Lisa Cron Quotes

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.

Before there were books, we read each other.

We don't turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.

Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution—more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.

Stories are about people who are uncomfortable.

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Art is fire plus algebra.

We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us.

Elmore Leonard famously said that a story is real life with the boring parts left out.

each scene in your story, ask yourself, If I cut it out, would anything that happens afterward change?

Outlining the plot before you develop your protagonist traps you on the surface of your novel—that is, in the external events that happen.

They had mistaken the story for what happens in it. But as we’ve learned, the real story is how what happens affects the protagonist, and what she does as a result.

You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.

If you don't know what the objective is, everything appears random.

Because the story, as I’m very fond of saying, is in the specifics.

Remember, when we're lost in a story, we're not passively reading about something that's happening to someone else.

In a nutshell: A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.

That’s why in every scene you write, the protagonist must react in a way the reader can see and understand in the moment. This reaction must be specific, personal, and have an effect on whether the protagonist achieves her goal. What it can’t be is dispassionate objective commentary.

In fact, often the opposite is true, because we’re much better at teaching something that we’ve learned through experience than we are at teaching things we innately know. When we innately know how to do something, we assume it’s part of the standard operating package we’re all born with.

In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist’s skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don’t know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6 It

To sum up, when writing in the first person, it helps to keep these things in mind:    • Every word the narrator says must in some way reflect his point of view.    • The narrator never mentions anything that doesn’t affect him in some way.    • The narrator draws a conclusion about everything he mentions.    • The narrator is never neutral; he always has an agenda.    • The narrator can never tell us what anyone else is thinking or feeling. Conveying

AN EXTERNAL LAYER: The thing that happens, the external event, the unavoidable problem the protagonist must tackle (the plot). 2. AN INTERNAL LAYER: What that external problem causes the protagonist to struggle with, internally—the misbelief versus the truth—in order to solve it (what the story is really about). Combined, those two layers rivet us.

what we’re hoping for in that opening sentence is the sense that something is about to change (and not necessarily for the better). Simply

The story you’re telling doesn’t start on page one. It started long before you got there.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke up to find myself alone in a dark wood.4

good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. The

You don’t need to know exactly how the story is going to end, but you do need to know what the protagonist will have to learn along the way—that

narrators are often unreliable, and part of the reader’s pleasure is figuring out what’s really true. The

As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once noted, “Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

• What does the story tell us about what it means to be human? • What does it say about how humans react to circumstances beyond their control?

What is it I want my readers to walk away thinking about? What point does my story make? How do I want to change the way my reader sees the world?

As Evelyn Waugh says, “All literature implies moral standards and criticisms, the less explicit the better.”12

All human creativity plays with patterns to create an emotional experience in its audience. We look for patterns and ascribe meaning because that is what we are wired to do. The inestimable Lisa Cron has written an entire book called Wired for Story that examines the direct link between brains and books, synapse and story—I cannot recommend it strenuously enough.

And the best preparation for writing any story is to know with clarity what your protagonists’ worldview is, and more to the point, where and why it’s off base. Thus you have a clear view of the world as your protagonist sees it and insight into how she therefore interprets, and reacts to, everything that happens to her. It’s what allows you to construct a plot that forces her to reevaluate what she was so damn sure was true when the story began. That is what your story is really about, and what readers stay up long past their bedtime to find out.

a powerful story can have a hand in rewiring the reader’s brain—helping instill empathy, for instance5—which is why writers are, and have always been, among the most powerful people in the world.

When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something larger than the sum.… The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts.

Think of each detail as an egg. The writer keeps tossing them at us, one after another, seemingly unaware of the growing number of precariously balanced eggs we’re being asked to hold. So somewhere around the middle of the description—say, the huge brass lamp—it’s one egg too many. The trouble is, we don’t just drop that particular egg; all the eggs go crashing to the ground. The more details the writer gives us, the fewer we’ll remember, proving, once again, that as with most things in life, less is more.

The story isn’t about whether or not the protagonist achieves her goal per se; it’s about what she has to overcome internally to do it. This is what drives the story forward. I call it the protagonist’s issue. The second element, the theme, is what your story says about human nature.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, a story is not about the plot or even what happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story, as we’ll see throughout, is an internal journey, not an external one.

Simply put, we are looking for a reason to care. So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on its way. This means that whether it’s an actual event unfolding or we meet the protagonist in the midst of an internal quandary or there’s merely a hint that something’s slightly “off” on the first page, there has to be a ball already in play. Not the preamble to the ball. Not all the stuff you have to know to really understand the ball. The ball itself.

The narrative voice is almost always neutral, meaning that as omniscient narrator, you’re invisible and just reporting the facts. Your characters, on the other hand, are free to express their opinion on whatever they so desire. As long as the reader knows whose head we’re in—that is, who the point-of-view character is—you rarely need a preamble at all.

Your job is not to judge your characters, no matter how despicable or wonderful they may be. Your job is to lay out what happens, as clearly and dispassionately as possible, show how it affects the protagonist, and then get the hell out of the way. The irony is, the less you tell us how to feel, the more likely we’ll feel exactly what you want us to. We’re putty in your hands as long as you let us think we’re making up our own mind.

Do you know what your protagonist’s external goal is? What specific goal does his desire catapult him toward? Beware of simply shoving him into a generic “bad situation” just to see what he will do. Remember, achieving his goal must fulfill a longstanding need or desire—and force him to face a deep-seated fear in the process. Do you know what your protagonist’s internal goal is? One way of arriving at this is to ask yourself, What does achieving her external goal mean to her? How does she think it will affect how she sees herself? What does she think it will say about her? Is she right? Or is her internal goal at odds with her external goal?

1. As we’ll explore in chapter 10, the brain is wired to hunt for meaningful patterns in everything, the better to predict what will happen next based on the repetition or the alteration of the pattern (which means, first and foremost, that there need to be meaningful patterns for the reader to find).8   2. We run the scenario on the page through our own personal experience of similar events, whether real or imagined, to see whether it’s believable (which gives us the ability to infer more information than is on the page—or go mad when there isn’t enough information for us to infer anything at all).9   3. We’re hardwired to love problem solving; when we figure something out, the brain releases an intoxicating rush of neurotransmitters that say, “Good job!”10 The pleasure of story is trying to figure out what’s really going on (which means that stories that ignore the first two facts tend to offer the reader no pleasure at all).

other words, the reader must be aware of the protagonist’s personal spin on everything that happens. This

As corporate consultants Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman say in their book The Elements of Persuasion, “For those of us whose business depends on being able to persuade others—which is all of us in business—the key to survival is being able to cut through all the clutter and make the sale. The good news is that the secret of selling is what it has always been—a good story.

Ever since we added language to our tried-and-true communication system of grunting, hand gestures, and evocative facial expressions (insert image of eyebrow-waggling Neanderthal here), every story that ever got through to anyone, convincing them of something they didn’t already believe, did it by connecting to their experience. Story was the key to our survival, and every savvy storyteller knew that—how else could they have convinced their tribe that it’s better to harness fire than to run from it?

Anything that doesn’t impact the protagonist’s internal struggle, regardless of how beautifully written or “objectively” dramatic it is, will stop the story cold, breaking the spell that captivated readers, and unceremoniously catapulting them back into their own lives.

And while in the olden days, disgruntled readers suffered pretty much in silence, now there's Amazon. The last thing you want are myriad scathing reviews that potential readers "find helpful.

The only true voyage of discovery … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess [new] eyes.

Evolution dictates that the first job of any good story is to completely anesthetize the part of our brain that questions how it is creating such a compelling illusion of reality.

You slogged from the terrifying emptiness of the blank page to the two most beautiful words in a writer's vocabulary: "The End.

Of course, in this as in most things in life, luck tends to favor the prepared. And

Even so, in life the key word is intuit; movies have the raw power to convey thoughts visually, through action; plays, via dialogue. While all three can be incredibly compelling (especially life), ultimately, they still leave us guessing. In prose, those thoughts, clearly stated, are where the story lives and breathes, because they directly reveal how the protagonist is affected by—and how she interprets the meaning of—what happens to her. That

But the simple fact remains that without the first half of the story, there can be no second half. The first half establishes where the problem came from and who the protagonist is to begin with, so that the plot you then create can force her to struggle with that problem and, in the process, change.

Story is the language of the brain. —LISA CRON, STORY GENIUS

the protagonist’s impossible goal: to achieve her desire and remain true to the fear that’s keeping her from it.

Indeed, feelings don’t just matter, they are what mattering means.”1

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

We think in story. The brain evolved to use story as its go-to “decoder ring” for reality, and so we’re really expert at probing stories for specific meaning and specific info—and I mean all of us, beginning at birth.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. —URSULA K. LEGUIN

Story was the world’s first virtual reality.

you have to know everything there is to know about the protagonist’s specific internal problem before you create the plot,

an effective story is, literally, an offer your brain can’t refuse. You didn’t decide to keep reading—it was a biological reaction. Nature made you do it.

Stories let us vicariously try out difficult situations we haven’t yet experienced to see what it would really feel like, and what we’d need to learn in order to survive.

According to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, functional MRI (fMRI) studies reveal that when we’re reading a story, our brain activity isn’t that of an observer, but of a participant.

story is how what happens affects someone who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a difficult goal, and how he or she changes as a result. Breaking it down in the soothingly familiar parlance of the writing world, this translates to “What happens” is the plot. “Someone” is the protagonist. The “goal” is what’s known as the story question. And “how he or she changes” is what the story itself is actually about.

Novelists are revered (and at times feared) because they have been able to go deeper than scientists, shedding light on the inner reaches of someone else’s mind, giving us insight into what makes people tick.

Clearly these are smart people who’ve seen a movie before. Why on earth would they think that they have to protect themselves from what’s happening on the screen? The answer is, they’re not thinking at all. They’re experiencing it as if it were happening to them. For as Gottschall goes on to point out, “Their brains are instructing their bodies to do all the things they’d do if they were actually under mortal attack.”2