The Cognitive Science Of Telling Captivating Stories
“Story secret: from the very first sentence the reader must want to know what happens next” — Lisa Cron
What are the linguistic elements that distinguish a good story from a bad one? What elements might writers add to make a good story great, or a bad story worse? What are the key structural units that compose a great story, whether in fiction or nonfiction? And how does a certain arrangement of words captivate the reader’s attention, or lose it fast?
This last question — how do you capture (and keep) your reader’s attention? — is one that haunts my brain most I’d say.
A story after all is an interactional event, not a solipsistic endeavor: a story involves not just a storyteller, but a story recipient too. In other words, good storytelling, for me at least, is more like a face-to-face conversation than a pre-recorded zoom lecture. Although it’s a constant challenge, when I write, I try to imagine someone nodding along in engaged interest (or nodding off in boredom).
When it comes to techniques to actually accomplish this literary feat of attention-grabbing prose, my main tactic is to look to writers who capture my attention and deconstruct their words: this important deconstructive technique in a writer’s…
