The #1 Reason a Story is Like Having a Good Long Cry
A scene from the classic tear-jerker Brief Encounter.
If you’re expecting a post about tear-jerkers, prepare to be dismayed. This is not a meditation on the power of sob stories, but a reflection on how different things – say, a story and a fit of weeping – might have a similar evolutionary basis.
In science, when two very different functions are found to have a similar structure, it suggests they may have a similar evolutionary cause.
This is referred to as a(n) homology.
My suggestion is that stories and emotions are homologous.
Read on if you are curious to discover why.
What Is a Story?
For millennia, thinkers have been pondering the significance of stories, and how and why we tell them. Multitudes of answers have arisen, including theories of moral degradation, social cohesion, distraction, shared narratives, joy, truth, lies.
Many of the discussions are elegant and eloquent, clever and reassuring but, in the end, most of them have failed to convince me.
My tendency is to think, ‘how, and between whom, exactly?’ ‘Whose, why and when?’.
There are so many bazillions of stories already in existence, and so many new stories gushing forth in unrelenting cascades every time someone shares what they saw on the way to the bus stop, that it’s impossible to analyse each and every story, storyteller, listener and the context in which each story occurs in order to answer the how, whom, whose, which, why and when of stories.
I have always thought there has to be something deeper and more fundamental, foundational, universal and, yes, biological, underlying how we tell stories and why we like them to spring forth in a particular shape.
Fortunately, there is such a thing as affective neuroscience, which is the study of emotions in the brain.
It is my favourite topic in the world.
Alexandre Cabanel Fallen Angel
The Emotional Arc
For a long time – like forever, but especially during the 20th century – emotions have been disparaged. The thinking went that emotion is uncool and unreliable, and that reason and abstract thinking and ‘objective’ observation are the only road to truth.
Around twenty or thirty years ago, with the advent of powerful new technologies, researchers started delving into the hard science behind emotion, including evolution, brain structure, and neurochemical behaviour. Rather than surmise, hypothesise and conjecture the ills of emotion, they used the latest technologies to track brain activity during the experience of an emotion to demonstrate how emotions can be reliable guides through life.
To get to this point, affective neuroscientists have measured everything from the easily detected hammering of heart and gurgling of gut, to ripples of electricity along axons, cascades of brain chemicals from tiny glands, microscopic eye movements (saccades), and minuscular twitching of micro-muscles in deeply remote body parts, among many other things.
When they chart the experience of emotion as two-dimensional graphs, emotions of various kinds appear to form a variety of arcs with distinct phases, including beginnings, middles and ends.
The arc of emotion follows a predictable series of moments. These moments are driven by neurochemicals released under certain conditions.
I made a nifty table to demonstrate roughly what happens during an emotional episode (imagine a small child undergoing a minor upset):
The Five-act Narrative Arc
The thing to notice about this emotional episode is that its trajectory follows the trajectory of the classic five-act narrative arc:
Repose
Inciting incident
Escalating drama
Crisis
Denouement
And this – according to my own wanderings on the plains of hypothesis – is where the homology comes in.
That is, I find it eminently plausible that the evolutionary foundation of storytelling springs from the same roots as the expression of an intense emotion.
At their core, stories follow the archetypal arc of an emotional episode because this emotional arc is something we intrinsically and intuitively understand.
We build storylines that mirror the shape of our lived emotional experience.
Story IS emotion.
If you want to explore narrative arc more closely you might be interested in Seven Steps to Story, which is my guide to plotting picture-book stories (and any other kind of story).