Summary of “Wired For Story” by

Lisa Cron
How to write a good story

Written by Bookey
About the book
The brain can tell whether a story is good or not.
This book uses the findings of innovative brain
science research to talk about the creation of
Hollywood film scripts, novels, and so on. It
reveals the secrets of our brain, cognitive traps, and
practical writing techniques. This book can
transform an amateur writer into a master of story.
Advertising professionals, journalists, and
white-collar workers will also benefit from this
book and transform them from listeners into
excellent storytellers.
About the author
This book was written by Lisa Cron. A graduate of
UC Berkeley, she worked in the publishing
industry before moving to the world of television.
She now works as a TV producer and story
consultant for Warner Brothers, Village Roadshow,
and other motion picture companies. Having
witnessed and created numerous good stories, Cron
has accumulated rich experience in this field and
become a true master of story. Her personal essays
have appeared on Freshyarn.com and the
Huffington Post. She has also performed them at
the 78th Street Playhouse in NYC.
Chapter 1: Overview
Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we’ll unlock the
book Wired For Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using
Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First
Sentence. We live in a world full of stories. Every
morning, we can see all sorts of stories happening
all over the world when we read news websites. In
cinemas, we watch stories that are mind-blowing or
touching in sci-fi films, suspense films, and so on.
So why is our life full of stories? From the
perspective of brain science, it’s because the human
brain loves them. Story is the language of
experience. From the perspective of reproduction,
people need to pass on helpful experiences about
survival and reproduction to their offspring. Such
experiences are conveyed in a way that is easily
remembered by the brain, and stories are created.
Take the story of Pinocchio, for example. It teaches
people to be honest. Imagine if parents simply told
their kids, “You must be honest and never lie to us.”
How many kids would actually follow through
after hearing that? With the story of Pinocchio,
however, kids imagine that their noses will grow if
they lie. They will spontaneously put themselves in
Pinocchio’s shoes. What could be more horrible?
As a result, they will naturally want to be honest.
However, the fact that life is full of stories doesn’t
necessarily mean that it’s easy to write a good story.
That said, some people are born storytellers. Like
the protagonist’s father in the film Big Fish. He’s
just a salesperson, but he turns his ordinary life into
fantastic stories. But a larger number of people
don’t have enough writing skills or technique. They
just don’t know how to make a story attractive.
The author of Wired For Story, Lisa Cron, is a
master of story. She had worked in the publishing
industry for ten years before she ventured into the
television industry and became a producer. She also
works as a story consultant for Warner Brothers,
Village Roadshow, and other motion picture
companies. As a senior story expert, Lisa Cron has
created scores of great stories over the years. She
has expertise in helping writers and producers
discover good stories and make them into movies.
Besides working as a story coach, she is also a
UCLA Extension Writers’ Program instructor. In
this book, she fully reveals her story writing
experience and techniques. If you aspire to become
someone who writes and tells good stories, this
book is a great place to start. We’ll unlock Wired
For Story in the following three sections: Part 1:
What makes a good story? Part 2: Basic
approaches to writing a good story Part 3: Tips
for hooking readers.
Chapter 2: What makes a good
story?
Let’s start with the first question: What makes a
good story? One particularity of this book is that
it explains stories and their connotations from the
perspective of brain science. So it’s necessary for
us to explain the cognitive secret of story at the
beginning. To put it simply: We think in stories,
which allows us to envision the future. Just
imagine. Millions of years ago, our ancestors faced
life-threatening dangers from beasts and natural
disasters every day. They had to avoid those
dangers. Survival was their only goal. In order to
effectively identify information and make the right
decisions, our ancestors’ brains gradually
developed a way to consciously navigate
information – through story. Storytelling was the
solution. People think in story and sift for
information related to their survival.
Neuroscientists believe that stories allow people to
simulate intense experiences without actually
having to live through them. Besides, story has also
developed into a way to know more about
ourselves and others, which helps us better deal
with social issues. Think back to your past story
reading experiences. You must have reflected on
“to be or not to be” after reading Hamlet. Or, did
you ever imagine yourself as Oedipus, wondering
about what you would do after having unknowingly
committed the crimes of killing your father and
marrying your mother? These reasons explain
why people naturally crave story and have
expectations for story. Our expectations are closely
associated with whether the story can offer us
information that benefits our survival. In order to
let the story meet our expectations, our brain
subconsciously sets tasks for the story. For instance,
we expect to see the protagonist running into
increasingly difficult situations and struggling to
make his way out of them. Following this cognitive
pattern of our brains, we can now easily identify
the key elements of a good story. A good story
must have three key elements: the protagonist, the
plot, and what’s at stake. Let’s talk about the
protagonist first. Every story must have a
protagonist. This is very important, because the
reader needs to know who the story is about while
reading. By reading about what the protagonist is
feeling, the reader gets to feel for the protagonist.
That’s why in most classic novels the protagonist
makes his or her debut on the very first page. Take
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude, for example. The opening reads: “Many
years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant
afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
By putting the protagonist’s name, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía, in the very first sentence,
Marquez lets the reader know immediately whose
story it is. The second element is the plot, or
what’s happening in the story. Think about
Spider-Man. The story unfolds as the protagonist,
an ordinary high school student named Peter Parker,
gets bitten by a mutant spider during a school visit
to a scientific laboratory. From then on, he
develops the superpower of shooting spider-webs,
clinging to surfaces, and so on, and his adventure
begins. The plot describes the problem that the
protagonist will spend the whole story struggling
with. Now that we understand what purposes the
protagonist and the plot serve, let’s look at the third
element: what’s at stake, or the protagonist’s issue.
It combines the previous two elements and creates
suspense, hooking the reader to imagine what will
come next. Consider Franz Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis. It begins like this: “One morning,
as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious
dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been
changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” With
this simple opening, we get to know the name of
the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, and what’s
happening – he’s become a giant bug. We know
that his life is going to be turned upside down and
that he’s likely to be treated as a monster. And
that’s what’s at stake. To make a good story, none
of the three elements – protagonist, plot, and
something at stake – is dispensable. But that’s not
all. A good story must have a clear focus.
Information irrelevant to the theme should be left
out. The brain is a highly efficient organ. It
automatically filters out information that does not
contribute to the theme. So when we write a story,
we should always keep the story’s focus in mind.
It’s the synthesis of three elements that work in
unison to create a story: the protagonist’s issue, the
theme, and the plot. It gives the story a
fundamental tone that leaves a deep impression on
the reader. Only with a clear focus can the reader’s
expectations be well managed. For example, the
focus of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The
Great Gatsby, is the protagonist’s unattainable
American Dream. The story primarily concerns the
relationship between Gatsby, once a lower-class
character, and Daisy, a girl from an upper-class
family. Gatsby makes a lot of money and moves up
the social ladder just to pursue Daisy. He buys a
mansion near Daisy’s house. From his house,
Gatsby often stares at a green light in the mist
across the bay, where Daisy lives, and longs for an
opportunity to see her again. Once he tells Daisy,
“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home
across the bay… You always have a green light that
burns all night at the end of your dock.” The author
mentions the flickering green light several times in
this novel. The implication is that the rags-to-riches
American dream and Daisy’s love, the two things
that Gatsby has always been pursuing, are actually
beyond his reach. Just like that green light in the
mist. Lastly, a good story should include a lot of
emotion. It should make the reader feel something.
As neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer puts it, “If it
weren’t for our emotions, reason wouldn’t exist at
all.” Emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s
goals. To create a good story, it takes a lot of work
and skill to generate strong emotions, so that the
story will resonate with the reader. Hollywood
films must ensure that the audience can fall in love
with or hate certain characters within just a few
minutes so that they can feel strongly about what
happens next. Take the film Jaws, for example. The
audience feels repulsed by the shark hunter named
Quint as soon as he makes his appearance. Within
the first several minutes of his debut, he scratches
his nails on a blackboard, behaves and talks rudely,
and bullies young oceanographer Hooper. The
screenwriter designed these details to make the
audience feel disgusted by Quint, thus setting the
stage for what comes next. That concludes the
first part, what makes a good story. As we
mentioned, stories evolved out of the human need
for survival. A good story must have three elements:
the plot, the protagonist, and what’s at stake. A
good story must also have a clear focus that guides
the reader’s expectations in the way the author
envisioned. Lastly, a good story should also contain
a lot of emotion, because the reader needs to feel
something in order to appreciate the tale being told.
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