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.

  Theme: The Keys to the Universe

  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.

  The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Olive Kitteridge offers a simple, sublime example. Its theme is how we bear loss, and author Elizabeth Strout has said that she hopes her readers “feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance.”10 In the following passage, a mundane moment triggers a memory that is utterly gripping because it taps into a universal that, I’d venture to say, everyone has experienced and yet rarely found the words to express:

  She was glad she had never left Henry. She’d never had a friend as loyal, as kind, as her husband.

  And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light to change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been times when she’d felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindnes
s of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.11

  In that very specific memory—the dentist’s fleeting, workaday touch—an otherwise ineffable feeling of existential loneliness is made manifest, as palpable as if it had happened to us—because, as we’ll see in chapter 4, as far as our brain is concerned, it actually has.

  By filtering her story through the thematic lens of loss and human endurance, Strout was able to pluck an otherwise random moment from Olive’s life and use it to give us insight into how Olive sees the world, and at the same time provide a visceral glimpse of the cost of being human.

  Theme and Tone: It’s Not What You Say but How You Say It

  If theme is one of the most powerful elements of your story, it’s also one of the most invisible. You didn’t “see” the theme anywhere in Strout’s passage, did you? It wasn’t spelled out, wasn’t referenced, but it was there, all the same. It’s like tone of voice, which often says more than the words themselves. In fact, sometimes tone says the exact opposite of what the words are saying, as anyone who’s ever been in a long-term relationship can attest.

  Your story’s tone reflects how you see your characters and helps define the world you’ve set them loose in. Tone is often how theme is conveyed, by cueing your readers to the emotional prism through which you want them to view your story—like a soundtrack in a movie. It’s another way of sharpening your focus, highlighting what your reader really needs to know.

  For instance, the tone in a romance novel lets us know that, although big things will definitely go wrong, nothing genuinely damaging will ever happen, so we can safely relax into the story, secure in the knowledge that love is not only capable of saving the day, but actually will. Whereas in a novel like What Came Before He Shot Her, from the first sentence, the tone implies the exact opposite, though it doesn’t come right out and tell us so. Instead, tone makes us feel it, by evoking a particular mood. Tone belongs to the author; mood to the reader.

  In other words, your theme begets the story’s tone, which begets the mood the reader feels. Mood is what underlies the reader’s sense of what is possible and what isn’t in the world of your story, which brings us back to the point your story is making as reflected in its theme—reflected being the key word. Because as crucial as theme is, it’s never stated outright; it’s always implied. Movies and books that put theme first and story second tend to break the cardinal (although often grievously misunderstood, as we’ll see in chapter 7) rule of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s the story’s job to show us the theme, not the theme’s job to tell us the story—especially since theme is a rotten storyteller and, when left to its own devices, is much more interested in telling us what to think than in simply presenting the evidence and letting us make up our own mind. Unchecked, theme is a bully, a know-it-all. And no one likes to be told what to do, which is why reverse psychology works so well. What this means is that the more passionate you are about making your point, the more you have to trust your story to convey it. As Evelyn Waugh says, “All literature implies moral standards and criticisms, the less explicit the better.”12

  Besides, did you ever go into a bookstore saying to yourself, What I’d really like is a book about survival and how catastrophes bring out the gumption in some and not in others?13 Or I’m dying to curl up with a good book that traces the defects of society back to the defects of human nature?14 Or What I’m so in the mood for is a book that is a metaphor for Latin America?15 I don’t think so. Which isn’t to say that you might not leave with Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Flies, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose authors, when pressed, described their themes as such.

  But wait: aren’t there more themes in each of those books? Probably. In fact, a simple Internet search will turn up myriad suggested themes for each title—some of which would no doubt stun, if not infuriate, their authors. But they are mostly secondary themes. What we’re talking about is the main theme—the one you, the writer, choose, rather than the ones scholars will later foist upon you so graduate students can endlessly debate them in small, earnest seminars.

  Gone with the Wind: A Case Study

  To better understand how to use focus to define what your book is about—thus creating a yardstick by which to filter out all unnecessary information—let’s look at the most accessible of the three books just mentioned: Gone with the Wind. In the past some have dismissed Gone with the Wind as a trite, melodramatic potboiler, nothing more than “popular fiction.” But no one can deny its power as a spellbinding page-turner. And here’s the shocker: in 1937 it won the Pulitzer Prize. It also happened to be the bestselling novel of all time until it was surpassed in 1966 by Valley of the Dolls—which somehow the Pulitzer committee overlooked.

  First, let’s take a good look at the theme of Gone with the Wind according to author Margaret Mitchell in an interview with her publisher in 1936:

  If it has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality “gumption.” So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.16

  As Scarlett fights, schemes, manipulates, struggles, and ultimately survives against all odds, the key ingredient is gumption. Fair enough. But is that the novel’s main thematic focus? Does it drive Scarlett’s reaction as calamity after calamity befall her? Is it the lens through which we watch the tale unfold? The secret ingredient that holds us fast, whether we can define it or not? It is.

  What keeps us reading is the knowledge that Scarlett’s headstrong will, her guts, her nerve—her gumption—is stronger than her need to conform to society’s dictates. But we quickly learn that, as potent as her untempered gumption is, it’s also capable of completely blinding her to what is in her best interest—which, as we’ll soon see, is where her internal issue lies. We know what would make her the happiest. And we realize pretty quickly that chances are it’s the last thing she’ll do. Which raises the question: What will she do instead? Will she ever wake up and realize what she truly wants? And that’s what keeps us reading.

  But what about the other themes that run through the novel—for instance, the nature of love, the constraints of class structure, and of course, nineteenth century society’s tightly corseted gender roles? Couldn’t any one of them be the central theme? Good question. Here’s the litmus test: the central theme must provide a point of view precise enough to give us specific insight into the protagonist and her internal issue, yet be broad enough to take into account everything that happens (again: the plot). Let’s see what happens when I try to sum up Gone with the Wind with these other contenders. First, the nature of love:

  Set against a backdrop of the Civil War, Gone with the Wind is about a Southern belle whose misguided love for the wrong man blinds her to the one person who could give her what she wants.

  It’s not a bad description—if the book were solely a romance, with everything else merely “setting.” But given the novel’s scope, it’s much too limiting.

  Well, then, what about the way Scarlett disregards social norms?

  Gone with the Wind is about a Southern belle who bucks the societal tide in order to survive during the Civil War.

  This one isn’t bad either. That is, if you go in for the general. What societal tide, exactly? Buck it, how? Without any specifics, it’s hard to get a real picture of … much of anything. Okay, what about class structure?

  Gone with the Wind is about how traditional class structure in the South gave way during the Civil War.

  Sounds like nonfiction, doesn’t it? And since nonfiction sells, and there are millions of Civil War buffs, this could be a bestseller—that is, until they realize it’s really a steamy romance abou
t a gutsy woman who ruthlessly bucks the societal tide. Of course, by then even the staunchest history buff might keep mum, too busy hoping against hope that Scarlett wakes the hell up and realizes that Rhett is the man for her before it’s too damn late.

  So, although this isn’t to say that my descriptions wouldn’t entice some readers, there is nothing in them that suggests a sprawling, steamy epic, and Gone with the Wind is nothing if not that. But when I begin with gumption—the notion Mitchell used as her defining theme—it’s another story:

  Gone with the Wind is about a headstrong Southern belle whose unflinching gumption causes her to spurn the only man who is her equal, as she ruthlessly bucks crumbling social norms in order to survive during the Civil War.

  Aha! While my description of Gone with the Wind might not be there yet, we’ve hit on something well worth mentioning. One way to help identify a story’s defining theme is to ask yourself: is it possible to filter the story’s other themes through it? In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett’s gumption came first, so—for better or worse—it affects everything else: her love life, her refusal to be constrained by the mores of the day, and her insatiable need to take action when she doesn’t get what she wants. Take action? Ah yes, the plot.

  THE PROTAGONIST’S ISSUE VERSUS THE PLOT

  As we know, it’s the plot that puts the protagonist through his paces, presenting increasingly difficult obstacles that must be overcome if he’s to get within grabbing distance of the brass ring.