If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Did you know that your brain is biologically hardwired to crave specific narrative patterns, and that mastering them can give you near-total control over an audience’s attention?
- Have you ever wondered why the most unforgettable characters are always the most flawed, and how you can use neuroscience to craft a protagonist that feels hauntingly real to your readers?
- What's the secret to using 'stimulating details' to bypass your audience's logic and speak directly to their subconscious mind?
Listen to The Science of Storytelling — Free Audiobook
Key Takeaways from The Science of Storytelling
- Discover how the human brain constantly constructs reality as a narrative, automatically casting you as the morally superior hero and forcing cause-and-effect relationships onto random events.
- Understand why audiences are irresistibly drawn to flawed characters, which provide a safe psychological space to explore our own hidden faults and deeply ingrained beliefs.
- Learn how to keep your audience hooked by emphasizing meaningful goals, a technique proven by best-selling novels that use action words like 'do,' 'need,' and 'want' twice as often as other books.
- Master the art of plotting by giving your protagonist a 'flawed theory of control,' allowing a rich storyline to naturally unfold when their warped worldview is tested by unexpected change.
- Find out why confronting a character's deeply held beliefs creates such gripping conflict, triggering a neurological response in the brain that feels exactly like surviving a physical attack.
Learning Tools
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Mind Map
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
The Science of Storytelling — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Human brains are wired to love stories.
Chapter 3: We’re especially drawn to flawed characters.
Chapter 4: A well-crafted character is essential; if you shape the right one, a rich plot will inevitably follow.
Chapter 5: A compelling plot should spur us to ask, “Who is this character, really?”
Chapter 6: You can further energize the story by giving the brain room to fill in the gaps.
Chapter 7: In the end, most great stories are fundamentally about a change in status.
Chapter 8: Stories possess a singular power to reshape our view of the world.
The Science of Storytelling Summary & Overview
The Science of Storytelling (2019) shows you how to craft a compelling story using lessons from psychology and neuroscience. These blinks walk you through the steps of creating a narrative that grips your audience by subtly manipulating their brains. From demonstrating how to create a perfectly flawed character to explaining the power of stimulating details, Will Storr reveals the crucial elements that go into building a great story.
Who Should Listen to The Science of Storytelling?
- Aspiring writers
- Creatives whose work involves storytelling, like journalists or advertisers
- Anyone who wants to look at stories more critically
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