This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Wired for Story" by Lisa Cron. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How does a well-written story fill our need to understand the reasons behind everything? What does “Show, don’t tell” mean for writers?
In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron argues that our brains evolved to absorb information through stories. So, writers must write in a way that satisfies our brains’ expectations of story. This includes creating causal links that appeal to the brain’s need for cause-and-effect structure.
Continue reading to learn about the need for cause and effect in a story and how to achieve it.
Cause and Effect in a Story
Stories are about change, and conflict is what drives change. Showing how conflict leads to change requires us as writers to convey a clear pattern of cause and effect in a story. According to Cron, we have a neurological need to understand the reasons behind everything, which means our stories need to have a clear cause-and-effect structure on both the external plot level and the internal level of the protagonist’s choices. Things can’t just happen at random—rather, every action must have a reaction which then affects the next decisions the characters make. This establishes the logic of your story, which the brain needs to maintain interest.
(Shortform note: Story elements and events that appear at random will interfere with the cause-and-effect logic of your story, but it can be very tempting to use them because they can feel like great ideas or provide an easy way to weave in some other exciting element. However, if it doesn’t contribute to the overall story, it will fragment the narrative. The same applies to coincidences: One well-known story rule from Pixar is that, while it’s okay to use a coincidence to create conflict in your story, it’s cheating to use a coincidence to resolve conflict. However, some writers suggest that creating conflict with coincidence is also cheating, as it still fails to play into the larger cause-and-effect structure that’s supposed to establish the story’s logic.)
Taking this into account, what does “Show, don’t tell” mean? Cron points out that the maxim is commonly misunderstood to mean that we should avoid explicitly stating something—like the emotion a character’s feeling—and instead show them feeling it, by expressing it physically (through crying, yelling, smiling, and so on). However, she argues that what it really means is we need to show the cause-and-effect process that leads to that feeling. It’s not enough to say your character is angry. Rather, we need to see the event that made them angry, and we need to understand the internal thought process that caused them to react the way they did to the story’s events.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Lisa Cron's "Wired for Story" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Wired for Story summary:
- How humans have a neurological need for stories
- The formula that the human brain expects to encounter in a story
- How to build a protagonist that engages your reader
