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The Hardwired Power of Story: Insights from Lisa Cron
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The Hardwired Power of Story: Insights from Lisa Cron

As humans, we are hardwired to respond to story in a visceral way. An effective story doesn't just engage our conscious mind, but "enters through your gut, looks out through your eyes, and is never really analyzed by your conscious brain," as Lisa Cron puts it. Story has an primal power over us, a power we often fail to recognize.

Cron, the author of books like Wired for Story, Story Genius, and Story or Die, has spent years studying the neuroscience and function of story. In a wide-ranging interview, she shared insights into why story holds such sway, how writers often get story wrong, and what they can do about it.

At the core is this: "We are all affected by stories every minute of every day, whether we know it or not." Our brains take in information and instantly transform it into a story to determine how it will impact us based on our past experiences, beliefs, and needs. Story is how we inscribe meaning.

But when it comes to fiction writing, Cron argues that much of the prevailing advice is misguided at best. Emphasizing exciting plots or following prescriptive story structures misses the point entirely. "Writing is communication," she says. "It's having something to say." And that something must come from an organic, bottom-up process of developing the inner lives of characters.

"Without the past to anchor the present, everything will be neutral and nothing will add up," Cron explains. "And so it will come across as random to the reader." Getting to the heart of a character's motivations—their misbeliefs, their emotional roadblocks, the specifics of how past experiences shape their perception of reality—is essential groundwork.

For many writers, doing this work up front feels arduous and unnecessary. After all, can't you just start writing and figure those elements out as you go? Cron's blunt response: "Pantsing is the dumbest way to do anything." Creating a rich, cohesive story requires intentional work in building out a character's psychology, philosophy, and crucible of formative experiences. Otherwise, you merely have "a bunch of things that happen."

Shortcuts produce shallow results. As Cron puts it: "If you think it's easy, then fine. Then you're writing for yourself and that is totally fine. But that's not going to pull other people in." Real stories that connect require diving deep, embracing the difficulty.

Ultimately, the writing advice of "show don't tell" has it backwards according to Cron. "If you don't tell us what the character's thinking, you've locked us out and we're not going to care even an iota." It's only through fully rendering a character's inner world that their external actions carry weight. After all, the turning points that make for great drama stem from the internal struggle to "solve it, or end up giving up."

For writers willing to put in the work, Cron's techniques offer a path to stories that resonate on a deeper level. Her core message is a reminder of the unique and underestimated power of story itself—the good kind taps into our most profound needs and beliefs, while the bad kind can manipulate us in troubling ways. But approached with skill and intentionality, story remains one of our most impactful tools for mutual understanding.

While Cron advocates doing extensive preparatory work in developing characters' inner lives, she doesn't view this as separate from the writing process itself. "This work, this backstory work, isn't like pre-writing, or research, or what you do before you get to the real writing," she says. "If you look at most novels, they are between 50 and 60 percent backstory."

Rendering those critical backstory elements on the page, getting into the granular details of how past experiences have shaped a character's current mindset and misbeliefs, is the real creative work of storytelling according to Cron. Too often, writers treat this as an afterthought meant to provide context, when it should be the driving force.

Cron cites the acclaimed novel Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng as a prime example of this approach in action. We are "pulled in" to the characters, many of whom have distinct "origin stories" that gradually reveal their individual psychologies and the formative events that gave rise to their current perspectives.

At its core, story is about diving into those rich inner lives and allowing characters' unique lenses on reality to unfold and evolve over the course of the narrative. This focus on interiority is what creates a sense of authenticity and investment for the reader.

The prevalent emphasis on exciting external plots and hitting prescribed story beats misses this core element entirely. As Cron bluntly states, "Plotting is just as bad" as the oft-maligned process of "pantsing" or writing by the seat of one's pants. A plot-driven story without fully fleshed-out characters will still feel hollow, like "a rat dropped in a maze" being forced through a series of contrived scenario.

Cron acknowledges that doing this deeper psychological work isn't easy - in fact, she declares it "fucking hard." It requires wrestling with thorny questions of identity, challenging one's own misbeliefs, and pushing through multiple drafts. But she sees it as essential if one hopes to create stories that genuinely move people.

"Writers are the most powerful people on the planet," Cron argues. "Story is the most powerful communication tool." Yet that power is often squandered by skipping the difficult labor of psychology and settling for pale imitations of genuine human experience.

By emphasizing the biological roots of how we process story as a species, Cron hopes to reframe the way writers approach their craft. It's not about adhering to formulaic conventions, but tapping into the brain's fundamental need to find deeper meaning and emotional resonance, rooted in our own lived experiences.

While her insights may feel daunting for some writers, they ultimately serve as a rallying cry to embrace story's unique capacity to enlighten, connect, and potentially even "gird yourself against" the more manipulative narrative forces that constantly buffet us from all sides.

For Cron, committing to this painstaking process of unfurling authentic human narratives is not just a matter of improving one's writing - it's about waking up to the existential power of story itself and learning to wield that power with intention. Her teachings offer both a robust methodology and a clarion call to take this biological impulse seriously as truth-tellers and storytellers.

While Cron's focus is on mastering the internal depths of character and story, she doesn't dismiss other storytelling elements like setting, language, and spectacle. She simply sees them as most impactful when grounded in personal truth and human universals.

"Nobody ever taught us to love stories. I mean, it is literally a human universal," Cron notes. From the earliest days of our species telling tales around the campfire, story has been indispensable to how we make sense of ourselves and our place in the world.

Even the most imaginative works of speculative fiction can tap into this timeless power when they arise from an authentic emotional core. Cron cites examples of writers she has worked with in the fantasy and sci-fi genres whose works have been utterly transformed by applying her methodology of rendering characters' rich inner lives.

"If you saw what they came in with and what they're doing now, you would not believe me," Cron says of the metamorphosis some writers experience. What seemed like shallow, self-indulgent world-building initially gets replaced by stories that breathe with human complexity and genuine interiority.

At the same time, Cron pushes back against the notion that stories set in the "real world" automatically have more inherent truth or resonance. "It surprises me how many people who want to be first-time novelists...are writing fantasy," she observes. To her mind, constructing a whole new universe with its own laws and cultures from scratch is an incredibly difficult creative undertaking.

The key isn't the degree of realism, but making any story world feel vividly inhabited by recognizably human psychologies and struggles. "It's scary to write something about, you know, what might happen to the person next door tomorrow," Cron admits. But often those smaller-scale dramas provide the most fertile ground for connecting with core human experiences.

In fact, Cron's favorite example of storytelling done right is Larry McMurtry's epic Western novel Lonesome Dove. Despite its sweeping scale and drama, it remains grounded in the conflicted inner lives of its primary characters. "Even with that, it still goes to all this, even to the very end where you really get, it's about somebody who can't do the thing that would really matter to him and we really understand why."

So while fantasy fans may revel in the imaginative world-building, and literalists may appreciate novelists grounded in gritty realism, Cron believes the most powerful stories work on a more primal level that transcends genre or setting. It's about making us feel the inner truth of why this person is driven to make these choices, confront these obstacles, and continue this quest against all odds.

By cutting through the nonessential artifice and reestablishing that bedrock connection to raw human struggle, the best stories amplify our own self-understanding. They climb inside our utmost hopes, fears, flaws, and unvoiced heartaches to sing out the kind of resonant emotional truth that stirs our very biology.

From Cron's studied perspective, story remains one of the most powerful tools in the human experience precisely because it arises from that same primal source as our most instinctual drives and learned experiences. To engage with it skillfully is to wield a somatic superpower.

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