Learn Storytelling in 72 Minutes (Will Storr Interview)
In this 72‑minute interview, writer‑researcher Will Storr argues that storytelling is fundamentally about character, not plot. He introduces the “theory of control” – a one‑sentence statement that captures what a character believes will keep them safe or give them status – and shows how flawed versions of this theory drive conflict and change. Storr outlines a five‑act character‑change structure (the flawed self, the search for alternatives, the midpoint transformation, the test of pain, and the final resolution) and explains how each act is a causal chain of change. He connects storytelling to human evolution, identifying three universal drives – survival, connection, and status – that underlie every story. The conversation covers suspense as the “threat of change,” the role of information density in pacing, the importance of craft versus artistic snobbery, and how obstacles and goals are the engine of narrative. Storr also discusses how these ideas apply to business, politics, and personal mental health, and he critiques the hero’s journey as an outdated framework. Throughout, he uses examples from literature and film (Scrooge, Willy Loman, Fleabag, Jaws, The Godfather, Mad Men, Nomadland, etc.) to illustrate his points.
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Will Storr is on the show today, and he's written 7 books, and he is like a scientist for storytelling. And now you might think, oh my goodness, do we need another storytelling person? But Will's different, and he's different because he talks about character instead of plot. Most people talk about the hero's journey, but Will says, you know, let's talk about great characters. What makes for a good character? And what's fun about this episode is by the time you're done, you're gonna be able to go out, hang out with your friends, and instantly test what he's talking about. All right, let's rock. So what I want to start off by talking about is stories and why we have stories to make sense of reality.
Well, one of the main reasons we process reality as a story is just simplicity. Reality is enormously complex, it's chaotic. And one of the things that story does is give us this kind of simple, of fairly linear experience of the world. So that simplification is really, really important. It's also really important for human behavior and human progress. We're a unique animal in the sense that we imagine the future. We have these great dreams and ambitions and goals. We have regrets that exist in stories from our past. And so that kind of storytelling capacity is really our superpower in the sense of it really separates us from the rest of the animals. I mean, cows and fleas and fish aren't imagining the future of, what if we could escape the ocean and get on land? But humans do that. So that's the other thing our storytelling capacities are doing. They're kind of really helping us survive and progress.
And what is it that most people miss about storytelling? Because what I wanna do with this interview is, Take what most people miss and show people what they can do to write better stories, to tell better stories?
I mean, there's a few things really. I mean, one of the things that I've written about a lot in the past is about character. I think in the past, well, ever since Aristotle really, 2,000-plus years ago, people have been trying to figure out the secrets of story. And the only way you really, up until recently, you could do that is by getting all the stories that work and comparing them and seeing what works, and then say, well, all these stories that work, you know, this happens and then this happens and then this happens. And then so what you end up with is this kind of recipe, this kind of plot recipe. And so people have these various ideas about— this is the, you know, there's the hero's journey, there's the camera recipe, there's the Save the Cat recipe, there's John Yorke's Into the Woods recipe. You know, this is recipes. And so that makes people think about plot a lot. You know, I'm gonna— if I have these kind of events in this order, I'm gonna get a bestseller, I'm gonna get a, you know, a blockbuster movie. But what that misses is character. And I argue that character is actually much more— you can't really— they're both really essential, but character is much more important than plot. And I think it's character that makes amazing stories, you know, really amazing. Our most memorable stories, the stories that mean the most to us, are the ones with the most memorable characters.
Well, let's dive in. So, what makes for a good character?
So, the way I think about character and the way I teach designing character in my workshops is to begin with a very, very simple idea of what your kind of character stands for. So, you can think about the brain as this machine for controlling the world. That's what we're all trying to do. I mean, that's what every living thing is trying to do, trying to control the world in order to get what they want. And so, every human has this kind of set of ideas that kind of dictates their behavior such that they kind of get what they want. So if you were to take, say, Donald Trump and, I don't know, Gandalf the Wizard, and put them in a room, and they've both got to get what they want out of the world, Donald Trump is going to approach a problem in a very different way to Gandalf the Wizard, or Peppa Pig, or whatever. So, So that's how I think about character. A character is this kind of theory of control. But how do I control the world? And the way to start off is with a really, really simple idea about how do I control the world? Ideally, a one-sentence idea. This is my theory of how the world works.
And what would examples of that be? Would it be like, I need the power, I need to be the coolest? Help me think about how to do that.
Well, it's usually a kind of— You know, I talk about these kind of various sentences you can complete, and one of them is, I am only safe if I... So, if you think about Scrooge in A Christmas Carol...
Mm-hmm.
I'm only safe if I have— keep all the money and love to myself. That's his theory of control. You know, he's this vulnerable, flawed character at the beginning that, for whatever reason, has come to believe that he needs— the only way he can protect himself and keep himself safe is by making sure he's got all the money. And so that's Scrooge. That's who he is. And from that very simple idea of character comes actually a character of huge complexity, of huge kind of profundity. And it's a really elegant story. Of course, the 3 ghosts come along, they show him, these are the ramifications of your theory of control. This is the damage it's causing your life. And he learns and he changes. And then by the end of the story, he's the opposite. He's very generous.
Hmm.
And so he gets the rewards of the hero. He gets love, he gets status. So that would be a kind of a classic example of A Theory of Control. Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman is something about success is all that matters.
Mm-hmm.
You know, success in the world, that's all that matters. So, he's obsessed with the idea of success, both for him and his sons. And that obsession with success, success, success— I think Arthur Miller himself says something about, you know, Willy Loman's idea was that when you die, God weighs you on the scale and weighs your success, and you either pass and you either fail. Kind of that idea. And again, Death of a Salesman is this very interesting examination of the damage that that idea has caused, you know, him and his life. So that's another example. I don't know whether you had— we had a big, big hit series called Fleabag, a sitcom written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Hmm.
It was massive over here. And that was a young sort of millennial woman who basically the only value she saw in herself was sexual. So she was— I'm a sexual being and that's my only value. And, you know, again, Fleabag was this very funny, It was a sitcom, but it was also quite profound and quite interesting and quite deep. And it was profound and interesting and deep because she had a really interesting character with a really specific theory of control about the world, that she controls the world with her sexuality. And again, you know, the story shows the drama and the craziness and the damage that that idea had caused for her life and the life of the people around her.
So that question is, I only feel safe when...
Yeah, that's one of them. You know, there are all kinds. I mean, you know, another famous one would be When Harry Met Sally. Harry, theory of— theory that was tested in that screenplay was very famously, men and women can't really be friends because sex always gets in the way.
Mm-hmm.
That's his idea. And that entire movie, and those brilliant characters, were a test of that idea. You know, he stood for that idea. That's who he was. So, I think that's where you begin with a character, a very simple idea about the world, which the character stands for and the character tests. And that's how you get— profundity in a story. That's how your story becomes not a series of plot points of ever-increasing drama. It becomes a real profound examination of how the human world works. Because is it true that men and women can't really be friends? Sex always gets in the way. That's a really interesting question.
Mm-hmm.
And it's fascinating. And there are loads of, you know, there are loads of different fors and againsts that idea. And the screenplay examines those things. So, it's interesting, it's got depth, it's fascinating. You know, so I think that's the stuff that people miss when they just look at the surface drama, ever-escalating action. You know, it's not enough.
So, when novelists, or when you're designing a character, or somebody's writing a TV show, is this something that they're usually doing in advance? Or is this something that is sort of an emergent thing that later on they begin to codify?
I think it needs to be in advance. I really do. I mean, because that's where you begin. I think you should begin with character. And, you know, you need to have a sense of where the plot's going, but the plot— The plot can't exist without you understanding the character. I mean, that's what I find when I'm doing the workshops. I sometimes ask people, tell me about your story, and they come up with all these plot points. And then I ask, tell me about your character, and they don't really have much of an idea. Oh, they're just this nice person who's struggling a bit. And it's like, if you don't understand your character, how do you know what's gonna happen?
Yeah.
Because in story, just as in life, what we do, how we respond to the world, is a product of our character, is a product of our theory of control, it's a product of who we are. And so you can't really build a plot in any— that's gonna be realistic and feel authentic and feel interesting and original without first understanding your character. I mean, if you're Phoebe Waller-Bridge writing Fleabag, all that whole 6-part— well, 2 series of it— show comes out of that central idea of, you know, my— the only value I have to offer other people is my body in a sexual way. Mm-hmm. There is no story without that. Everything emerges out of that, and that's why it's a really interesting piece of work. Or, If you have this great what-if idea, like, I want to write a show about, I don't know, set in a dystopian world of overpopulation, for example.
Yeah.
Okay, that's fine. But then you need to think about, okay, so who is this story going to be about? What is the perfect person to center a story about overpopulation on? Well, maybe it's somebody who hates human company, like the ultimate misanthrope. That would be really interesting. So, okay, so you want the ultimate misanthrope. What's their— Theory of control. I'm only safe if I don't know, but what is around me? And then so that's how you you go back.
What I think is important here that I want to emphasize is that whatever their theory of control is, the flaw in the theory has to be revealed over time.
Yeah.
That there is some fundamental flaw that they think that the world looks looks like this. They have some model of reality, and then they go do do do do do do do do.
Yeah.
They're going about their life. Everything seems good, and then all of a sudden. there becomes a disconnect between the story in their head of how they can be successful and what's actually true about the world. And now all of a sudden those 2 things clash, and then that's when the conflict begins.
That's when your story begins.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly. So when we talk about the theory of control, it's a flawed theory of control. Of course, in Fleabag, her only value isn't her sexuality. That's not true. That's not true of anybody. All stories change. It's a series of Causally linked changes, but one of the most important things that's changing throughout your story is your character.
Right.
And so, the story really begins when they realize— you know, like in The Godfather, classic example, the theory of control of the Al Pacino character, whatever his name was, was, I'm not a gangster. I am gonna be a senator. I'm a good man. And of course, the story begins when there's an attempt on his father's life, and he gets sucked into that gangster world. So, his theory of control, I'm gonna survive by not being a gangster, that's the theory. That's his flawed idea. And it's not flawed in a moral sense, it's flawed in the sense that it's wrong. You know, that's the important thing about the word flaw. And the story shows why he's wrong, because when there's an attempt on the life of his father, he gets sucked in and he wants revenge, and all those feelings come up.
Right.
So, that's what we're doing. As the story's going through, we are kind of breaking apart that theory of control. And then, if the story has a happy ending, it's in the final scene, literally in the final beat of the movie or the story, very often you see the characters change. The flaw is fixed. They're not that broken person anymore. They've, they've, they fixed that mistake that they're making about themselves or the world.
Yeah. And how much of this is about us asking, well, how should I live? How should I be? What's the flaw going on in my head? How much of this is our ability to basically get into the life of a character versus be like, oh my goodness, well, I'm trying to examine my own life and look in the mirror and what's going on for me. How much of this is just, we're just narcissists and we're thinking about what's happening in our brains?
Well, actually, I've no doubt that when people, artists, I mean, to a great extent, are very often trying to figure out their own problems. Like, this is how I see the world and why is it wrong? And trying to— that's what artists are doing often in any medium, they're exploring their own damage in that way. But I've also— I've got no doubt that once you understand these principles, you could write a story about somebody that has a flaw that's nothing like yours. Like, if you're a Hollywood screenwriter, you've just got to write the damn movie. Or if you're writing, you know, for HBO, you've just got to sit in the writers' room and write the next Mad Men or Sopranos, whatever it's going to be. That's what I think is interesting about these principles. You don't have to— It doesn't actually have to come from personal experience. You just have to be able to imagine what is life like for somebody who only cares about success, and that's the only thing that they ever think about? Well, that's Willy Loman. And I think if you're a good writer, I think most people can imagine their way into kind of thinking through those sort of somehow alien lenses.
And what makes what you're saying People might think, oh, oh my goodness, well, I'm just going to have a caricature and this person is not actually going to have the depth that an actually good character has. But you just seem to completely reject that. So what is the thing that people miss?
This comes up all the time because people think, well, if I, you know, you're reducing my character to one sentence, how unbelievably— like, what? And it's just— it is paradoxical, but I promise you, That that's how you get the most complex and interesting characters. And so in The Science of Storytelling, the book I've written about all this, I go in detail at the book The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, hugely respected literary author. No one's going to accuse Ishiguro of being simplistic, but his central character does this exactly, and that's Stevens, the butler. who just completely believes in the supremacy, the natural supremacy of the English, who are in the right environment for this. So he really believes that the English make the best butlers, and the English aristocrats— there shouldn't really be democracy. English aristocrats should make all the decisions. And his theory of control is English reserve is how a person should operate, and that's how you should be. And so So that's who he is. And, you know, we were talking just a minute ago about how the story begins when something happens that challenges that theory of control. And so he's very deliberately set his story not in 1890, the height of British power and the British Empire, but in 1950, when British power was beginning to decline. And the big stately home that he's worked in has been sold by his English aristocrat and bought by an American. God forbid.
Uh-oh. So, yeah.
Beware of those guys. Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is a This is a bit of a shock. So, English power is declining. His new boss is an American, a guy from, you know, symbolically a person from the New World. And his new American boss is— he's got to cut down the staff running the house. And so, what happens is, the only person that he knows that he could— who could successfully run the house on this reduced staff is this woman that you basically learn that he's kind of in love with, who doesn't work there anymore.
Mm.
And so, the American boss sends him out, borrow my car and go out and drive down to Cornwall. and just ask her to come back and work for us. So, he goes on this road trip out into the real world and meets real people. And the whole novel really is him reassessing this notion he's got of the superiority of the English upper classes. That's what it is.
Right.
And it's a novel of incredible depth and power. You know, it's just fascinating about all the flaws of that sense of English... British superiority that there certainly was, you know, back in the day. A lot less of that now.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and that begins with this extremely simple idea of who this guy is. And so it's, it's just not true that you end up with a simplistic character, because what you're doing is you're— if you're writing your story properly, is you're taking this idea about the world and you're testing it in a million different ways and seeing how that person reacts. And, and, and so, so as I say, you end up with this very deep, rich experience. And also, you know, just think about some of the characters that we that we know and love from literature. Another one, again, is Scrooge. Nobody calls Scrooge a simplistic character.
Right.
But he is there as a kind of test of this very interesting idea about greed and selfishness. Greed and selfishness are not simplistic themes. They're complex, deep, profound themes. And so that's kind of what you're doing. So yeah, people do resist because they think it's reductive, but it's like an atomic Bomb. It begins as this tiny thing and it kind of explodes in meaning.
Yeah. The one parallel that comes to mind is in public speaking, that a lot of people think, oh, if I just reduce it down to 3 points or 1 point, oh, it's gonna be too simplistic. But the fact of the matter is that really ties together your entire piece, and it also actually allows people to remember and allows people to get a sense for what's going on. But what I wanna do now is I wanna shift into the turning point inside of a story. And when there's thing A that becomes thing B, because you have this line from the screenwriter, John Yorke, who said, the image every TV character, in fact or fiction, always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.
Yeah, yeah. So, all story is an account of change. And I think that well-written story is just this symphony of change. It's things changing constantly on every level. So, you've got the change on the surface level of the drama, stuff's happening. Stevens is going out into the world on this road trip, and he's meeting these people, he's meeting these— car's breaking down, and this is happening, and that's happening. You've got change on the subconscious level of the character. As the drama's changing, their theory of control is changing, their idea about how the world works is changing. So that's very dramatic and tense. And I think that's the secret kind of energy that really powers people through stories. When you see the character changing, you kind of, you know, you become gripped. And, of course, loads of other things change. The character's goal can change, the character's understanding of who the cast of characters around them can change, their— You know, really great storytelling is just full of change, and that's what's keeping people gripped. And that change has to be causal, ideally.
Right.
So one change is triggering the next, triggering the next, triggering the next. It isn't that this thing happens, and then this thing happens, and then this thing happens. You know, you've got to have this kind of, like, domino effect where one change is triggering the next, triggering the next. And that's how a good story is structured in that kind of engineering sense.
Who do you think does this well?
I think all successful storytellers have got that kind of instinct. I mean, I've been watching— I've been watching The Sopranos again recently, the series 3, 4, and 5 of Sopranos. I had COVID a couple of weeks ago, so I was in bed watching this.
Oh, man.
And David Chase and his team did that really well. I mean, everything's causal. So it's the one thing that triggers the next, which triggers the next, which triggers the next, which triggers the next. So you're just gripped. You can't— you can't stop watching. And that causal understanding of the world, that's very human. That's how the storytelling brain understands the world as well. So humans, we see causes and effects where there are no causes and effects. If you put a human in front of a screen with a bunch of randomly moving dots, the human will start telling a story about what's happening with those dots. So this dot is chasing this one and he's hiding and all that kind of stuff. And it's completely random. But we are— You know, we see causes and effects everywhere, and that's actually how a healthy human brain works. And when humans go mad, when they go crazy, that, that storytelling capacity tightens up and it becomes overactive. So people with psychosis and people who are paranoid see causes and effects where there are no causes and effects. They start going, you know, going about chemtrails and 5G masts and COVID, and they'll start connecting things which shouldn't be connected.
Right.
But to them, it feels completely real, you know? So, so, so, so So yeah, that causality is a fundamental part of the way that humans think. And that's why great storytelling should be causal, because causality is the language of the human brain. And when storytellers don't do causal, like when they're David Lynch being David Lynch, and there's all these sort of weird disconnected events, people call it hard work. It's quite hard work. It's quite difficult.
Yeah.
And they call it hard work and difficult because It's not causal. So we're having to consciously think about how does that thing connect with that thing? And it's like a puzzle that you're trying to solve that is actually impossible to solve often. Yeah.
So as you're writing a story, how do you think about doing your outline? What are the different components of an outline?
Well, I've got my own 5-act plan, which is inspired by Freytag's Pyramid, But it works with that theory of control idea. So I think the problem for me with existing plot plans, structures, is that they don't really take into account character change. And I think that it's character change that should power a story. So just those 5 acts of a commercial story, you know, not a literary one, but like a Hollywood blockbuster or a bestselling— novel would be, Act 1, this is me and it's not working. So this is me. So you see the theory of control, you meet the person, sometimes quite slow at the beginning of the story because you're being introduced to the person and their theory of control and why it's flawed.
Right.
So you see the person, you see them behave, and you see how their behavior isn't working anymore. So if you're Stevens, you see, oh, he believes in English supremacy, but this is the '50s and everything's going to shit in England, right? So, this is me, and it's not working. Act 2 is, is there another way? So, something happens which makes them realize, this me that I've been for all my life is not working anymore. And then you've got the ignition point, or the exciting incident, sometimes it's called, which sets them on their way, and it forces them to begin changing. And they begin experimenting with a kind of a new form of self. And then you've got Act 3, which contains the midpoint, the big turning point, which is, there is. I have transformed. So, often, in the very middle of the story, the character embraces this new theory of control. So if you watch Jaws, exactly in the middle of Jaws— Jaws is about a man who's— people think Jaws is about a shark. It's not about a shark.
Huh.
It's about a man who's scared of the ocean. It's about a man who's scared of the water. So the central character of that, his responsibility is for the safety of the residents of— I think it's called Amity Island on the East Coast of the US. And the shark comes along, and he can't protect his people anymore. And it's made much worse because he's terrified of the ocean. You know, he's got a reputation of being scared of water, and people laugh at him about this. In fact, his wife says he's so scared when he gets the ferry over, the car ferry over, that he stays in the car. He won't get out of the car in the car ferry. He's so scared of the water. And so, so the shark comes, and to help him with his fear of the water, you get this new character, which is quite, you know, an archetypal character, like a Yoda character. Dumbledore, a teacher-helper character who teaches him about the ways of the ocean, the sharks. And then, at the very middle of Jaws, he goes in the ocean. He goes, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna go out there, and I'm gonna fight the shark. So that's what you get, you know, this transformation of character. I'm only safe if I stay away from the water. I'm gonna go in the water!
Right.
And then the next act, Act 4, is, but can I face the pain of change? So, the thing about a theory of control is it's protective. So those ideas around which we orient our lives somehow protect us. They give us some kind of safety, some kind of sense of identity. And when we reject those ideas, there's a cost to that thing. So an obvious example would be The Godfather. At the very beginning of— middle of Godfather, Al Pacino's character kills a police chief and a rival gangster. His theory of control is, I'm only safe if I never be a gangster. Now he's transformed, he kills people, so now he is a gangster. There's no going back from that. And Act 4 is, but can I take the pain of change? So, I've transformed, and now the ramifications come in. So, it's like a test.
Right.
So, it's like the gods testing the character. Can you— okay, you've made this decision now to become different. Can you fucking handle it? That's what the story's doing. And so, in The Godfather, You know, the police attack, rival gangsters attack. It's just a massive increase in drama. In Jaws, the shark attacks, obviously. And then finally, you've got Act 5, where there's often a final showdown, and the character has to decide, is this forever? Is this really me, this change, this new theory of control? And if it's a happy ending, they have.
Right.
And so what you'll often find when you look at stories is the very final scene of a story often isn't the end of the drama. The very final scene shows the character change.
Mm.
So, in Jaws, you watch Jaws, and then there's the final showdown with the shark, and he kills the shark. He puts a compressed air tank in the shark's mouth and shoots it, so it blows the shark up. Wonderful. But that's not the— people think that's the final scene, but it's not. The final scene, he's swimming back to the shore with his— oceanographer friend, and he says, I used to be scared of the ocean. And his mate goes, I can't imagine why. And then the credits roll. And it's the same in The Godfather. People remember The Godfather, the end of it being the thing where he's getting all of his enemies killed, and it's this massive bloodbath. But the final scene is actually him in a room a bit like this, surrounded by other gangsters who are all kissing his ring and calling him Godfather. And then the credits roll.
Mm.
So, the final scene is the character transformation. It's not— The kind of drama.
Let's go back through them. So the first one is, here's the character.
This is me and it's not working.
This is me and it's not working. Number 2 is, hey, there actually might be another option.
Exactly, yeah. We can go see this.
Okay, so then we keep going, and then there's the character change.
Yeah, they embrace the change. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna change.
Yeah.
Okay.
Number 4 is, they've— are they gonna embrace the change?
Yeah.
It's a test.
Can you take the pain of change? It's like, okay, you've changed, but now the ramifications of that change come in? Or the, you know, so there's a huge escalation in drama. And then, say, the final act is, um, is, I have transformed, or—
Or I haven't transformed.
You haven't. So, in a tragedy, it works a bit differently, 'cause in a tragedy, you've got somebody who's flawed, and rather than changing, they just double down on the flaw.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, so, and then what you have at the end of a tragedy is they, they usually end up dead, but at the very least, ostracized from the community, or in prison, or something like this. So in tragedy, they don't embrace the character change. Right.
That's why we call it a tragedy.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why we call it a tragedy.
Yeah.
What do you make of the hero's journey and what it reveals about the structure of consciousness?
Well, I mean, I want to give full respect to Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey, but I do feel like it's— he came up with that in the 1940s. It's getting on, it's like 80 years old now. And I feel like it's time we move kind of beyond that. I think in its full length, the hero's journey is 22 beats. kind of plot thing. And of course, it's probably the most influential story theory of all time, massively successful, and has been responsible for some incredible examples of storytelling, but also a lot of junk.
Yeah.
So my feeling is it's time for us to salute it but retire it, really, because I think we know so much more about storytelling now because of the advances we've made in psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, in neuroscience.
The one word that hasn't come up is a sense of suspense. Like, when I think of the great stories of when I've been, you know, just sitting on my chair just watching a movie or something, you're like, oh my goodness, what is going to happen? Like, I need to keep reading. And what is going on with how context is set up, where the mystery comes from, where that sense of, oh my goodness, I need to figure out what is going to happen, where does that come from?
Yeah, well, I think, well, I mean, I think That's part of the craft of the storyteller to come up with stuff that's going to happen in the plot that's going to really test the character, surprising events. I think this theory of control that we all have in our heads to direct our behavior, it's kind of who we are. It's our identity. It's our very sense of self. I mean, it's very hard to change that. And so, in story and in real life, if somebody's gonna change the real kind of core of who they are, that takes something really dramatic to happen.
No kidding.
So, that's where I think the suspense comes in really good, really well-told stories, is, you know, what's the perfect thing that could happen to this particular person? So, you know, we were sort of talking before about maybe you could write a story like, well, who's the perfect person to tell a story about overpopulation, about some dystopian future where there's too many people.
Yeah.
It's the ultimate loner.
Yeah.
So creating the perfect person for the perfect character for your kind of what-if, that should automatically be creating suspense, because you've got these 2 elements which are kind of in conflict. Like with Stevens in Remains of the Day, he believes in the natural superiority of the English, Um, so you drop him in 1950 with an American boss.
Right.
That automatically creates suspense, creates drama.
What I'm sensing is both of those have the sense of conflict.
Yeah.
Where you have what this person wants, what they're going for, their sort of idyllic state.
Yeah.
And then, eh, we now have a conflict between those 2 things.
Yeah.
And what I'm seeing, though, is one sense of conflict is they want this thing.
Yeah.
They're now in a place where they don't get that thing.
Yeah.
So that's like, the British aristocrat butler guy. Yeah, in America, or sort of with American boss. Okay, now we have conflict there. I think another one is exactly the opposite of that, which is you want this thing. Yeah, fine. I'll give you that thing. I'm gonna give you that thing in its extreme. Yeah, you're now gonna be taken to the limit of that thing, and you're gonna scratch your head, and you're gonna— and you're gonna say, okay, hold on, actually, I don't really like this that much.
Like Brewster's Millions, right? You ever see that film Brewster's Millions? No, tell me about it. I think it was Richard Pryor and And I think he was somebody that was like a working-class African-American guy, and there was something about some relative had given him— he could inherit his millions, but he had to spend a ridiculous amount of money in a 24-hour period. And he wasn't allowed to give it away. So it's brilliant because he's got everything he wanted, but by being given everything he wanted, he learns that it's not that important at the end of the day. So it's a really smart way of Exactly. Kind of achieving the same thing, testing the character. You're still testing that theory of control. You're testing the idea around which that character orients their lives.
Right. Because the thing that you've always wanted turns out to be more hollow than you thought.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was talking to somebody about Mad Men the other day. You know, Mad Men apparently came out— I don't know. I was told by this person I was talking to, Matthew Weiner, who used to work on The Sopranos writing team, had this kind of insight suddenly that he had everything he'd ever wanted. He was working on this amazing hit show as a TV writer. But he still wasn't happy. So he wanted to tell a story about people who had everything they wanted, but they still weren't happy. And that was Don Draper with his perfect wife and his amazing job, perfect looks. And, you know, I think about White Lotus as well. I mean, White Lotus is brilliant because it's very character-driven. And you've got all these people who have everything they could possibly want, but they're still not happy.
Yeah.
So, so again, that I think For me, that gives these stories this rich profundity because it's about character rather than being about plot, plot, plot.
Hitchcock has a line where he says, there's no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
Yeah.
And what's going on with that?
Well, you know, I think that he's talking there about— well, I mean, what I talk about in The Science of Storytelling is the idea that there's— you know, storytellers play with change, moments of change, but also they play with the threat of change.
Yes.
You know, so again, going back to Jaws, if you read the book of, you know, the novel of Jaws, which is another massive—
Dun dun dun.
Yeah, yeah, like it begins with just by describing this big fish swimming through the water. So it's already sort of playing with this kind of threat of change. And that's another way of saying suspense, the threat of change. It's like very often with these ideas, story is like life, and it's, you know, it's the same stuff. It's made out of the same stuff. So absolutely. The threat of change is this amazing weapon that storytellers can use to get people gripped to their narrative.
Yeah, it's funny because if you just watched a horror movie and all you saw was the scary moment, it wouldn't really be much of a scary movie.
No.
What you need to see is all the lead-up and the music and the dark little shack in the middle of the night. And then you get in and it's like, what's going to happen? Uh-oh, uh-oh. And I like that turn of phrase, the threat. Of change. Uh-oh, something could happen. And that's actually where a lot of the mystery and a lot of the suspense comes from.
Absolutely. Yeah. It's like The Blair Witch Project, which is one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen. I mean, the ending scene is just— you're in a dark room, and there's a kind of a ghostly girl standing in the corner like that, which, if you just were shown that, you'd be like, what's that? But because everything leads up to it, it's absolutely horrendously terrifying. So they do a brilliant job in The Blair Witch Project of playing with the threat of change in order to freak everybody out.
Tell me about this: survival, connection, and status, and how they relate to stories.
Well, these are kind of really fundamental concepts in human life. So like all animals, and indeed plants, humans want to survive. And that means we want food, shelter, safety, but also procreation, survival for our kin, our friends, our tribe. So that's one thing that we want. But humans are kind of social animals. We're tribal. So humans are apes that are a bit like ants, and we solve the problems of our existence by coming into groups that are highly cooperative.
Mm-hmm.
And that's how we've taken over the world. So if you think about human life, We think about big heroes like Steve Jobs and whoever, but it's not really individuals that do stuff. It's groups. It's Apple Computers and the amazing teams that he led that invented that iPhone and the Mac. So we solve all of our problems by connecting into groups. And in order to make that work, evolution has to program us with very powerful drives and instincts. And those drives and instincts are, firstly, we seek to connect. So all humans fundamentally want to connect with other humans. We want to connect with romantic partners in order to enter a cooperative relationship to raise children. We want to enter into friendship groups to help us emotionally, to help us when we're sick and in need. And it wants to form us into groups, which are— back in the day were our tribes, but today are our political organizations or the companies that we work for or the soccer teams that we play in. So, so all humans are desperate to connect. And the corollary of that is that we dread disconnection. So ostracization, social rejection is a universal human fear.
Yeah.
Once we're in those groups, it's not just enough for us to be in a group and accepted in a group. We've got to be valuable to that group. So evolution has programmed us to want status. So that is— status is the idea that we are valuable to other people. So, so that, that motivates us to, you know, back in the days of the hunter-gatherer tribe, to be the best hunter, to be the best storyteller, to be the best sorcerer or the finder of honey or builder of camp or whatever it might be. So survival, connection, and status are the 3 things that all humans want. There are 3 fundamental drives, and survival, connection, and status are also the subject of all human stories.
Hmm.
So if you think about movies like The Revenant or Alien, they're about survival. If you think about movies like Stand By Me or Brokeback Mountain, they're about connection. If you think about movies like Whiplash or Barbie, they're movies about status. If you think about the best stories, the stories that we feel that we can watch again and again and again and again, and that stand the test of time, they're about all 3 of those things. So Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, Star Wars, they're about survival and connection and status in about equal proportion. So those 3 concepts are fundamental to human life, and they're fundamental to human storytelling because humans use stories to teach them how to live. So of course, that's going to be the subject of human stories. Human stories teach us how to get survival. They teach us how to get connection. They teach us how to get status and avoid losing those things.
So how do you think about these things as you're just going about your life and you're at the pub with your friends and you're having a pint or something, you're telling a story Like, how do these ideas show up in terms of your very practical reality?
Practical reality, I think they're really important for mental wellbeing, psychological wellbeing. I mean, they've changed the way that I see myself and my life and deal with my problems. Because when I'm anxious or depressed, I think, okay, so what's the problem? Is it survival? Is it connection? Or is it status?
I like that.
And it's always one of those things.
Wow.
Always one of those things. With status, you've got to understand it in the broadest sense. It's like, like, is it something in my career? Have I had some rejections? Have I had a shit comment on Amazon or whatever? You know what it might be. But status is also, is my political team doing badly? Have I read something on social media that attacks my team and makes me— you know, so that's the status thing too. And so what I find in my personal life is that if I'm having a normal bad day, I've got a problem in one of those things. Maybe I'm feeling sick. That's a survival thing. Maybe I've had an argument with my wife. That's a connection thing. But if I'm starting to get really depressed, there's a problem in 2 of those buckets.
Wow.
Or, or more. So it's really changed the way that I, I understand my own mental health, because it's, it's, it's 100% correct all of the time that when you're feeling shit, you've got a problem in, in one of those buckets, probably. And if you're feeling really bad, probably more than one of those buckets. Like, the really bad times, maybe you're physically sick, maybe you've not— you're feeling lonely and disconnected. and maybe your career's going badly. I mean, that's a recipe for really significant psychological problems because it's hitting all 3 of those sort of measures of wellbeing the brain has.
I want to talk about the pacing of stories, because one of the things that I've picked up from you is that basically, if you talk to people, like if you ever meet someone who was in an accident, what do they always say? Well, the car started flipping and it was like time slowed down. And I saw this and I saw this and I saw this and I saw this. And they'll tell the story and there'll be a little bit of information for the entire day leading up. Then there'll be a lot of information, like the 4 or 5 seconds, and they'll often just remember it so vividly.
Yeah.
And then there'll be a little bit of information after. And all this is to say that our— the way that we process reality is during these peak suspenseful moments, the information density of what we remember goes way up.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think the same thing happens when people are telling stories, that that's one of the ways that you communicate that this is an important moment, is you put in a higher density of information and time seems to slow down.
Yeah, I like that information density. That's a lovely way of putting it. That's exactly right. So, you know, so when we're in a car accident, we, you know, the brain speeds up, we process a lot of information, and time seems to slow down to give us more of a chance to react and kind of get ourselves out of that situation. And that's how it should be in storytelling too, you know. Um, the slow bits of life should be told fast, and the fast bits of life should be told slow. That's, that's the general rule in, in how to make great stories. And I, you know, I find this too when I'm— because I'm a ghostwriter too, so I write, I write books for—
Oh, wow.
Other people. And what I'm always doing when I'm working with clients writing their story, their life stories, is saying, let's make it a moment. Let's make it a moment. So, I'm looking for scenes in their life when they have had some kind of change or when they have learned something. And you need to— and I'm always saying, well, we need to make that a moment. And what I mean by that is by making it a scene. So, I want to know all the information in extreme detail, specific. What you were wearing, what was the weather like, what did you have for breakfast? You know, so it's the same thing. You're kind of slowing that down, You're figuring out what are these moments of change that are really important in the story. You're always looking for moments of change. And when you've got an important moment of change, you kind of slow it down and make it this sort of dramatic, very detailed moment in the story. And it signals to the reader, obviously, this is important. And if it is a moment of change where they've learned something important or something has happened that's changed their life in some way, then you have to— that is the moment that should be in the story.
And now, when you're writing your books, how much of it is Your thinking at the beginning of, hey, we're going to make a map of where things are going to go, this is what the book is all about, and how much of it is sort of, I'm going to write and kind of see what emerges, and then I'm going to maybe do a reverse outline after I have a first draft. I'm going to look at that, outline it. So how much of it is sort of this orderly planning versus sort of spontaneity?
I'm very much ordinary, like a planning person. I come from a— my family's engineers, So, yeah, I'm very much a planning person. Like, I want to know how it all works in my head in quite some detail before I get going, because I want to know how the character changes, and I want to know where the big moments are, and I want to know what the midpoint is. And, yeah, like, I don't understand— like, I know that lots of writers like to just start with a blank page and see where their imagination takes them, but that's just, for me, an invitation to sort of chaos, because— you, you are almost certainly going to have to be rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and throwing away loads of stuff that doesn't fit. Like, so, so I get that some people more naturally work like that, but the idea just gives me the— gives me the shivers.
The heebie-jeebies.
Yeah, I'm just like, fucking hell. Yeah, I mean, I actually did a course. I did a— I went on a, on a writing course last year. Arvon is a very prestigious literary writing course because I was just interested to hear what what very literary storytellers had to say about writing. And one of them, whose name I won't mention, was writing their second novel. They had a very celebrated first novel, lots of awards. And she just kept talking about how agonizing that she was finding the process of writing a second novel. And you could see it was tearing her to bits. And these were the kinds of people that would look at what we are talking about, plot structures and plans, and think, oh, no, I just— I'm not going to do that. I'm an artist, I'm a creator.
Right.
And I was just thinking— I didn't say it because it's just rude, but I was just thinking, man, just read one of these books. It will change your life. Figure out plot, figure out how plots work. So yeah, I think my feeling is a lot of writers, because they're wed to this very silly idea that thinking about plot and craft is low status and artificial, and that a true artist only ever starts with a blank page, I think it it causes a lot of heartache for these writers. That's my feeling.
Yeah, I think a lot of people think that if they master the basics and really understand technique and what's going on, then it's going to end up diluting their work. And one of the ways that— this is a very simplistic model of history. You see this a lot in painting, that it used to be that people just studied the masters and tried to copy the masters. And what you had was a kind of lack of originality. And right now we're in a section of art, an era of art where people reject the masters and they go for high originality. But really what you want is the synthesis of the two.
Yeah.
Where what you've done is you've studied the masters, you've really looked at them and you've said, okay, what are they doing? What is their technique? And then over time you end up developing your own style.
Yeah.
And it's just one of the things that has surprised me the most. We look at people like Picasso, people like Monet, And we see, wow, their, their, their styles are so distinct and different. But if you actually go back and look at their early styles, pastiche. Picasso and Monet were both painting like hyperrealism. And it's very strange. And I think that this gets at exactly what you're saying when it comes to stories and actually learning from the masters is people look at the late-stage work that people end up making. They say, oh my goodness, it's so distinct while not seeing all the work. That came into that, which was just really a form of apprenticeship.
Exactly. And I think in every other art form, there's an acceptance that craft is important. So if you want to be a dancer, if you want to paint, you need to first learn your craft. But in storytelling, for some reason, especially for literary storytellers, they tend to reject that idea for some reason. And actually, the irony is that they're still doing that thing because they tend to be reading large volumes of other people's work. And of course, subconsciously, they're absorbing those rules anyway. So I think when they write and it does work, often you see there is structure in there that is often very similar to structures that people write about in books like mine, or The Hero's Journey, or Into the Woods, or Save the Cat. But they've just absorbed it almost subconsciously because they've read so much storytelling. So yeah, I just think it's a stage. I think it's snobbery. I think it's silly. And I think a lot of, as I say, a lot of these writers who are struggling would really benefit from just having the humility to just learn some craft. Because, you know, the model that I talk about, the 5-act model, beginning, you know, this is me and it's not working, it's so broad, you know, it's such a basic kind of broad structure that you can build almost anything off it. I mean, and the other thing to say about that 5-act structure is that It's different for literary works. So if you want complete character transformation, like Jaws or Godfather, as the examples that I've used talking about these 5 acts, then use the 5 acts. Because really, commercial storytelling, you see a full character transformation. At the beginning of Jaws, he is terrified of the water. At the end of Jaws, he's swimming quite happily through this shark-infested ocean, giggling about how he used to be scared of the water, right? But in literary story, that's not what happens. It tends to be Act 1 and 2 of that thing. So, in literary storytelling, you just don't often see that huge character transformation.
Huh.
So, in The Remains of the Day, you've got, this is me and it's not working. You've got, is there another way? And then, literally, in the last, I think, paragraph, or maybe even a few sentences of that novel, there's a hint that he might change. I think he even says something like, maybe there is another way of seeing the world. And that's literary storytelling. And it's literary because it's more realistic. In real life, it's very unusual for somebody to go from being phobic of the water to destroying sharks. You know, it's just not what happens. It's what we want to see, but it's not what happens. So even literary storytellers could use these structures in a way that is literary because, you know, Act 1, Act 2, and a bit of Act 3, that's real life. And so that's when we're reading, in inverted commas, high-quality literature, that's what it's trying to reflect. It's not giving us this Hollywood— transformational, perfect transformation story. It's just saying, this is a reflection of what real life is like.
How much does what you're saying line up with more ancient kinds of stories, things like the Aztecs or the Incas, whatever it is? How consistent is this throughout history, or is this more like a Western thing of the last 2,000 years?
That's much more of a recent kind of thing, really. I think a lot of Western storytelling goes back to ancient Greek myths, as I said before, like the idea of this powerful hero going out there and fighting monsters and coming back with boons and all that stuff, is a very Western thing. So yeah, I mean, it certainly goes back to the roots of Western European storytelling, for sure. I mean, I think the earliest story we know is Beowulf, which is just—
11th century?
Yeah, and that's basically Jorunn. Jaws, as has been documented by Christopher Booker in The 7 Basic Plots. He begins his book by saying, Beowulf is Jaws, but 1,000 years ago. So yeah, these kinds of stories have been around for a very long time. And it's because part of the evolutionary purpose of storytelling is telling us how to survive as a human being and what human beings want. want is survival, connection, and status. So stories that tell us how to get survival, connection, and status are naturally interesting to us because we relate to the person that the story's about, that their survival or their connection or their status is imperiled in some way. So we begin to worry about them and we begin to be interested in how they're going to fix this problem. It's fundamental to human life and human behavior to be interested in these kinds these sort of stories because they teach us how to be a human being.
And how much of what's happening in stories is a battle between the conscious and the unconscious? Because if you meet someone, so often they'll say, I want this thing. And then you'll ask them what's going on, and then you'll take a step back and they'll actually realize there's all these unconscious desires that have been driving them. Yeah.
So I think that's a really interesting thing that happens in lots of storytelling. I think our job as the storyteller is to understand those unconscious things. And what often happens in storytelling is that the character themselves is kind of oblivious to that stuff. Like, I mean, very often, it's very unlikely for a character to understand explicitly that they want status, for example.
Right.
They want connection. There are lots of sort of times in story where the kind of— subconscious reality is revealed to the character, and that can be a very kind of profound and moving moment where they suddenly understand something really important about themselves.
Yeah.
In the sense of story setting, one of my favorite TV series of recent history is Transparent, which was the show on Amazon Prime that won loads of Emmys and BAFTAs about what happened to a family whose father transitioned to a female. And there's a really brilliant scene in there where the son, who's, you know, he's not woke, but he's progressive, you know, he's totally up for his father's transition, and he's cool, and he works in the music industry, but he just starts losing his shit about nothing in particular.
Wow.
And you can tell he's just breaking down, and he just, you know, breaks down at one point and says, you know, nothing's making sense, nothing's adding up. And you can see, you know, it's really powerful because you can see his conscious story that he's telling himself is, I'm fine, everything's fine, I'm happy with my dad.
Yeah.
And then there's a very moving scene where someone says to him, have you mourned the death of your father? And he says, oh, you're not supposed to say stuff like that. He's not dead. And he said, yeah, but have you mourned the death of your father? And he breaks down in tears. I mean, it's really— I'm getting choked up talking about it because it's really moving. And it's, you know, really brave of the writers. You know, it was written in a kind of a slightly pre-woke era, so you could actually be a bit more honest honest about these subjects. And it was really showing that this guy was really consciously trying— was convinced his theory of control is, I'm just going to be— everything's great, everything's fine. But unconsciously, he was broken. And he was broken because in transitioning, effectively, his father was dead. He didn't have a father anymore. And that was, you know, and that was causing all this kind of eruption and disruption in his life. So, you know, that's— to me, that's amazing storytelling. It's deep, it's rich, it's profound, it's brave. Yeah, it's fantastic, I think.
That's something you see a lot in the modern world, just in terms of how people go about their lives.
Yeah.
If you talk to people who have some sort of manic obsessive behavior, where what they're doing is they're compensating for something that they didn't have or some sort of loss that they never grieved. And you hear all the time of somebody goes to therapy or whatever it is, and they say, oh my goodness, for the last 30 years, I've been compensating for this thing, and I didn't even realize I was doing that. And, um, I think that that would be another layer that I would— if I was designing a character, that I would think through is where is there a disconnect between almost like the simplicity of what they say they're going for? Like, a lot of times we'll really simplify our motivations. Oh, I just want money. But like, actually, this thing happened when you were a kid. You were abused by your dad, or or you grew up really poor and you had a conversation with your dad and you said, hey, are we really poor? And dad says, no, no, no, son. But then you have this like conflict or whatever and your whole life becomes a compensation for that. But a lot of times that just happens at this very primal, intuitive, subconscious level.
Absolutely. And so I, I, you know, when I'm teaching, I call this origin damage. It's like good to figure out when you've got your character in there, Say you're Harry and you believe that men and women can't really be friends 'cause sex always gets in the way. It's good to have an idea of where did he get that idea from?
Right.
And— but the interesting thing is you don't actually have to put that in your story. I think it's enough that you can know. And when I was researching The Science of Storytelling, I actually read, interestingly, that Shakespeare was the pioneer of doing this. So it's quite well known that Shakespeare's plays were just based on— he was just cut and pasting stuff that was out there already.
Yeah.
But he was just really good at putting it together.
Yet another guy who knew the literature well, you know?
Yeah. But, you know, But very often in the stories that he based his plays on, it would tell you why King Lear was behaving in this kind of crazy way and what had happened in his background. But why Hamlet was behaving this particular way. But Shakespeare took all that stuff out.
Oh, wow.
And by taking all that stuff out, he created— like, you have this effect of creating characters that are just much more interesting. Because you start thinking, well, why are they this way? So, I thought that was sort of fascinating, this idea that you don't have to put that stuff in the story. You know, another example from recent times would be the film Shame, about a sex addict.
Sure.
We never actually find out. There's a really weird relationship between the Michael Fassbender character, who's the sex addict, and his sister, and it's almost— kind of playing with it slightly incestuous, like it's a bit weird. You never really quite work out kind of what it is. And it's not actually in the play, like, what happened. Like, why is he a sex addict? What's his weirdness with his sister? And I've heard that in the original screenplay, that it was in there.
Mm.
And the story was that Fassbender's character, when he was a kid, he hurt his— sister being sexually abused, and he didn't step in and stop it. And that's what's fucked him up, and that's why he's just— that's what's made him deranged. And that the— that was taken out of the— that explanation for his character was taken out of the screenplay.
Huh.
Which is actually, you know, brilliant, because you don't need it. You know, when you meet people in real life, you don't find out what's this— kind of thing that's— what's their origin damage? What's the thing that's created this broken view of the world? So it's interesting, and it allows the space for the viewer or the reader to step in and come up with your own ideas and your own theories and your own thoughts about what's going on.
Well, a lot of times, just the way life works is you see that somebody's got this flaw, and then you see that, whoa, that flaw is actually steering their lives quite a bit. And actually it's only later on that actually becomes part of the suspense of talking to somebody about what's going on. They end up figuring that out later. So that could even be in a story, something that gets revealed later on.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let's move into the world of business and the world of leadership and politics and all that sort of stuff. I mean, stories are hugely impactful, right? A politician, they get up, they need to have a story of where things were, Why things have gone wrong, how they're going to improve things. A business, so much of a business is a story. Amazon, we're going to be the world's most customer-centric company. It's always day one is the story. It's always day one. How does this show up there?
Well, again, it's fundamental. I mean, you've got to go right back to the beginning of human evolution to figure out, you know, why did we become this storytelling animal? And the answer is, it's again, because we are this highly cooperative ape. You know, we're part ape, part ant. And so in order to get all these individual human brains and wire them up together so they're all thinking in the same way so they can cooperate together, you need a story. And so, you know, a story about what is good, what is bad, what do we want, how do we get there, you know, what kind of— what is a good person, what is a bad person, that kind of story. And so when lots of people kind of absorb that story into their brains, they all start thinking the same way.
Yeah.
And that's how human groups all work. So, you know, as you say, Amazon has story about the world. The Democrats and the Republicans both have competing stories of the world. China has a story about what's going on with tariffs, and so does Trump. So all groups are bound together by story. That's kind of what story was originally for, was for enabling us to come together in the form of this kind of collaborative superorganism that we all think as one. You see the effect when we go to the cinema, go to the movies, and everybody goes in there as individuals, and the film comes on, and say they're watching Trading Places, and then suddenly they're not thinking about their own lives. They're experiencing the life of Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in Philadelphia in 1983. That's what it is for 90 minutes. And the amazing thing is that the whole audience is having that experience. So all those brains are experiencing the same consciousness. And we have that weird experience sometimes when you leave the movie theater and you kind of got this weird, sort of almost like drunkenness where you still, you kind of think you are the hero of the movie for a few seconds.
Right.
It's a weird thing, but that's story doing what story's supposed to do, which is take over your brain and replace your consciousness with this kind of other consciousness. And usually it's the consciousness of the group. So when you go to work, into your job and you're identified with your job, you enter the consciousness of the organization. You go, right, today I'm not Bob, I'm somebody that works for Amazon, and Amazon's business is this, and I'm going to make it happen. Yeah.
I was talking to a friend who's an investor, and he just raised a fund, and he's been going to these different conferences. And I said, hey, what's one of the most surprising things you've learned? And he said, it's really weird. Sometimes it's better to actually have worse returns but to have a really clear story for why your returns will stay consistent. So he's like, if you can make 15% year over year, but you have a really clear story as for why that's going to be versus you make 20% year over year, but you're sort of just like, I don't really know how we did it and all that. Even if you made more money with the 20, the 20 guy makes more money. The more institutional companies, they want to give their money to the 15.
Wow.
Because they actually have have a clearer story about why things are going to continue. And so you wouldn't expect that. That's irrational. But story can be a kind of predictability for people.
Yeah, absolutely. Stories is how we think, is how we make sense of the world. We are stories, we think in stories. So if you want to persuade people and convince people, you need to do it with story. Facts don't really work. Logic, we haven't evolved to solve to understand the world with algorithm and facts and statistics. We think in stories, we believe in stories. So it's so important to leaders, to groups, to have a compelling story to tell about what they're doing as a group and how that interacts with the world in general.
Yeah. As we begin to close, I want to basically ask, are there things from A Story Is a Deal that you want me to ask you about? Because I haven't read it and I feel feel like there might be stuff there?
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that came out of A Story Is a Deal, which is useful to all kinds of storytellers, is about how important obstacles and goals are.
Oh, boom.
And I think that's something that I missed a bit in The Science of Storytelling, because when I sort of figured out this thing about how the whole purpose of story really is to enable cooperation in the form of highly cooperative groups, it explained to me why story is always about obstacles and goals, because that's what story is supposed to be doing. It's those human groups, those human collaborative groups that we form into, their whole purpose is to overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals.
Mm-hmm.
That's what every group is doing, whether it's about, again, political groups or cults or religions. You're coming together as a group to overcome some kind of obstacle in pursuit of some kind of goal. And that really is like— that's why story is always really about obstacles and goals, you know, because that story is teaching us how to do that. So I think that was sort of a really interesting revelation for me.
What's an example of how obstacle and goals play out?
Well, so for example, the beginning of a movie like Nomadland, you know, an Academy Award-winning movie, before even you've got the opening titled thing saying Nomadland. You're introduced to this middle-aged woman. There's no words. She opens a lockup. You can see all her stuff's in it. She's looking sad. She picks up a plaid shirt, which we can assume is her partner's, and she smells it deeply. So we can tell he's not there anymore. Oh, we're told in a sort of a title card that all the industry in her— industry in her area in Nevada is shut down, so all the plants have shut down. She closes the thing, she pays the guy who owns the lockup, and she drives off in a van into the wilderness. So, you know, with barely a word spoken, I think she just— the guy says, thank you, good luck. With barely a word spoken, we're into the story, you know, already. It's, well, it's a survival story, this one, you know. So we talk about the big themes of stories, Survival, connection, and status. This is about pure fucking survival. She's out there. She's out there. And that's the obstacle and the goal. The obstacle is she's got to live now. She's got no money. She's living in a van. She's living in this frozen wilderness. Her husband's gone. That's it. So that's why it's such a successful movie, because they're not mucking around, these people.
Mm-hmm.
So 3 minutes, barely a word spoken. It hasn't even announced it's called Nomadland yet. You've got your theme, survival, you've got your obstacle, and you've got your goal.
Boom, you're in.
So it's— and I think that's what really great storytellers, like even very experienced storytellers, sometimes forget that. Like, like when you're reading a book or watching a movie and you're feeling confused and irritated, ask yourself, is it because it's not clear who wants what and what's standing in the way of getting that thing? Very often that will be why you're bored of the story, because, because the storyteller hasn't made it clear. Who wants what and what's standing in their way of getting it?
I think it was Aaron Sorkin who said that at any point in a movie, you should be able to press pause, look at the screen and say, who is this person? What do they want and what's getting in their way?
Exactly. In fact, I don't quote that exact Aaron Sorkin quote, but I do quote him in that part of The Story Is a Deal. So, so, so, so yeah, he's somebody that's spoken about that. But what was interesting is finding that evolutionary reason as to why. And that's because the whole point of story is to fuse human brains together, to get them working as part of a cooperative group. And the point of the cooperative group is to overcome the obstacles in pursuit of the goal of living a successful life. That's what story is for. It's about solving problems, the problems of survival, connection, status.
Yeah.
So yeah, that really punched up that idea in my head of, yeah, obstacles and goals, it's a really important Fundamental of storytelling. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's fractal. The character has an obstacle and a goal for their life, but also all the individual scenes do, right? So if my goal is I want to make a lot of money, and my obstacles, how do I do it? Well, I'm going to go to business meetings, I'm going to get lonely sometime, whatever it is. And you can be thinking that at all these different levels.
That's right. And, you know, I'd obviously add that if your goal was to make loads of money, one of your major obstacles is something's wrong with your personality. There's something interior that's stopping you from making loads of money. So part of the obstacle in really good storytelling, profound storytelling, the major obstacle, one of them, is always going to be your personality, your character. You've got to fix something in yourself that's stopping you achieving that wealth that you desire.
Mm-hmm.
So there's that internal obstacle, which I think is really important.
Well, thank you very much.
No, thank you, David. It was a great pleasure.
That was good. Thanks, man. Cool.
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