Glynn Marshes writes:
Riffing on comments I exchanged with Paleo Retiree after my last post, one of the cool things about fiction — and one of the reasons I don’t think the novel, as an art/entertainment form, is quite dead, yet — is that reading takes over our brains.
From a NY Times article published about a year ago:
[W]hen subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active . . .
Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
The article’s author, Annie Murphy Hall, goes on to say that Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychology professor at the University of Toronto, “has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that ‘runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.’”
Yep. And to take this a step further: fictional characters become avatars. What we call “enjoying a book” is, in fact, a projection of awareness. We experience what the character experiences as if it’s happening to us personally.
(Which is why readers resist identifying with inexcusable characters, perhaps. Readers don’t want to “become” something they hate.)
This is more than what Hall covers in her piece. It involves our entire nervous and endocrine systems.
I expect that’s why, if you’re a writer, it’s inadvisable to diverge from the classic 3-Act structure when constructing a novel (or play or movie): the 3-Act framework maps directly to how our nervous and endocrine systems respond innately to . . . well, everything.
Act 1. Something captures your attention and raises your cortisol and norepinephrine levels. You read a bit more and discover that your hunch was right, there is something wrong. Your fictional avatar is in trouble. Make that bad trouble. You’re then hooked, because you’re hard-wired to do something about the stress hormones that are building up in your body and brain.
(You hear a rustle in the night. Something tells you it could be a saber toothed tiger. Eep. Your senses go on high alert. And then . . . you realize your spear is out of reach.)
Act 2. You’re now assessing your avatar’s predicament. This relieves some of your stress temporarily (which is good — too much stress for too long is overly unpleasant — you might even abandon the book). But as you keep reading, the tension rises again as you realize that no, your avatar is not going to be able to fix things — in fact, you suspect his situation is going to get much worse.
(You manage to retrieve your spear, but the tip is broken! You have to repair it while keeping your cool. Good thing the elders taught you well.)
Which leads you into Act 3, where the conflict quickly mounts to its highest levels; you-aka-your-avatar face the final confrontation, followed by the resolution . . . at which point your stress hormones recede and your endorphin levels rise. You sigh. That was such a great book!
(A flash of firelight reflects the tiger’s eyes—your split-second warning before he springs from the bushes. You strike the beast through the heart. You’re saved. You live happily ever after.)
Tension levels in a novel . . .
. . . cortisol levels in response to stress.
When it comes to novels, btw, the understanding of how to apply this structure has become incredibly refined: e.g. hook has to happen on the first page (if not the first line) because “no hook” is the endocrine-system equivalent of “no tiger.” IOW it’s become less of a thing “good” writers do instinctively, and more of a technique that writers learn as part of the “craft.”
Which leads to my next question: is the constant refinement of the “craft” of writing fiction making our novels too predictable?
But that’s a question for another day . . .
(P.S. Online tutorial for novelists on 3 Act structure here.)
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Smart musings. Just curious: Have you ever studied dramatic writing, or screenplay form? I did, and I found that they gave me what I’d always been looking for as a fiction writer: ways to take my fantasies, dreams, and ideas and turn them into interesting characters, provocative situations, and fun-to-follow narratives. That’s something that the “creative writing”/LitFict approach had never done for me.
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Thanks.
I’ve never studied either, although I’ve tinkered with screenplays.
But an awful lot of what is being passed around today as the “craft” of novel writing is taken directly from screenwriting. Which is good for structure, but maybe not so good for other things …
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We human beings like a good structure underneath us, but we also like surprising variation. A really great storyteller knows just how much to depart from the formula.
Really bizarre stuff can sometimes work, but the only area where it tends to work really well is comedy.
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Syd Field is notorious for pushing this structure for screenplays, as does (?) in Save The Cat. I’m not surprised that novels seem to take the same form. I do suspect, however, that novels are more flexible, if only in that they have room for longeurs, digressions, and even plot holes. They can be loose and baggy, even if that same old 3-part thing is the structure lying beneath.
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I’ve spoken to Creative-Writing-teacher types as well as screenplay-structure types and they both tell me the same thing: that the craft of narrative (the storytelling end of fiction-creation) has moved entirely over to the screenwriting department. Creative Writing teaches fiction-making of a chic or prose-poemy sort. It’s about sentences and strategies. Screenwriting teaches how-to-create-and-tell-a-story.
If what interests a person is more storytelling than competing with other people who fantasize about being in The New Yorker (or becoming the next David Foster Wallace), then it’s far better to skip short-story-writing 101 and head directly over to Intro to Screenwriting, IMHO. There are many wannabe on-the-page writers whose ambitions would be better served by a year or two in the screenwriting department.
There’s a hilarious antagonism between the two teams, as far as I can tell. The Creative-Writing set looks down on the how-to-create-a-story set — they see ’em as vulgar, and insufficiently intellectual — while the how-to-write-a-story people just roll their eyes about the pretentious Creative-Writing crowd.
FWIW, I take the craft of dramatic narrative (ie., what’s now taught in the Screenwriting department) to be like basic French cooking techniques. My wife’s a good cook, and she tells me that if you master the basic techniques you can pretty much cook whatever you want to cook. It equips you to be a cook. Some people who study classic techniques will get all prissy, or inhibited and/or formulaic, and will never do anything that isn’t by-the-book. But for others, learning the basic techniques is just plain liberating. That was certainly the case for me. In either case: it isn’t the fault of the techniques.
If you’re curious about narrative-dramatic structure, I’d avoid Syd Field. Richard Walters has a couple of excellent books out. And the Robert McKee book “Story” is endlessly fascinating. I’ve taken four McKee weekends. He often gets slammed for being an arrogant asshole (true), and for imposing a lot of formula writing on movies. For me, learning basic dramatic techniques gave me everything I needed to be able to start doing what I wanted to do with fiction. The Creative Writing classes I’d taken had only depressed me and frustrated me.
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I’ve also heard of teachers purchasing Flip cameras (remember those?) to help kids learn how to work with narrative. Presumably, they’d give the kids the cameras and let them shoot stuff and edit it into rough stories. Given how image-based today’s young people are, I wonder if that’s not a better way to go than bothering with all that word crap. Comics are similar — those “rage comics” that have proliferated on the ‘net are a pretty interesting little subgenre of narrative.
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I admit that a novel-writing possibility for me has been to write it as a screenplay…then flesh it out novelistically. I love writing dialogue, so that’s not a painful prospect for me.
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