How to Use Brain Science to Hook Readers, With Lisa Cron

What’s science got to do with this thing we call writing? Well, knowing how the brain works when we write will improve your writing life. Why? Because according to our guest, you can learn how to use brain science to hook readers. Read and listen along to Lisa Cron, author of Wired for Story and Story Genius, on what we really do when we write.

Read along as you listen to QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher.

David Leite: Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa Cron: Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Marion Roach Smith: I’m so excited about this. Your book Wired for Story looks like my high school Karl Marx edition, with all these …

David: All marked up.

Marion: Yeah, all marked up. And it’s crazy marked up, it’s folded over, all those things that I kept saying. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes! So now we have you to ourselves.

David: Yes.

Marion: And we want to talk about this, okay?

Lisa: Okay.

Marion: So welcome.

Lisa: Thank you. Thank you.

David: I think the question that I’d love the answer to is explain the idea of how brain science connects to story.

Lisa: Okay. Well here’s really the thing to think of, which is we are literally wired for story. And what that means is that we make sense of everything through narrative. It’s hardwired into the architecture of our brains, so that when you’re writing what you’re writing is how we process information. And the way that we process information as humans is to ask ourselves. I’m not saying we ask ourselves this like we sit down and we ask ourselves out loud. But our tacit, in what’s known as our cognitive unconscious, we are probing everything to ask the question is this safe or isn’t it? And so, the way that we determine that question is to turn to our memories.

Lisa: Because as neuroscientists will say now, and I’m working on a new book on story, so I’m re-reading all of the neuroscience again and kind of what’s happened since I wrote Wired for Story up until now. And it’s really fascinating. I’m reading a book now called Your Brain is a Time Machine by a neuroscientist out of UCLA. And basically what he says, as in many other books as well, is that the core mechanism of your brain is as a time machine to store past memories in order to predict the future. And that’s what we do. Our brain is also a prediction machine. So that when it comes to story, what we come to story for, is not what’s going to happen, but how is that going to affect me given my agenda, given what’s important to me, given what I need? And that’s literally how we make sense of everything.

Lisa: This is why people have trouble with facts. Because when someone gives a fact to you, and you have no context within which to make sense of it, it just goes right over your head. Story provides the context that gives meaning to everything that’s out there. Because a big mistake that we tend to make is we think there is an objective reality out there. And since everything we know we know by definition subjectively, all the meaning that we read into everything that’s out there, counting the facts … I mean if we still even have facts. That seems to be debatable at the moment.

Marion: Now now. We probably can’t go there.

Lisa: But if you look at a fact, and you take one that you go okay that is a fact, people are going to come at it and read vastly different meanings into it.

Marion:  Yes.

Lisa: And the meaning that they read comes from one place and one place only, and that is what their past experience has taught us those things mean. That is story. Story is literally the simulations that we perform to try to figure out okay given what I want what would I need to do to get it? Given what I’m afraid of, what do I need to do to avoid that? And that’s what story is. Story is-

Marion: I love this.

Lisa: Exactly that narrative.

Marion: I love that. One of the things I really love about the way you write is you go from the neuroscience phraseology to phrases like neuroscientists believe that without stories we’d be toast. And I just-

Lisa: It’s true.

Marion: And it’s just so rewarding for the reader. And, of course, we do know what you mean. I mean, the Greeks believed this whole sense of catharsis, that we go to the theater to process what we believe and confront what we know within a safe space. And that’s the beauty of story. We get in there and we try to figure it out. And your work seems to so thoroughly clear up any questions of why we build story. You say the brain loves the “if this, then that” aspect of a tale, and I completely agree with you. I teach memoir as almost a crime procedural, you know?

David: Yes.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Marion: You sort of throw down the what’s at stake in the opener, creating a great gulf between who you were and who you want to be, or who you were and who you are now, and you hook us. So, you do this and you explain to us why this works. So, let’s look at it for a minute. Let’s look at it the other way.

Lisa: Sure.

Marion: And why does it feel so good to write? Why do people talk about I’m in the zone, or it’s the only time I’m happy, or-

David: What are we doing as writers that is clicking into that primal or pre-primal brain that we have that scientists are talking about?

Lisa: Well, I mean I think it’s two things. First of all … I mean there are two things I want to say to that supposition. One is I do think it’s when we really are, we’ve tapped into what we believe, and it’s coming out through to some degree our cognitive unconscious. Which is not the same as the muse or the zone. I do not believe there’s such a thing as the muse at all. But it-

David: Oh, thank God.

Lisa: But it really-

Marion: Oh, thank God.

David: Visit me in two years. I’m so glad.

Lisa: Albert Brooks’ movies notwithstanding, there really is no such thing as the muse.

Marion: Right.

Lisa: But here’s the thing that I would say, that I would back up with that. I think that writing is really hard. I think the opposite is true. I think that writing is deeply difficult because there’s so much more to it than meets the eye. I think that it’s painful because really often … In fact, before we were talking I was talking with a writer who is a very successful writer, and she’s working on a memoir. And the trouble that she’s having is diving deeply into what she’s writing about, what happened to her, because it’s super painful. Especially with memoir. You’re often going into place that you have locked behind a door, and now you’re bringing it out to explore. So, my feeling about writing is kind of the opposite. If it isn’t hurting you a little bit, you’re probably not doing it right. Now once you’ve gotten to that place, and you’re writing forward, then yeah, I think you have hooked into it and it does feel really great. But I actually think, don’t get mad at me-

Marion: No, no.

Lisa: I actually think that one of the big problems with the writing world is they talk about it feels good.

David: Yes.

Lisa: So, people just let it out and they write any old thing, and because it felt good that means it’s good writing or it’s a good story. And I actually, I mean I firmly believe that out there in the writing world zeitgeist that almost everything is not only wrong but takes you in the wrong direction. I think it’s why they say that 97% of writers who sit down to write a first draft don’t finish that first draft. Only three out of 100. And then for those people, the ones who finish and then actually let’s say go through several drafts, or polish and actually query an agent or a publishing house, 96% of them get rejected. And I think it’s because a lot of people think it’s supposed to feel good. And really often it doesn’t.

I always say if it’s not hurting you … So, I just said to this writer, if it’s not hurting you, you’re not doing it right. I worked with one writer who she said that her mentor in college had said to her when you’re writing if you get that feeling like you’re going to throw up ’cause it’s so hard?

David: Right.

Lisa: Grab a trashcan. I hope it’s not a wire trash can. Throw up in it and keep writing.

David: Keep going.

Lisa: Because that’s when you know you are in the zone.

Marion: That’s great.

David: I think that that should be written on the national monument I believe, engraved on the national monument because people they have this flowery notion of sitting in this ivory tower just typing away all day and writing these incredible stories. And both even my cookbook, which I wasn’t mining any great depths, was extraordinarily difficult. And then of course the memoir, as Marion knows, you basically have a nervous breakdown while you’re doing it, and then you come out of the other end. So, I think it’s great that you say that.

Marion: Yes.

David: Because I just don’t think people believe that enough. There’s this romanticized version of what it is to write.

Lisa: Yes. Right.

Marion: Yes.

David: Now speaking about writing and the technique of writing, one of the things … In 2012 you wrote a letter to the editor about the notion that language is the handmaiden of the story and not the other way around, master story. Everything else is gravy. Now I had a visceral reaction to this, because as a review of my book someone said that he’s made language his bitch. Language is extraordinarily important to me. So I’m thinking this woman is shaking the walls of my fortress of language. So can you explain to us, give us your definition of story on which we then will lay language once the story’s foundation is laid?

Lisa: Yes exactly. And if I could just say I think the biggest problem with the way people come at writing is they come at it as if it is about writing, as if it is about capturing the right language, as opposed to capturing the story. ‘Cause it is the story that gives the language its power. It’s the story that’s bringing it to life, not the other way around. As I’m really fond of saying the story polishes the prose, not the other way around. And the problem is when you’re just focused on beautiful metaphors, or beautiful writing, or you end up writing what’s known in the trade as a perfectly penned so what, a beautifully written who cares.

David:  Right.

Lisa:  Because what story’s about is story is about an internal change. That’s what we come for. In fact let me give you, and again this doesn’t quite answer your question, we can come back to that, but it’s a bit of neuroscience that I was just reading that I think is so … It just was like oh my gosh I can’t believe that I can turn around and say this, and that there’s several studies that show it. And there was a study that was done where they were trying to figure out both what areas of the brain light up when you read, but then what are you focusing on? When you focus on story, when you’re lost in a story, what is your brain going toward? What are you responding to? And they took a swipe at … They said this is great, and apparently I did not know this before, but apparently beginning with Aristotle. And Aristotle said when you’re reading what you’re pulled into are the events, the plot, that’s what you’re focusing on. And guess what? That’s not true.

When you’re pulled into a story, whether it’s a novel, a movie, a headline, something in the paper, something around the water cooler, the first place your brain goes is who’s the protagonist? Who’s the point of view character? Who is that person? We go straight to that. And then what we do, and this is where story lives and breathes, then we do this thing. And this was a word I thought recently I had never heard it before, and then I realized I had, but I had just sloughed it off because it sounds like British slang to me. It said then when we go into that person we mentalize. So that’s like the British slang of, “Oh, he’s so mental,” or something.

David:  Mentalize.

Lisa:    Anyway-

Marion: It sounds like a tube stop in London.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or a flavor of cough drop or something.

Marion: Yeah.

Lisa: But what it actually means is that we go into that person’s head and we try to figure out what they’re thinking.

Marion: Of course.

Lisa: We try to figure out what they want, what their motivation is, what are they afraid of? Where is that vulnerable part inside that they’re not showing on the outside, which of course is where story lives and breathes. And it comes back to the notion of theory of mind, which hopefully, hopefully we come into when we’re about three or four years old. Which is the notion that we realize that other people have different thoughts than we do. We’re not all the same.

Marion: Yes.

Lisa: That’s what we were pulled into. That’s what we come to story for. We don’t come to story for what happens. We come to story for how it affects someone. Story is not about an external change, meaning a change in the plot. Story is about an internal change within the protagonist. I mean the thing I’m the most fond of saying is story is not about the plot, which is why the two schools of writing out there pantsers, which is … Which are people they always hear that term and they go pantser? It’s funny. When I wrote I guess it was I can’t remember which book I referenced pantsers in. And the copy editor at Ten Speed, my publisher, she doesn’t write fiction, so she didn’t know the fiction world. And she came across the word pantser and she went what is that? Isn’t that that mean thing that we did to kids back in elementary school?

David:  Right. We pantsed them.

Lisa: Yeah no. Right?

Marion:  No, it’s pantser. Let’s be clear. It’s P-A-N-T-S-E-R, and it’s in Wired for Story by the way, just to tell yeah.

Lisa: Thank you.

Marion: You’re welcome.

Lisa: ‘Cause she was the same copy editor on both. But no, no, no. That’s someone who writes by the seat of their pants.

Marion:  Of course yeah.

Lisa: Meaning they just sit down and start to write the worst story.

David: And then there’s also the plotters too. That’s the-

Lisa:  And the plotters are, right, and that’s the other school. Just as bad. Because the plotters assume it’s about an external bunch of things that happen and it’s not. That is not what a story’s about. A story’s about an internal change that your protagonist makes. And if you’re thinking wait a minute, what do you mean internal change? Change from what to what? What are you even talking about? The biggest point is all stories begin in medias res, which is a very fancy Latin way of saying in the middle of the thing, the thing being the whole entire story. Page one is page one of the second half of your story.

Because all protagonists, and the truth is really pretty much all characters enter the story with two things already fully formed. Something they want and they’ve wanted for a long time that gives them an agenda, because they step onto page one with an agenda already fully formed. And misbelief, which is something that is holding them back. And misbelief is something that comes into our being really early in life, in childhood, early teen years, really no later than that. And that’s, again, all of this is just human psychology. I mean this is what happens to all of us. And misbelief is a misbelief about human nature, about what we need to do in order to survive and thrive in the world. It’s not a misbelief like I thought the world was flat. And I hope you’re sitting down because I’ve got a surprise for you. It’s actually round. Or I thought she was my sister and it turns out she’s my mom.

Marion: She’s my mother, my sister, my mother. Yeah. And in screenwriting they teach this as the fatal flaw.

Lisa:  Right. Yes.

Marion: As the thing that you’ve got to get over. And this is what David and I were arguing about before you came on the line, because I helped David with his wonderful book Notes on a Banana. And he said to me why this thing, she’s got this thing, this idea of misbelief. I was panicking. I don’t think I have that in my book. And I had to say David, not only do you have it in your book, but I taught it to you.

David: Yeah.

Marion: It is that you grew up Portuguese, gay and bipolar. And you really, really wanted to be the only son of Darren and Samantha Stevens on Bewitched. And-

David:  Blonde-haired and blue-eyed. That’s what I wanted.

Marion: And straight. And very, very, very psychologically in a box.

David:  Perfect.

Marion: Yeah, perfect. So in David’s book the misbelief is this idea that you should be blonde, straight and mentally a straight arrow too. And I love that, that you called it misbelief, and it works beautifully. And it’s the transcendence.

David:  Yeah.

Marion: It’s the going from what’s at stake, to what you tried, to what works. In every story that works the mind of the reader through and into a new state of understanding.

Lisa: Yeah.

Marion: And that’s what’s so gorgeous about this.

David:  And I think what’s interesting is, when Marion reminded me that I did have a misbelief, is because by something that I really, really wanted from a very early age is I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be accepted but yet I was Portuguese. And Portuguese, when I grew up, were being looked down upon. I knew that I was gay from a very early age, but I wanted to be accepted. I knew that there was something really kinda off with me mentally and psychologically, but I wanted to be accepted. But I wanted, by the misbelief or the fatal flaw, I wanted to be accepted as a perfect television blonde-haired blue-eyed boy, which was never going to happen, to dark haired, dark-eyed Portuguese from Massachusetts.

Marion: Right. But boy, did you try to make it.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah.

David:  Boy, I did. And the whole journey of the book is finally dropping that and accepting myself for who I am. The acceptance that I had happen was personal acceptance. And so-

Lisa: Always.

David: This really resonated so strongly with me once Marion pointed out that I have that misbelief.

Marion: So let’s talk about that, that misbelief idea. Let’s talk about the rules. Because one of the other reasons that I just love you and the page that’s sort of tacked to my wall from your book is this whole idea where a neuropsychiatrist says that following your gut only works if you’re prepared for the test and know the material. And I let out a big old whoop when I read that, because I’m the one on those creativity panels where, and I get invited to these things all the time. And somebody says very sincerely what’s creativity? And the first guy always says oh, well, you get your angel’s feather.

David: Yeah.

Marion: And you get in touch with the right side of … and I’m going …. I’m making that horrible noise. And the next person says you know it’s a dynamic process between the cortisol and the cranial hemisphere of the and blah, blah, blah. And I always say it begins with discipline. And I’m the bummer of every creativity panel, because I genuinely believe you’ve got to know the rules, follow the rules. Sit in the chair, drink some caffeine and stay there until you get the damn work done.

David: Yeah.

Marion: So, you say that that’s true, and I love you for that. But you also say that it’s all in the rewrite, which is part of the rules. And so I want to just talk about the process of the rules a little bit. That we go from knowing them, to living them, to then rewriting, which is part of the process. Just maybe you could just give us sort of a timeline of the rules and how you see them and where you learn them. I think a lot of people don’t think there are rules.

Lisa: And you mean rules when it comes to-

Marion: To writing-

Lisa: To nailing a story?

Marion: Yeah.

Lisa: Okay. And if I could, ’cause when I wrote Wired for Story a lot of it was theory and in pieces. When I went back and wrote Story Genius, which is more it takes you through exactly how to do it, I went deeper. And I actually think that the rules that there are the rules for how to find the story to begin with and how to create it. There’s no writing, it’s only rewriting, but there’s rewriting all the way along. In other words I firmly believe that it’s a massive mistake ever to sit down and just dump out a first draft. Like the way that, and I love everything else she does, but Ann LaMott talks about get that first draft out, a child’s draft. You can roll-

David:  Yeah. The shitty first draft, yeah.

Lisa: The shitty first draft. Right. I mean which isn’t to say that first drafts don’t need work. Hemingway talked about all first drafts are shit, but she calls it the child’s draft. And she says you can romp all over the place, because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter and no one’s going to see it, so you can change it. And the truth is the most important person on the planet sees it in the process, and that’s you. And when it romps all over the place there’s no story there. Almost always you need a page one rewrite. And the problem when you do that is that we don’t do it on purpose, but our tacit allegiance is to what we’ve already written.

David:  Yes, it is.

Lisa:  As opposed to the story that we’re telling, because we don’t know what that story actually is. And then writers, and this is the again why I think so many writers give up. They go back and now they’re going to try to inject story logic from the outside in, and it doesn’t work that way. It’s not top down. It’s bottom up. So I think the rule is, I mean if you want to know how do you create a story, is you’ve got to create the first half before you create the second half. Which means you have to go in, and in media res, very, very, very specifically with as much specificity as you are writing the novel, you have to go back and figure these things out and write them in scene form, not as the writers will often sum up a character’s past.

And think about it in real life. When you sum something up that happened to you, you’ve got tons of granular specifics and you’re just taking a very general a few things that you can pull out and go okay that’s the summation. But if someone asked you, you could give them all the granular specifics.

David: Sure.

Lisa: With writers when they do it, they don’t have anything but that. So the thing to do, I think, is really to go back. Again we don’t come to story for why. The why is internal. And to create that misbelief in terms of okay what exactly happened? And I don’t mean ever in a simple declarative sentence, or just I know what it is or I thought about it. But I mean writing it out in, again, in scene form. So we are inside the character’s skin, in their head, because again that’s a Vulcan mind melt between your protagonist and your reader, and really writing that out in great graphic detail. And the reason I don’t tend to use the word, and I know I did in Wired for Story. It’s one of the few things I wish I could rip out. I don’t tend to use … There are a few things I really wish I could rip out and this is one of them.

Marion: It’s so gratifying to hear that.

Lisa: You have no idea, which is the term fatal flaw. I would never use that because it sounds judgemental. It sounds finger waggy. It sounds almost like you know what you did, right? You say that to your spouse right? You know what you did. I’m not going to tell you.

David: Right.

Lisa: As if the person’s doing it on purpose. As if it’s this moral failing, and it’s not that. A misbelief is something that comes in early in life that life teaches us, that really feels to us like I am so lucky I learned that really early on. And the reason that they come in early in life is because … And I’m sure you’ve probably heard of Maslow, Abraham Maslow, his pyramid of needs right?

Marion: Mm-hmm.

David:  Right.

Lisa: In psychology. And he says there’s a pyramid of needs, and at the base is food, water, shelter. And the top I think was like a sense of purpose and whatever that … I’m not concerned about the top.

Marion: A remote control. That’s what’s at the top.

Lisa: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

David:  And that’s like…

Lisa: Right. It’s so true. It’s so true. Do you know what? Netflix is a total digression. Do you know what Netflix says their enemy is?

Marion: Uh-oh.

David:   No, what?

Lisa:    Sleep. The enemy of Netflix is sleep.

David:  Oh boy.

Marion: That’s too funny. And we have to get to digressions then, ’cause you say digressions are deadly, and look what you just did.

David:  Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Lisa:  Because that was on point.

Marion:  Right.

Lisa:  But to go back with that bottom of the pyramid of needs, food, water shelter, that’s not the bottom. That is not the first thing we need. The first thing we need is someone who cares enough about us to give us those things. Because when you’re a baby or a child … If you’re a six-month-old baby and you’re trying to get food, water, shelter on your own? You’re not going to live out the week.

David: It could happen.

Lisa: Yeah. So what we come to is we are immediately trying to make sense of the world around us. What do I need to do in order to survive? And that’s where these misbeliefs come in. And they’re, again, taught us. Life teaches it to us. So we think well that’s true. I’m lucky I learned that early. Because there are things on the level of the nicer someone is to you the more they’re actually trying to use and abuse you. So be careful. Now that’s a lesson a lot of people are … They learn it earnestly. They don’t know it’s not true. They think I am so lucky I learned that early in life. Because there are all these people who are trying to be nice to me. And I would’ve been nice back, but now I know they’re really trying to abuse me so I’m going to reject all of them.

David:  You know what’s fascinating about what you’re saying is if we apply this to therapy.

Lisa: It is therapy.

David: This is what people go in-

Lisa: This is therapy, 100%.

David: To undo is the most misbelief.

Lisa:   100%. Yes.

David: Yes.

Lisa:  My sister’s a therapist. 100%.

David:  Big chunk of my therapy, that I talk about in the book with a therapist in my memoir, was accepting the fact that of getting rid of the notion I had to be blonde haired, blue-eyed.

Lisa:    Right.

David: And adopted son of Samantha and Darren Stevens, and accept myself as who I was. I had to break away from that notion of perfection.

Lisa:    Right.

David:  This is fascinating, because I think that everyone carries this around with them. And I think when a book is well written with beautiful language and a great story, that’s why that Vulcan mind melt happens.

Lisa:    Right.

David:  Because you identify on levels that you do not even know that you’re identifying.

Lisa:    Yes.

David: With the protagonist.

Marion: Of course.

Lisa:    Oh, well often you do though. I mean often-

David:  You think?

Lisa:    Don’t you have that? I do. I think that often a really good story … I mean the irony is the stories and the specifics are the granular specifics to that character. And the more specific you can get the more you’re able to tap into a universal that everybody’s going to feel. It’s so counter-intuitive. That’s why it’s funny when you, Marion, were talking about creativity. I was teaching for a while at the School of Visual Arts. They have a program in Visual Narrative. And the guy who ran the program goes yeah creativity. I know, Lisa, you’re going to roll your eyes back in your head so far they’re not going to come back down again.

Because those notions of creativity, or love or loyalty, they’re generic. And abstractions do not exist in real life. What exists is only the granular moment-by-moment things that have taught us to look at the world the way that we do. So story comes into that, but in the universal it taps into. Then when all of us are reading it we are applying that to our own version of that. So that, I mean, any book that you read, Harry Potter or some historical fiction, well we’re not going to live that life, or be that person, or Katniss Everdeen. We’re not going to be her, but there are places where she’s experiencing something that we go yeah me too.

Marion: Absolutely.

Lisa: I feel that too, and we put it to ours. I mean that’s the beauty of writing. That’s what people come to story for, those me too moments, the moments where … I mean I didn’t think I could let that out. I thought I was weird because I thought that. I had a student at UCLA once who said, she said I know on the surface I look really put together, and she really did. She said I know I look put together, but inside I’m a raging mess and I’m trying to keep all of you from seeing it. Stories about the raging mess, that’s what we come for. Oh my gosh I thought it was me.

Marion: Absolutely. Stories about the secret that we all have. Stories about the universal. And it’s a beautiful and wonderful thing to be reading for your own transformation. But it’s one of the things that memoir writers, for instance, forget all the time. They think we’re going to get involved in their plot-driven book. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I always tell them we’re not reading your memoir for what you did. We’re reading your memoir for what you did with it.

Lisa:  Yes.

Marion: And I think it shifts the character off of center stage, but it’s the same with fiction. It’s the same when we go to a play.

Lisa: Oh it’s all the story’s a story regardless the content.

Marion: Absolutely.

Lisa: And regardless the genre.

Marion: It’s the universal.

David:  So am I off the mark by saying when we’re looking at story your way, not Aristotle’s way or other ways. Looking it through your point of view that the character almost becomes the lens through which we understand and appreciate and relate to story.

Lisa: I would make that stronger. The character is the lens. I’m sure you guys have heard that and out there too. What do they say? Commercial novels are plot driven and literary novels are character driven.

David:  Yes.

Lisa:    Could not be less true. That is such a lie. Every story is character driven. Every story is driven by how what’s happening externally is affecting the character internally. The meaning that they are making from it and there for what they do next. If it was just plot driven it would be this happens, that happens, this happens. It would be surface. And we all understand the surface world. We don’t come to story for the surface world.

Marion: No.

Lisa:  We come for what’s going on beneath the surface. That’s what the story’s about.

David: How does a very unlikeable protagonist fit into this? Because I don’t want to identify with some really horrible protagonists. So how does that writer keep us?

Lisa: Oh, easy. The biggest mistake we make is when we think about making a character likable. And we tend to mistake likable for they do everything right in terms of what’s expected of them, in terms of the social construct that society has defined. Why do you think you wanted to be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed perfect person?

David:  That’s true.

Lisa:    Because you wanted to be what society said was perfect. And is that perfect? Of course not.

David:  Right.

Lisa:    I mean we’re not looking for people who are likable. I mean likable tends to be reduced to someone who would never swear even if they stubbed both toes. Somebody who’d never hit a dog even though if it was it had its teeth sunken into their thigh. Someone who would never steal anything even if they’re starving.

David:  Right.

Lisa:  I mean based on that, if we’re watching Les Miserables, we would not like Jean Valjean at all and we would be totally into Javert, because he would never steal anything. Right. We don’t come for that when you think about it. I always think about it these days with Facebook. Think about Facebook and what drives people crazy. We’ve all got those friends who they look beautiful. They wear the most recent styles. Their house is perfect. Their kids are perfect.

Marion: Their breakfasts are gorgeous.

Lisa:  Everything. They’ve got the best vacation.

Marion: Right.

David:  Yep.

Lisa: Do you like those?

Marion: No.

David:   No.

Lisa: Right. We hate them. But the other thing about people who seems likable on that level is they make you think I wonder what they’ve got tied up in the basement? Because nobody is-

David:  Yeah, exactly.

Lisa:    We are more interested in “unlikable” people. I mean imagine if when Edward Alby wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf it was after George and Martha had a bunch of marriage counsel?

David:  Right.

Lisa:  And instead of sniping at each other and the secret and sonny boy, but now they have date night and they understand each other. And they never go to bed angry.

David: And they let each other finish their sentences.

Lisa: Yeah. Who would watch that? I mean I think interestingly we’re fascinated. Think about one of my favorite books of all time is The Talented Mr. Ripley.

David: Yes.

Lisa:  I mean the book, not the movie. The movie was terrible, but the book is you can’t put it down. Or there’s a book called Perfect Days. The name of the author escapes me at the moment. A very young guy from … I think he’s from Argentina. He’s Argentinian I think. And it’s told from the point of view of a psychopath, you know, a psychopath. So we are inside and who doesn’t want to know how is he thinking? And he thinks like all of us. He’s 20 years old and he goes to a party with his mother and he sees a woman that he really likes. And he decides that he’s going to woo her. And he does what we’d all do. He tricks her to coming over. He knocks her out. He rolls her up in a carpet, takes her to a hotel and ties her to the bed for two months, ’cause that’s what we’d all do right?

David: Yeah.

Lisa: I mean-

Marion: Well we all have the potential for it.

David: Right.

Marion: Absolutely.

Lisa: The point is though we don’t come for the what, we come for the why. Don’t you want to know how he makes sense of it? Think about it. And this is a hard thing to say, but all of the horrific shootings that there are. What does everybody want to know? Why did he do-

David: Why.

Lisa: What was he thinking? Why?

David: Everyone asks. The first thing the police do, what’s the motive?

Lisa: First thing. Why. And after I remember from one of the big ones recently, the sheriff came on a couple weeks later and said we feel really horrible because we have not been able to find out why. We failed. We come for why. And why always exists and comes from the past, again ’cause we make sense of everything based on what our past experience has taught us. So that as Faulkner so brilliantly said, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. And that’s why the work that you need to do to write, to excavate this, isn’t like … It’s not pre-work. It’s not research.

Lisa: And then you do the real work when you get to page one. This is writing. This is, because most of what’s there ends up in the novel, or the memoir, in the the form of flashbacks, in the form of what goes through the character’s mind as they’re trying to make sense of what’s happening in the moment. Not because they’re going down memory lane. Not because something reminded them of something so they’re just musing about it. But because in every scene a character is being forced to make some difficult decision. And so they’ve got to struggle with what to do. How much of my true self do I show? What can I show? What do I need to hide? Because think about it. Every minute of every day that’s what we’re doing with everybody. How much can I show of who I am, and how much do I have to hide? And then we’re always fighting with that.

I want to show people who I really am because I want to be loved for my true self, but I’m afraid if I do then they’re going to reject me, or make fun of me or use it against me. And then if somebody likes you you think yeah they like me, but if they knew the real me they wouldn’t. And that makes them an idiot because they believe that’s the real me. We’re always going through that all the time. That’s what story’s about. Story gives us insight into that. And the only way to do that is to really work to dig up who that protagonist is. Story specifically, not in general. By the wise it’s like saying I’m going to write a 300-page either memoir … Well not memoir, ’cause you know yourself, but novel about the most important turning point events in someone’s life who I know absolutely nothing about.

David: Right.

Lisa: You wouldn’t and you couldn’t do that.

Marion: Of course not.

Lisa: So yeah. That’s where it comes from. It always comes from the past. And again, in the end, if I could just say one thing about language, and to talk about the notion of beautiful language. I think that that is one of the biggest mistakes that writers make, and it’s something that we’ve been taught since kindergarten, which is that it’s about language use. And that writing means literally learning the techniques and the mechanics of writing. And it just isn’t true.

Because you think about words, like what are words? They’re either something written on a page, or sign language or something that you hear. In and of themselves words are nothing. It’s a sound, a squiggle, a hand gesture. Words are empty. Words are nothing but a conveyor, and what they are a conveyor of is meaning and of story. The story is what gives, again, the words their power. Without the story you just have beautiful words. And writing is taught that way all the time. Come up with a metaphor and use it all the way through. Well why would you do that? What metaphor? For what? Why would you use it all the way through? If something naturally comes, fine.

David: Right.

Lisa: But to look and to try to struggle to do that, that has nothing to do with story whatsoever.

David:  Well it’s interesting that you say that. Because when I was writing my book, one of the things that I was very conscious of was language. I do love language. I have this love affair with language. But I always flagged in the margins whenever the language took me out of the story. When you became aware of that language, for language sake, then it’s not language. It’s showing off.

Marion: Absolutely.

Lisa: Yes exactly. The minute you see the language, the minute you can see the writer in any way, shape or form. A memoir obviously would be different, but I mean the writer, the person writing the memoir as a writer. The minute you see the writer you’re annoyed.

David: Yes.

Lisa: It’s like you just broke the spell.

Marion: Well-

Lisa: And the minute you put anything in you break the spell on that level.

Marion: And you never want to wake up your reader. You don’t want to do that.

Lisa: No.

Marion: It’s like putting epaulets on a dog, you know?

Lisa: Yeah.

Marion: You just don’t need ’em.

Lisa: Exactly.

David: But they do look good though.

Lisa: Yeah.

Marion: Oh, nah, only some dogs. Well, Lisa, this is fabulous. And we could talk to you absolutely all day. And I think we’ll just have to come back for part two.

David: I was going to say would you be willing to come back on and talk to us more? This is fascinating.

Lisa:  Absolutely. I mean I love talking story. There’s nothing I love more than talking story. Don’t tell my husband I said that, but it’s true.

David:  And I think our listeners, once they hear the episode, will have lots of questions, and I’m sure lots of protests. But we would love to be able to have you back on to talk about them.

Lisa: Any time. You just let me know and I will be there.

Marion:  Thank you Lisa. It’s been a joy.

Lisa:    Thank you guys.

David:  Thank you so much.

Want more from Lisa Cron? Read her book, Wired for Story and her book, Story Genius. Prefer the podcast edition of the show? QWERTY is released weekly. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, or Spotify or Stitcher.

Have you got a question you’d like us to answer or to ask our authors? Send it along to us and we’ll choose a few each week and answer them on QWERTY. Just drop me a line at my contact page. 

Want more of a writing education? Come join me in one of my online memoir classes. They run all the time and all of them will help you get where you want to go in your work.