We hear music, we view sculpture, and we read literature. Art (and by extension all entertainment) is the business of attention, and we can only pay attention to something. To earn and move an audience, any book needs to reward the attention invested by its audience. Fiction requires literal decoding from brains up to the task, raring to go.
A painting is visible, a symphony audible, but how do you make a story resonate? When talking about songs, it’s easy to grasp what listeners expect: sound, rhythm, melody, hook. But what readers want from fiction isn’t an education or eye exercise—they read for an emotional experience. As a genre author, you must take their feelings for a ride, satisfying their preconceptions while delighting them via your expertise and creativity within the form.
By evoking emotions, you engage with an audience’s interior experience. Impersonal ads and lazy retreads won’t cut it, but give your readers something to care about and they’ll follow you into Troy, Mordor, the Château d’If, and worse…because they care.
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
Alfred North Whitehead30
Humans evolved as problem solvers. Plenty of stronger, swifter, sturdier animals exist, but based on sheer cognitive oomph, humans ascended to the top of the food chain in spite of our evolutionary shortcomings. Brawn may be useful, but our brain is the lever that has moved the world for several million years.
The skill that defines our species is pattern recognition. We love meaningful order and search for it constantly, instinctively. We can’t stop ourselves. If I put three pennies on a table, you will see a triangle, not because I’ve drawn the lines, but because your brain draws them before you have time to intervene.
For humans, patterns exist everywhere and in everything, extending in a complex, interactive matrix. We identify patterns incessantly and then seek meaning in them as they oscillate between tension and release, order and chaos, creation and destruction, stimulus and response. This capacity for patterns makes language possible, as well as communities and every other rung in the ladder of human civilization.
Some patterns exist as part of the natural phenomenon we encounter, others are constructed by human consciousness, artificially, and so we call them art. All human creativity plays with patterns to create an emotional experience in its audience. We look for patterns and ascribe meaning because that is what we are wired to do. The inestimable Lisa Cron has written an entire book called Wired for Story that examines the direct link between brains and books, synapse and story—I cannot recommend it strenuously enough.
Short version: We love stories because of patterns. Music and painting and games, ditto. Audiences crave significance and meaningful patterns.
My goal here isn’t to bludgeon you with a quickie overview of neuroplasticity, but rather to explain that as humans we are wired for story, as Cron puts it so aptly. We extrapolate meaning from the data provided: If something happens, then something results, therefore a change occurs. We constantly infer cause and effect and use it to determine significance because our brains seek and enjoy patterns.
If/Then/Therefore essentially sums up all of human intelligence in three words. We group things in threes because our brains work in threes: if/then/therefore, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, you/me/we, need/lack/relief, etc., which means this sequence is most likely the root of the Rule of Threes in rhetoric and narratives. Feel that fact.
Tension within a pattern attracts attention and creates anticipation as we try to make sense of signs and puzzles, causes and effects, actions and tactics to find resolution. As possibilities present themselves and fall away, that delicious anticipation rubs our brain the right way with the dual pleasure of correct prediction and unexpected resonance.
Game designer Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design explains the clear links between fun and pattern recognition with far-reaching implications for all kinds of art. Koster argues that all entertainment identifies and explores patterns to attract and reward attention.31
• Fun is our word for the pleasurable feedback with which the brain rewards us whenever we pay attention to patterns in order to absorb them and learn from them.
• Delight recognizes and retraces a familiar pattern, producing a pleasure that is sweet but fleeting because it follows an old neural path. It rewards revisits at intervals.
• Beauty reveals a new pattern by exploiting the tension between expectation and reality, creating powerful and long-lasting enjoyment with depth and breadth. It also opens up new paths to revisit for later delight.
• Boredom is our word for the exhaustion of the possible variations in a pattern when the artist and the audience have stopped discovering delight or beauty.
Writers guarantee fun, aim for beauty, settle for delight, and avoid boredom like gum surgery. Folks don’t always need new experiences, but they crave new stimuli that change the patterns available within the experience.
Every artist establishes a series of patterns that suggest possible resolution or hint at closure…and then waits. Keeping the audience in suspense unleashes their imagination by giving causes but withholding effects. It makes them anticipate events and guess at possible outcomes, never fully satisfying their curiosity or scratching that itch until the end. Art creates patterns, then manipulates them to reward attention, create emotion, and fascinate the audience willing to take the ride.
Our brain gets the pleasure of identifying significant patterns that create new awareness and meaning. As humans, we experience this firing and rewiring of our brains as pleasure, because our brains literally evolved to identify patterns and ascertain significance.
Stories hijack our pattern addiction and meaning quest by allowing us to share experiences with none of the risk involved. All stories use the rhythm of tension and release seen in human breath, our heartbeats, and every other natural cycle. Writers create patterns and shape attention to extract emotion. Playing with those patterns is both useful and fun. All those new connections in the brain feel good—and they also make that brain work better. Win-win!
If you want readers to pay attention, you must make them care.
Have you ever not finished a book because you simply couldn’t bother? Not that it was awful or insulting, but it didn’t feel like an actual story, as though the person who typed those words in that order had never read any book, ever. Sentences followed sentences, incidents piled up, the hook might have pulled you in, but the book just sat there dead in your hands. Maybe you gave it a whirl anyway, but after words, words, words, you simply gave up and moved on because life is too short and we’re all too old.
I call this kind of writing “Names doing stuff.” You open a book and watch imaginary individuals lurching through its pages, never once believing this is a person living a life, let alone feeling something for them. All those leaden words strung together like greasy, decomposing entrails. Writing by rote. The cast of clichés, the catalog of incidents leaves you bored and numb. Who cares? Why bother? What a scam!
Those aren’t characters, but names. That’s not a story, just stuff.
If you’re writing popular fiction, you can’t hide behind literary pretensions and lazy solutions because, in the entertainment business, you either entertain or you starve. All fiction works because it plugs directly into our human capacities, and it works best when it’s allowed to do its job between our ears to make our neurons fire. How a writer directs that fire is what turns craft into art.
A great hook is what folks talk about before they read your book. A great character is what they talk about after they read your book. Characters make readers care.
To paraphrase a common meme: Everybody wants to be a diamond, but nobody wants to get cut. Writing, real writing, takes time and energy, art and craft, heart and mind, fire and wire. You know the difference because you’ve seen it and felt it.
Don’t just type your books, write them. Give them your heart and brain and spleen and lungs. Invest in your work and it will pay spectacular dividends.
“Wisdom begins in wonder.”
Socrates32
Our brains are pattern factories. Not only that, each brain is itself a complex pattern created out of electrochemical signals traveling through the three pounds of gray matter between your ears. So your brain is actually a pattern that finds and creates more patterns for other patterns to enjoy. Ideas feel good.
Old school cartoons and business infographics often represent an idea as a lightbulb. Eureka! We’ve all experienced that startling moment when realization dawns and we grasp a concept for the first time. Here’s the funny thing: although it doesn’t generate light, what we experience truly is a tiny spark flashing between two nerve endings. That dazzling A-ha! is the root of all enjoyment.
We call that gap a synapse, and it is literally the gap between two neurons across which a signal passes—ZZZZT!—like tiny lightning in the mind.33 That sizzle you feel is real, and it happens whenever a signal leaps from one neuron to another across that synaptic divide. We experience this spark as pleasure, so we are genetically predisposed to seek out new ideas/discoveries/synapses, which favors new experiences and education. Our brains reward us for using them. Even better, stimulation of those cells actually increases their density—the more ideas you have, the more ideas you are capable of having.
So…education is good, thinking is fun, and our brains reward regular use. Yay, neuroscience!
One of the fascinating features of fiction is that words written by someone far away or long dead can create overwhelming emotions and compelling insight inside of me here and now. Their thoughts, transmuted into letters and words, then in turn decoded by me, somehow close the gaps between us—ZZZZT! Amazing. Writing closes a different kind of synaptic gap, not between cells, but between minds separated by miles and millennia.
In comic books, a set of panels drawn on a page tell a sequential story. The drawings don’t move. The characters don’t actually react to each other’s actions. Those illustrated panels are separated by blank space, a border that comic artists call the gutter. That empty strip between drawings is where the story happens.
If I show two drawings, of eyes open and then eyes closed, you may think, “She fell asleep.” If I reverse the order, you could say, “She woke up.” The drawings didn’t change, but the context did. Most action in a comic page takes place in its gutters, between the panels. Given a context and a set of criteria, our minds fill in the gaps. Film uses similar gaps, using individual frames to trick our minds into seeing the illusion of movement by splicing a series of stills together or cutting from scene to scene to get to the action. Our imaginations fill in the missing bits.
The term for this instinctive visual storytelling is closure. Our mind connects two images and closes the narrative gaps between them to create a satisfying resolution.
Closure in a novel may be less obvious, but it’s still happening every moment you read. The author isn’t telling you every single detail you’d experience in the scene, every thought, every breath, every gurgle. Readers connect the dots to make a line, connect the lines to make a shape…cause and effect, one enjoyable synaptic leap at a time. ZZZZT!
You don’t actually know what Cleopatra, Jeeves, or Jack Reacher look like. They are cognitive mosaics built in your head out of resonant clues provided by their authors. Their seeds, your soil. Letters create words, words create fragmentary impressions. Based on the provided specifics, your mind produces closure and fills in the meaningful gaps.
Say I write 5+X=7. Your brain can look at the X and substitute a 2 and extrapolate the unknown component of the equation. You complete the pattern. In completing it, you connect with it, engage with it, become entangled with it. The audience fills whatever gaps you leave for them, so you’d best be careful about what you offer and what you don’t. If you don’t provide meaningful specifics, clear actions, and escalating stakes, then they’ll fill in the gaps themselves.
Audiences always participate.
In fact, neurobiologists have proven that whether we experience something personally or simply read about experiencing it, the neurons in our brains fire the same way. Humans evolved to read situations and each other, and that skill transfers directly to our experience of decoding a story.34
Never do the audience’s work for them. We want to decide for ourselves, experience it firsthand. People are far more likely to reach conclusions than accept conclusions. This explains why showing always beats telling, because making patterns too obvious and filling in the gaps for your reader steals the potential pleasure of decoding cause and effect for themselves.
In art and in life, emotional involvement is algebraic. We fill in the X based on our projection and assumptions about a situation. Authors provide compelling X’s in fascinating equations. The viewer completes the “unseen danger” equation and predicts the outcome. As in life, they assess the patterns and determine what
• has happened prior.
• is currently happening.
• might happen next.
Every type of filmed entertainment operates via closure, turning frames into motion and giving us enough picture and sound to elicit senses and sensations, impressions and expressions that require analysis, interpretation, and absorption. The pattern attracts us and we find the meaning. We can’t help but get involved and have feelings about imaginary circumstances, because we are code-breaking monkeys.
This is why film adaptations are often so disappointing and why “the book is always better.” The book you loved actually happened in your mind and the thrill of filling in fascinating gaps feels qualitatively, quantitatively different. Authors don’t “create” a character as much as readers infer character from on-page actions and the emotions they elicit. The best books offer cool gaps that appeal to a vast, receptive, imaginative audience.
All stories work that way. Soap opera viewers scold and praise the cast at moments of high drama. Mystery readers try to crack cases alongside the on-page sleuth. Slasher audiences will shout at victims onscreen about the maniac looming in the background.
In theatres, audience outbursts like boos, laughter, or shouted warnings are an attempt at real-world participation in the imaginary drama. When you race back to a book because you’re afraid or excited about what might happen, you know the outcome is already decided—but your heart doubts it. The emotions are real, so our brains don’t make the distinction. As social primates, we want to connect.
When two quirky attractive singles collide in a rom-com, we recognize a meet-cute in progress and immediately map out the romantic and comedic possibilities. When a dead body turns up in a mystery or an ancient evil in horror, ditto. Scenes of seduction, revenge, makeover, or triumph dramatize the characters’ actions and reactions in a steady climb toward satisfying resolutions, which is why these events recur in genre fiction so often: they leave a clear, causal trail.
Anticipation and reversal of expectation keep us on our toes and in our seats. The patterns compel us and we simply can’t stop ourselves getting involved tracking cause and effect to determine significance. Once we feel connected, our imaginations do the heavy lifting.
“A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.”
Billy Wilder35
One of the feeble truisms of authorship is that art springs from imagination. That’s true enough, but not from the author’s imagination.
Writers provide the raw materials and framework for the audience’s imaginary emotional experience. Your entire job is to provide better, more meaningful patterns that will unleash your audience’s imagination in an emotionally satisfying way. You provide the grit, they act as oysters, and the pearl of the story grows inside their minds.
The audience does most of the imaginative work of bringing fiction to life.
Admittedly, imagination is potent and flexible, but a writer’s imagination is also fickle, failing us in moments of stress and doubt. Imagination can paralyze us. Perfectionism is nothing more than imagination taken off the leash, to punitive extremes. “If only I could write this scene the way I imagine it” may guarantee you cannot write a word. Imagination can hinder as much as it helps. As a working author, you need reliable tools to get the job done.
Art is the ability to remove unnecessary details, rather than dream them up. Artists choose where attention should be paid. Leave imagination to your readers. Instead, embrace curiosity.
Curiosity is infinitely more powerful and useful, because knowledge feeds imagination. There’s always more to find, to know. Curiosity aims for a particular goal and serves a clear function that leads in a direction. Whatever fascinates you will heap logs on your creative bonfire. Curiosity digs up significant specifics and establishes meaningful patterns.
There’s an old saying that the secret of being witty is to make others feel witty; the secret of being fascinating is to be fascinat-ed. Well, in fiction, the secret to being imaginative is to unleash the power of your audience’s imaginations.
Imagination is limited by your education and capacity, by your emotional state and predilections, but curiosity is only limited by your ability to pay attention. Wise authors feed their process with a masala of challenging, complex stimuli and info. Imagination is wild and digressive. Curiosity follows patterns and leads. Imagination can falter or go cold, but curiosity is infinite. Imagination is unreliable and reactive, but insatiable curiosity is fundamental to our mental wiring.
As a professional, you must make peace with your skills and resources, your time and talent so you can kick your own ass. In testing those margins, curiosity will expose all your particular limits and genius. No two careers are the same, and they shouldn’t be—compare and despair. Leave imagination to the audience.
Your imagination can only travel as far as you let it. Without care and feeding, your imagination will wallow in cliché like a lazy sow. Why not? We’ve all seen authors stuck in ruts, revisiting characters, plots, and tropes they can’t seem to expand or reinvent. Clichés are comfy and easy, challenging nothing and delighting no one.
Cultivating curiosity will teach you to focus and problem solve. Inquisitive authors take spectacular risks and evolve as artists because they’re constantly extending their comfort zones (and their readers’ as well). When characters are curious, they see the world from unique perspectives. Curiosity forces us to pay attention to what we feel, what we sense, what we experience, and how we share.
Curiosity follows causal chains to their conclusion and it explores possibility but heeds a connected pattern. Imagination can lead you off a cliff or make you believe silliness. Relying on imagination without healthy skepticism can build castles on sand.
The reader’s imagination is your single most powerful tool: it can do more heavy lifting, paper over greater gaps and plot holes, and invoke more authentic emotion than any other trick in your arsenal. Your curiosity is the key. As you learn to look closer, dig deeper, your voice grows more powerful. All those fascinating insights, details, and solutions embed themselves in your fiction in ways that unleash their imaginations in the service of your story.
“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
Jorge Luis Borges36