A review of “The Science Of Storytelling” by Will Storr (2019)
I love being told stories (my favourite genre is the cinema and I reckon I’ve viewed around 3,000 films) and I enjoy writing short stories (I’ve produced 31 self-published under the title “The Rooms In My Mind”), so I found this a fascinating book which should help me both to analyse and to create stories.
The central thesis of the work is that all effective storytelling taps into the deep neurological thinking which the first humans evolved on the savannah and Storr supports his proposition with multiple references to academic research. So we like heroes and villains, we look for selfless and evil behaviours, we obsess about status and morality, and we expect cause and effect. As Storr puts it: Good stories are explorations of the human condition”.
For Storr, the essence of storytelling is the explanation of the model of the world or the theory of control held by the protagonist and the highlighting of what he calls “the scared flaw” in the model, before the story examines the challenge to that model and the capacity or otherwise of the protagonist to change the model. So the questions most stories ask are: Who is this person?” and “Are we brave enough to change?”.
Typically, therefore, a story will begin with “a moment of unexpected change”. Storr talks of the classic three-part story: crisis, struggle, resolution. But he devotes much more time to what he describes as “the standard five-act structure”:
- Act I: This is me and it’s not working
- Act II: Is there another way?
- Act III: There is. I have transformed.
- Act IV: But can I handle the pain of change?
- Act V: Who am I going to be
To illustrate his arguments, Storr references many well-known acts of storytelling, especially films and novels, and it helped that I’m familiar with most of these works. The films that he mentions most often are “Citizen Kane” (which many critics believe is the best ever made), “The Godfather” (which seems to be Storr’s favourite), and “Lawrence Of Arabia” (which is my own favourite). Among the novels that he quotes are “The Remains Of The Day”, “Gone Girl” and “Mrs Dalloway”.