Wired for Story summary

Ever read a great story without a decent plot? Probably not! When we listen to a narrative which meanders aimlessly, we are likely to lose interest in it rapidly. This is because all good stories need an explicit focus consisting of three factors in order to create an engaging story.

The first factor is the protagonist's issue, meaning the desire of your main character. If we look at Hamlet, the issue would be his father’s murder and his investigation to find out what happened.

We tend to think there are two separate sides to our personalities. One side is responsible for reason, rationality and decision-making and the other rules our emotions, our knee-jerk reactions and judgments.

We believe that in order to make smart decisions, we can simply ignore our emotional side and concentrate on the rational one. But this is incorrect.

Can you recall a book you loved in which the main character sort of stumbled around, with no defined purpose or desire? Most likely you can’t.

That’s because a great writer knows that giving the protagonist a clear goal is vital to captivating an audience.

Stories would be dull without central concepts and abstract ideas. The problem is that you can’t actually see them. Ever tried visualizing the duality of man with no imagery to help you?

Images are everything, owing to the fact that our brains have evolved with an extraordinary ability to create mental pictures.

One thing our brains really hate is randomness. What it wants is to find patterns, even where none exist.

Our tendency to notice patterns evolved as a useful tool to simplify the complex world that surrounds us and to be able to rapidly predict subsequent actions.

Say someone asks you how many of the letter “e” are in the word “entrepreneur.” You quickly try to visualize it, but you can’t come up with the right answer. We’ve all been there, that disconcerting feeling of forgetting how to spell a certain word, and the more you try to figure it out, the more unsure you become.

This happens because our brains function at their best when we act using our intuition; thinking too hard about something often decreases our performance.