PDF Summary:Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron

Why do we love stories? It’s not just because they’re entertaining; rather, they also satisfy a neurological need that humans evolved over millennia. In Wired for Story, writer and producer Lisa Cron argues that our brains evolved to absorb important survival information through stories, and so writers who want to create compelling narratives should write in a way that satisfies our brains' expectations of story.

In our guide, we’ll explore the formula that the human brain expects to encounter in a story, as well as how you as a writer can employ that formula. We’ll look closely at how to build a protagonist that engages your reader, techniques for creating conflict and advancing plot, and how to create causal links that appeal to the brain’s need for cause-and-effect structure. We’ll also add scientific context for some of Cron’s ideas, as well as additional or alternate advice from expert writers.

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You can also create an interactive narrative where the player’s choices impact the story—thus increasing their emotional investment. In this way, you can create emotions in the player by making them directly experience the emotions (for example, through the frustration of a difficult level or the relief of finally beating it, or the fear of watching another beloved character walk into a deadly situation the player just barely survived).

Identify the Internal and External Goals

According to Cron, the emotional impact that something has on your protagonist is specifically determined by how it impacts their goal. Neurologically, all our behavior is driven by goals, and we’re programmed to try to figure out other people’s goals so we can pursue our own more easily. Your protagonist’s goal is what gives meaning to everything in your story.

Your protagonist may have many goals, but there is one underlying goal that drives everything they do, which Cron refers to as the internal goal. This is the internal issue that makes it hard for the protagonist to achieve their other goals, which Cron refers to as external goals.

For example, a superhero might have an external goal of saving the world from a villain, but her internal goal might be to act in a principled way through the process. The external goal makes it hard to achieve her internal goal, but ultimately she manages to achieve them both by refusing to act cruelly even while fighting the villain.

(Shortform note: Because all our behavior is driven by goals, pursuing our goals in new and different ways creates changes in our behavior, so it will also create changes in your character.), or their character arc. The type of change you want to see in your character will be determined by the types of internal and external goals they have. According to neuroscientists, goals can be categorized by the level of skill or knowledge needed to achieve the goal and the level of motivation needed to achieve it. Goals that require both high motivation and a high level of skill or knowledge are the ones that people are the most invested in, so they’ll be ideal for engaging your reader and engendering change in your protagonist.)

Identify the Mistaken Belief

To start your protagonist on their journey, you need to pinpoint the moment when a central view they held about the world was challenged or altered. Cron explains that, according to neuroscientific research, our understanding of the world isn’t representative of how the world is, but of how we believe it is. To develop a strong internal goal, something must happen to your protagonist that contradicts a belief they hold about the world, and this opposition must create a conflict in the protagonist that interferes with what they want to achieve. This resulting struggle will lead to your protagonist’s change or growth as a human.

While this worldview-changing moment kicks off your protagonist’s development, it doesn’t need to happen at the beginning of the story. In fact, you might not describe this event in your story at all: You might simply hint at it and show its impact through the actions and decisions your protagonist makes. But you as the writer must know what it is before you begin writing. You may find it useful to create a character bio to help you identify this moment.

For example, if your protagonist believes that those who work hard are justly rewarded, her worldview-changing moment might be when she's passed up for a promotion in favor of a well-connected but lazy coworker. This would spark an inner conflict that could fuel her internal goal over the rest of the story—whether that be to win back the promotion or to get revenge.

(Shortform note: We can draw further comparisons between psychology and the protagonist’s belief system. When your brain encounters information that conflicts with your beliefs, you experience cognitive dissonance. That’s similar to the protagonist’s established beliefs failing to correctly predict what was going to happen, resulting in a worldview-changing moment. This prompts a psychological need for your character to reconcile their new worldview with the experiences that have contradicted their previous worldview, and since the protagonist is your audience’s lens, the reader will share that psychological need.)

Put Your Protagonist Through Hardships

Cron also explains that, since our brains use stories to help us imagine future hardships and difficulties that could interfere with our goals, you shouldn’t coddle your protagonist by keeping them out of trouble or protecting them from the plot. Instead, you should put them into situations that seem impossible to overcome—but aren’t—and show the reader the protagonist’s grueling, painful journey to achieving their internal goal. According to Cron, great stories are about how people change, and change is painful. This means your protagonist will suffer, and because we relate so closely to our characters, Cron says this is often a difficult thing for writers to do, but it’s also what makes a great story.

Writing About Trauma Respectfully

While hardship is a necessary hurdle for your protagonist to overcome, portraying extreme hardships such as trauma and oppression requires a writer to be cautious. Media that depicts graphic trauma can have negative psychological effects on an audience, though this is highly dependent on the individual and can usually be avoided if audience members understand and tend to their own needs. Additionally, when writers describe trauma based on real human experiences in excessive detail and use it to form the identity of an entire group, they can cause harm to that community. This type of writing, known as trauma porn, exploits the suffering of real-world people for the sake of entertainment.

To ensure you’re not exploiting others’ trauma in your writing, make sure the trauma you’re depicting is narratively necessary, that it doesn’t form the entirety of a character’s identity, and that it’s not just used as a device for a different character’s development. Also, be sure to research the type of trauma you’re depicting and ask others for feedback on your depiction to be sure you're accurately conveying it (but make sure you give them a heads up on what they’re about to read).

How to Build Your Plot

We’ve discussed the first element of story, the protagonist. Now, we’ll discuss the next element: plot, or the story events themselves. Plot consists of the many conflicts that create obstacles to your protagonist achieving their goal. To subject your protagonist to these seemingly impossible obstacles, you have to establish and escalate conflict in your story.

Conflict

As mentioned above, stories are about change, and conflict is what drives change. According to Cron, our brains are programmed to resist conflict. We evolved to cooperate for survival, so conflict with others poses a risk to our survival—and in fact, according to an MRI study, conflict causes the brain areas associated with physical pain to light up.

Our brains also resist change, whether it’s a good or bad change. We evolved to seek to maintain a state of secure equilibrium to ensure our well-being—if we’ve found a routine that keeps us safe, making a change to that routine creates a potential risk to our safety, which makes us fearful.

(Shortform note: Conflict and change don’t just cause us pain: Because we perceive them as a threat, they actually activate the body’s stress response (also known as the fight or flight response), putting us into a state of arousal that can be harmful in the long-term. Learning how to better handle conflict and change (for example, by reading fiction) can reduce our stress. Additionally, viewing the change in your life as if you’re the protagonist in a story can make it easier to process and handle conflict and change.)

However, because things constantly change in life despite our wish for them not to, stories must also be about conflict and change. Cron writes that there are many potential sources of conflict in a story: Any way you can find to pit two forces against each other in a way that impacts the protagonist emotionally and interferes with their goal is a potential conflict and impetus for change. Some of these include: the conflict between the protagonist’s belief and reality, the conflict between what the protagonist wants and what others expect of them, the conflict between the protagonist’s internal and external goals, and the classic conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist.

Characters Who Don’t Change, and Stories With Little Conflict

While change is a vital aspect of story, not all characters change. Characters who do change throughout a story are called dynamic characters, but those who remain the same are called static characters. Static characters tend to be secondary, and they can be useful in highlighting the changes that the dynamic characters undergo. People are more invested in dynamic characters because it’s easier to relate to characters who change since, as Cron mentions, we’re also constantly changing.

Additionally, not every story features the types of extreme conflict Cron mentions. A popular sub-genre of manga and anime known as iyashikei (literally, “healing”) offers stories that are designed to soothe the reader or viewer with plots that have low-stakes conflict and mellow themes. Characters in these stories can still face conflict and go through changes, but usually without the greater stress that accompanies more extreme conflict in other stories.

Cause and Effect

Showing how conflict leads to change also requires us as writers to convey a clear pattern of cause and effect. 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.)

Cron points out that the maxim “Show, don’t tell” 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.

(Shortform note: Some experts do use “Show, don’t tell” to mean you shouldn’t explicitly state things in a story but should instead use things like action and sensory details to demonstrate them. They suggest that this creates a more immersive experience for the reader and results in a better flow.)

According to Cron, this cause-and-effect structure must be consistent throughout your story, which means that each scene will logically lead into the next one. The previous scene will catalyze the next scene, and the effects of the characters’ choices in the previous scene will determine the choices they make in the next scene. This also means your protagonist needs to change from scene to scene. They should feel differently at the end of the scene than they did at the beginning. By connecting all the scenes in your story in this way, you’ll create a cohesive, logical narrative that helps the reader understand the reason behind everything and satisfies their neurological need to simulate an experience they’ve never had.

How to Implement Cause and Effect

Cause and effect must play out on both the micro and macro levels for your story to maintain its logical structure. In other words, it should be clear on both the larger scale of the overall plot events and on the smaller scale of paragraphs or even sentences. In real life, it’s often difficult to identify the effects of something, and sometimes an effect becomes evident long after the cause occurs, but experts recommend that your writing should show an effect immediately after the cause, and the reader should always be able to clearly identify the cause-and-effect pattern.

Some writers break down cause and effect into even smaller parts, suggesting that cause can be disassembled into 1) the goal your protagonist is working toward at the start of the scene, 2) the conflict that interferes with that goal, and 3) a disaster that represents a major failure for your protagonist in achieving their goal. This logically leads into a three-part effect, consisting of 1) the protagonist’s immediate reaction to the disaster, 2) a dilemma incited by the disaster in which there appear to be no good choices, and 3) a decision reached by the protagonist that will then lead directly into their goal for the next scene.

Breaking cause and effect into smaller pieces might help you ensure that the character is changing from scene to scene.

How to Hook the Reader

As soon as the reader begins your story, they start looking for the answers to three major questions: 1) Who’s the story about? 2) What’s the story about? 3) What’s at stake here? If the answer to any of these three questions is missing, it doesn’t matter how beautiful your prose is; the reader will not be interested in your story. However, says Cron, if you answer them quickly—on the first page, or even in the very first sentence—you can take your time presenting the rest of the details because your reader knows what to anticipate.

The answers to these questions give the reader context for how to understand everything they’re about to read, which, according to neuroscientific research, is how they determine meaning, or the “why” behind every piece of information. Answering these “why” questions is critical to do because humans have a natural curiosity about why any given piece of information is significant or useful to us, and having that curiosity sated is what keeps us engaged with what we’re reading.

For instance, we don’t just want to know that the protagonist is getting a divorce; we want to know the specific reasons why they’re getting a divorce so we can understand how the divorce will impact the protagonist and how it might affect what they’re going to do next.

Hooking the Audience in Different Media

A good hook is essential for any type of writing, but it sometimes looks different in different media. In journalism, the opening hook is called a lead or lede, and it may take the form of a relevant anecdote, an important statistic, or the basic facts of the article. Regardless of the type of lede, it should provide the reader with an idea of what the article is going to be about.

In media like screenwriting, you can’t always explicitly answer questions right away since you’re telling the story visually, but movies and shows should always have a logline, or a one-sentence hook that introduces all the important elements the viewer needs to know for context, including the protagonist, the conflict, and the goal or stakes. A logline should ideally hook a reader before they even play the film or episode. After that, experts suggest fully introducing elements like the protagonist, the setting, and the genre within the first 10 pages.

Whatever medium you’re writing in, your hook is what makes the audience decide if they’re going to devote their time and energy to what you’ve written, and the more quickly and concisely you can give them the important foundational details, the more likely they are to stick with your piece.

Suspense and Reveals

According to Cron, the push and pull between two conflicting forces allows the writer to build suspense by withholding information that the reader wants to know. Suspense is what keeps the reader turning the page because of our cognitive need to know what happens next.

While the big “reveal” of withheld information can be extremely powerful, it only works if everything up until that reveal is clear and logical enough for the reader to understand. The writer must give hints about the reveal in advance, so the reader has a sense that something is missing, but the absence of that missing piece can’t obscure the story.

These hints must also be specific enough that the reader can guess what the reveal might be, even if their guesses prove to be completely wrong. It’s not interesting enough to know that the writer is keeping something secret. We have to have some sense of what they’re keeping secret.

For instance, a mystery writer might plant hints throughout the plot that point to the identity of the murderer. The reader will know the writer is keeping the murderer’s identity a secret to be revealed later. Even if they incorrectly guess who it is, they'll still be able to understand the logical sequence of events that led the person to kill because the writer’s withholding of the murderer’s identity won’t obscure the rest of the story.

A reveal can’t be the piece that gives the plot meaning, but it can—and should—change the meaning in retrospect as readers look back through the story and understand what new light the reveal sheds on what’s happened.

(Shortform note: Writers may be particularly reluctant to share important information for fear of spoiling their reveals, but research shows that spoilers don’t actually interfere with our enjoyment of a story. In fact, they can even make us enjoy the tale more because we can focus on the aesthetic pleasure of the story without being distracted by the plot. This contradicts Cron’s suggestion that withheld information is what keeps the audience reading, as does the notion that we can reread stories we already know without enjoying them any less. Based on this research, suspense may be less vital in holding the reader’s attention than Cron suggests.)

Foreshadowing

This leads into another important idea from neuroscience: Part of the way we make sense of what’s happening to us is to call on memories from the past that help us interpret what’s going on in the present. According to Cron, you need to provide your reader with such memories so major reveals in the story will make sense.

To do this, you can use foreshadowing, which is when you give the reader hints about a change that’s going to happen later in the story. When you foreshadow, you essentially create a memory for the reader to recall later, and that memory helps them make sense of eventual character or plot changes. Foreshadowing importantly also lets you justify a choice by your protagonist that seems out of character. In fact, any out-of-character choice your protagonist makes must be warned of in advance.

It’s Easier to Call on Emotional Memories

The brain pays particular attention to memories that evoke emotional responses in order to make sense of what’s happening. Because of this, you can even manipulate how well the reader is likely to remember a memory you implant for them by adjusting the emotional impact it has. For example, if you want the reader to be able to call upon the memory easily as the story goes along, you can present it in a highly emotional context that will make it stick in the reader’s memory, such as by showing its immediate emotional effects on the protagonist or other characters.

Conversely, if you want the memory to be somewhat buried so the reader only remembers it when it suddenly becomes relevant, you can couch it in scenes or contexts where the emotional impact is unclear or is only described later.

For example, if you establish in chapter one that your protagonist has a deathly fear of flying, but later they need to get on a plane to save the world, you have to include information in those intervening chapters that justifies this choice, such as describing how the protagonist is taking steps to overcome their phobia.

(Shortform note: You can choose to foreshadow things in your story in a number of ways. The type of hint-dropping that Cron describes is called indirect foreshadowing, but you can also give information that makes a clear prediction about what will happen later, which is called direct foreshadowing. This gives the reader an explicit memory that they can expect to see play out in the story later. You also don’t have to limit your foreshadowing to the text of your story: You can plant hints about the plot in your story’s title or setting. To foreshadow well, avoid inundating your reader with hints, and make sure they’re spread out rather than concentrated in one spot.)

Pacing and Timing

Cognitively, explains Cron, readers can only handle so much conflict at once. It’s important to present your story in a way that gives the reader a break after moments of extreme conflict so they can process what’s happened and try to understand how it fits into the larger story. Narrative devices such as subplots and flashbacks can help you provide readers with this break so they don’t become overwhelmed by constant conflict.

(Shortform note: You can also break up your story’s pacing with chapter and scene breaks, switching between action and dialogue, and changing up the length and type of sentences you’re using. To check your story’s pacing, try reading it out loud to get a sense of how long it takes to get through and where it seems to slow down or speed up.)

Subplots

Subplots are secondary stories that add to the overall story, explains Cron. They can give the reader some distance from the major conflict and allow them to process what’s happened. But to be effective, they must have an impact on the main story and the protagonist, either internally or externally.

They can also help flesh out other characters whose plots can provide insight into the main storyline. Writers can use subplots to mirror the main plot, showing an alternative way that the main storyline could play out, usually taking an opposite path from the one the main story takes.

In any case, as with everything else in your story, all the information in a subplot must be something the reader needs to know to understand the main plot and its impact on the protagonist.

(Shortform note: While subplots help you flesh out secondary characters’ stories, you may want to include an additional secondary plot that continues to focus on your protagonist. Such a plot is known as a parallel plot, or a B-story. For example, if you’re writing an action story as your main plot, you may have the protagonist pursuing a love interest in the parallel plot. These, just like subplots, can help you change up the pacing and give the reader a break from conflict, but they too must directly impact the main plot to be effective. If you can take them out without the main plot being impacted, then they don’t belong in the story.)

Flashbacks

According to Cron, flashbacks also provide an opportunity to give the reader a break from the main conflict while supplying important information. They pull the reader out of the immediate story and into a different setting (often a subplot)—because of this, they should only be used when they’re absolutely essential because otherwise, the reader will feel like they’ve been yanked out of the story they were enjoying for one they don’t have any investment in.

Flashbacks should be placed only in spots where they provide context that’s necessary for understanding what happens next in the main story, and the reader should be able to tell right away what the purpose of the flashback is—they should be able to understand why they need this particular information right now.

Flashbacks and Flash-Forwards

Flashbacks can be difficult to work into your narrative because they represent such a big break from the action. It’s important to make clear to the reader that a flashback is happening, and experts recommend including a trigger in the story that shows why the character is flashing back to a previous memory. Also, be sure to make the transition clear through your verb tense so the reader knows exactly when the flashback starts and ends.

Another less common technique for adding new information through time jumps is to use a flash-forward, which allows you to implant information about what’s still to come in the plot. While this tells your reader what will happen in the future, it leaves them wondering how it will happen—and while it may feel like you’re spoiling the story, as discussed above, spoilers generally don’t reduce enjoyment of a story because the “how” is still compelling to the reader.