rather than explained. Readers should be free to anticipate what’s coming next and able to insert their own feelings and interpretations into why that just happened and what it all means. These gaps in explanation are the places in story in which readers insert themselves: their preconceptions; their values; their memories; their connections; their emotions – all become an active part of the story. No writer can ever transplant their neural world perfectly into a reader’s mind. Rather, their two worlds mesh. Only by the reader insinuating themselves into a work can it create a resonance that has the power to shake them as only art can.
So our mystery is solved. We’ve discovered where a story begins: with a moment of unexpected change, or with the opening of an information gap, or likely both. As it happens to a protagonist, it happens to the reader or viewer. Our powers of attention switch on. We typically follow the consequences of the dramatic change as they ripple out from the start of the story in a pattern of causes and effects whose logic will be just ambiguous enough to keep us curious and engaged. But while this is technically true, it’s actually only the shallowest of answers. There’s obviously more to storytelling than this rather mechanical process.
A similar observation is made by a story-maker near the start of Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’s 1941 cinema classic Citizen Kane. The film opens with change and an information gap: the recent death of the mogul Charles Foster Kane, as he drops a glass globe that contains a little snow-covered house and utters a single, mysterious word: rosebud. We’re then presented with a newsreel that documents the raw facts of his seventy years of life: Kane was a well known yet controversial figure who was extraordinarily wealthy and once owned and edited the New York Daily Inquirer. His mother ran a boarding house and the family fortune came after a defaulting tenant left her a gold mine, the Colorado Lode, which had been assumed worthless. Kane was twice married, twice divorced, lost a son and made an unsuccessful attempt at entering politics, before dying a lonely death in his vast, unfinished and decaying palace that, we’re told, was, ‘since the pyramids, the costliest monument a man has built to himself’.
With the newsreel over, we meet its creators – a team of cigarette-smoking newsmen who, it turns out, have just finished their film and are showing it to their boss Rawlston for his editorial comments. And Rawlston is not satisfied. ‘It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did,’ he tells his team. ‘You’ve got to tell us who he was … How is he different from Ford? Or Hearst, for that matter? Or John Doe?’
That newsreel editor was right (as editors are with maddening regularity). We’re a hyper-social species with domesticated brains that have been engineered specifically to control an environment of humans. We’re insatiably inquisitive, beginning with our tens of thousands of childhood questions about how one thing causes another. Being a domesticated species, we’re most interested of all in the cause and effect of other people. We’re endlessly curious about them. What are they thinking? What are they plotting? Who do they love? Who do they hate? What are their secrets? What matters to them? Why does it matter? Are they an ally? Are they a threat? Why did they do that irrational, unpredictable, dangerous, incredible thing? What drove them to build ‘the world’s largest pleasure ground’ on top of a manmade ‘private mountain’ that contained the most populous zoo ‘since Noah’ and a ‘collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued’? Who is the person really? How did they become who they are?
Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. They’re not so much about events that take place on the surface of the drama as they are about the characters that have to battle them. Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws.
There’s something you should know about Mr B. He’s being watched by the FBI. They film him constantly and in secret, then cut the footage together and broadcast it to millions as ‘The Mr B Show’. This makes life rather awkward for Mr B. He showers in swimming trunks and dresses beneath bedsheets. He hates talking to others, as he knows they’re actors hired by the FBI to create drama. How can he trust them? He can’t trust anyone. No matter how many people explain why he’s wrong, he just can’t see it. He finds a way to dismiss each argument they present to him. He knows it’s true. He feels it’s true. He sees evidence for it everywhere.
There’s something else you should know about Mr B. He’s psychotic. One healthy part of his brain, writes the neuroscientist Professor Michael Gazzaniga, ‘is trying to make sense out of some abnormalities going on in another’. The malfunctioning part is causing ‘a conscious experience with very different contents than would normally be there, yet those contents are what constitute Mr B’s reality and provide experiences that his cognition must make sense of.’
Because it’s being warped by faulty signals being sent out by the unhealthy section of his brain, the story Mr B is telling about the world, and his place within it, is badly mistaken. It’s so mistaken he’s no longer able to adequately control his environment, so doctors and care staff have to do it on his behalf, in a psychiatric institution.
As unwell as he is, we’re all a bit like Mr B. The controlled hallucination inside the silent, black vault of our skulls that we experience as reality is warped by faulty information. But because this distorted reality is the only reality we know, we just can’t see where it’s gone wrong. When people plead with us that we’re mistaken or cruel and acting irrationally, we feel driven to find a way to dismiss each argument they present to us. We know we’re right. We feel we’re right. We see evidence for it everywhere.
These distortions in our cognition make us flawed. Everyone is flawed in their own interesting and individual ways. Our flaws make us who we are, helping to define our character. But our flaws also impair our ability to control the world. They harm us.
At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way. The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them. We’ll warm to their vulnerability. We’ll become emotionally engaged in their struggle. When the dramatic events of the plot coax them to change we’ll root for them.
The problem is, in fiction and in life, changing who we are is hard. The insights we’ve learned from neuroscience and psychology begin to show us exactly why it’s hard. Our flaws – especially the mistakes we make about the human world and how to live successfully within it – are not simply ideas about this and that which we can identify easily and choose to shrug off. They’re built right into our hallucinated models. Our flaws form part of our perception, our experience of reality. This makes them largely invisible to us.
Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being ‘in
