Why Stories Work-Review

Title: Why Stories Work

Author: Somdev Chatterjee

Genre: Non-fiction

Summary:

For millions of years our ancestors survived on the marginal niches of the environment while the bigger beasts reigned on Earth. They were a bunch of weak, defenseless, and unimportant creatures serving out their time before being swept into evolution’s dustbin. Then, sometime between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, they embarked on a journey unprecedented in the history of life on the planet – one that took them from being footnotes in the book of Life to the dominant species of the planet. What secret superpower propelled this incredible charge? Tool use? Language? These were important, of course. But there was something else. We learned to tell stories. Drawing on insights from the evolutionary and social sciences, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, the author shows how the ability to tell stories has been at the foundation of our success as a species. They help us pass on crucial knowledge, imagine possible futures and co-operate flexibly in large groups. But the importance of stories in our lives goes deeper. It isn’t only that stories help us live. Recent discoveries in the cognitive sciences suggest that stories could be the most fundamental form in which we experience our lives : we live in stories every moment of our lives. That is why they have such power over us. If you have ever been captivated by a novel, film, or television show, and wondered why the storyteller is able to weave such magic (not merely how they do it); if you want to know why storytelling makes us human, and why to be human is necessarily to be a storyteller, then this book is for you.

Review:

This short book is an extended essay on the power of stories and how they work. If you have been devouring books, you would have noticed a few things. Well written stories have a way of holding your attention by increasing tension and the book usually has to end with the release of all that tension in one go, and that is what makes the book and the story worth it. Because the final release of tension is cathartic. When Darcy asks Beth to marry him and Beth refuses? That is some tension for you. And when it reaches the climactic build up and Beth says he loves him as well? The release of tension!

This is based off story writing theories.

But why does this tension build up? What exactly is it that makes us hooked on to the story? That is, why does our brain allow for that tension?

Chatterjee’s exciting book answers this question in detail. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to dissecting the question and finds answers in evolutionary cognition studies and psychology. He takes studies from these fields and puts them together to find the answer.

I found the studies the author cited to be just as interesting as the book’s arguments themselves. One such idea was about the mirror neurons that explain our empathy. They’re why we cry when the authors kill off our favorite character or puts them through a ringer. Humans are terribly interesting in the way our brain works, no?

Fun fact: Mirror neurons are suspected to be involved in autism, which means these neurons somehow are involved in the development of empathy and it is our empathy that makes us feel what the characters are feeling. When you’re crying because the world and the author are mean to your main lead, you feel the pain of the character by tapping into your own emotional life. Thus when the character is in an emotional low, you remember your own emotional lows-and we cry.

The author then goes on to explain why tropes work. The hero’s journey works because that is the journey we all take during our life times. We start out clueless, get pushed out of our comfort zone and then we reach our low, find the ‘atonement’ scene of our lives and shoot up, completing the circle. This is a famous arc for stories to take and we love it for a reason.

We pay attention because these could be stories of survival- we learned to listen to stories because they could mean life or death to the stone age cave men who told stories of the lions, the tigers and other predators (On that note, it is incredible, the stories we have been telling. The paintings on caves from prehistoric times tell us we’ve been doing mythology for a long long time. Isn’t that cool?).

The book’s major argument of how stories are embedded into our cognition for survival was well done, and the bit about our drive to solve puzzles playing into our love for stories that let us put the plots together was interesting. This is why we love stories were clues are left to us and we have a sense of progression than stories which don’t do that. You love murder mysteries? This is why!

It was an excellent and terse read and my only complaint is that it was too short. I would love to read more from the author on the same subject.

Recommendation: I recommend it to anyone interested in the art of storytelling.

I received a copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.