Storytelling explained from the neuroscience end rather than the craft end. The claim is that a story is a model of someone’s broken model of the world, and that we are gripped by the repair attempt.
Change is the unit. The brain attends to change, so a story opens with something breaking and holds attention for exactly as long as the breakage is unresolved. Character is not separate from plot. Character flaw is the plot.
I found the sacred flaw argument the most useful thing here. A protagonist’s defining strength and defining error are usually the same trait, and the story is the bill arriving.
Useful well outside fiction. Most product narratives fail because nothing is broken in them.
Read November 2024.
