Storytelling Ethics

Imagine…

It’s a beautiful day in Ireland. The waves lap back and forth against the rocks on the shore and the wind tosses the grasses around on the sand dunes. Throughout the bay and around the Giant’s Causeway, seals and sea lions drag themselves up on the rocks to sunbathe or frolic in the sea foam. For once, the rain isn’t coming down in sheets and you don’t have to worry about being swept off your feet into the ocean. (That actually happens in Ireland; no lie.)

Beyond the sand dunes, green fields reflect the sunlight and cows happily swoosh their tails back and forth as they munch on the lush grass. Beyond the field, just on the other side of a wooden fence, there sits a cute yellow bungalow with a bright blue door. Behind that door lives Slattery the Poodle. Ever since he was a wee standard poodle pup, Slattery has had a call to greatness. He has dreamed of one thing and one thing only: to be a farm dog. So, every Sunday morning, he lurks. He stalks that loosely guarded bright blue door. He paces back and forth, waiting for the opportune moment. You see, Slattery knows that, sooner or later, one of the children who live in the house will leave the door ajar, be it ever so slightly. And when they do, he sticks his shiny black nose in the crack and… he’s off! One giant ball of black fluff bolts across the backyard. He clears the wooden fence like a jumper pony and, within seconds, reaches the startled cows. In the blink of an eye, he has them running in a perfect stampede circle, as if he has been training for this moment his whole life. What happens next is even more entertaining. Out of the house flies a ball of bright fuchsia. That would be my mother in her very bright pink nightie and Wellington boots. She leaps over the fence even faster than the poodle and darts across the field, arms waving. That image of my childhood is firmly ingrained in my mind. Now, for better or worse, it’s ingrained in yours as well. That’s because you’ve just experienced a phenomenon known as neural coupling.

We’ve all been in those boring meetings. You know the ones. The presenter drones on and on in a monotonous voice, flips through PowerPoint slides composed in itty bitty font—where do they get that font?—and slowly but surely, we drift off. That’s because the speaker is literally speaking parts of your brain to sleep. You see, when you hear a profusion of facts (or read them or, even, have them projected at you), the information is processed in the language-processing center of your brain. However, when you imagine a giant fluffy black poodle leaping over a fence and running across the field to chase cows, the part of your brain that processes motion fires up. And if I were to tell you that the sea breeze smells of the ocean and I could literally taste the salt on my lips, the parts of your brain that process smell and taste roll up their sleeves and get to work. And so on. You get the picture. Stories, when they’re well told, have the power to jump-start our brains.

There’s more. Researchers led by Uri Hasson have found there is a negligible difference between the parts of the brain that work when I’m telling the story (reliving the memory, so to speak) and the parts of the brain working when someone watches, hears or reads the story. For all intents and purposes, our brains are mirroring each other—and there’s virtually no difference in the way our brains act to process the story whether we’re hearing someone else tell it, or are relishing a memory from our own past. What this means is that stories have the power to connect us like nothing else. Great conversations result in a kind of mind-meld. That’s one of the reasons why sharing stories brings people together and, as Jerome Bruner stated in the mid 1980s, why we’re twenty-two times more likely to remember a story than facts alone.

The implications for screenwriting and other forms of storytelling are immense. As you craft your scenes, bring in movement, sounds and smells to add dynamism. You’ll notice THE TUDORS (2007) often depicts King Henry moving through the set as he engages in important discussions, all the while adding to the esthetics of the scene and engaging our attention. It’s also important to think about what you choose to depict on-screen, because we know your readers and viewers will process that information almost exactly as if they were there themselves. I’m not suggesting you not take on difficult stories like SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993). Rather, I’m suggesting that we writers must pay attention to what we choose to leave off-screen and imply. As confirmed by scientific research, the viewer’s brain will not process the information to which the viewer is exposed as if it’s “just a story.” Nor will the story elements to which we’ve been exposed go away when we turn the television off, or remove a VR headset. Thanks to mirror neurons, the experiences remain firmly engrained in our minds and memories. I believe every content or story creator has a responsibility towards those consuming their art, to think about stewarding that experience, and to pledge, in a sense, to do no harm.

Insanely great stories have the power to bring us together or tear us apart. They transcend geographical and temporal boundaries and oftentimes go so far as to render social classes obsolete. Thus, storytellers have the power to shape the future by rewriting the narrative of our culture, inheriting from the past, and bequeathing renewed traditions to the future. Stories are the great levers of the world—not because they erode our differences, but because they transcend them.

There’s more to great storytelling than the power of connection fostered by neural coupling. As researchers led by Paul Zak have shown, there’s a close connection between story and the building of empathy. Stories have the power to alter our brain chemistry. When we experience anxiety along with a protagonist, this actually triggers the release of the stress hormone cortisol into our own bloodstream. We might as well be on screen living the adventure right along with the characters. The key to creating an emotional connection with the character or issue at stake is the release of a second chemical: oxytocin. This is the chemical associated with bonding, caring, and empathy. Zak’s research corroborates what expert storytellers from Aristotle, to pioneers in the movie industry, have understood for a long time. To make audiences care about something, you have to adopt a carefully crafted dramatic structure. (“Make me care” is one of Andrew Stanton’s key storytelling rules.)

As it turns out, traditional three-act structure, complete with the dramatic character arc, is the key to provoking the release of oxytocin. By following a protagonist who gets called on an adventure, wrestles and struggles to overcome rising conflict, and eventually faces off against the antagonist in the ultimate climax, you’ve created a basic story structure with a beginning, middle, and end. The protagonist grows and evolves over the course of this testing and experiences the dramatic arc. She isn’t in the same place at the end of the story as where we found her at the beginning. Thanks to developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology research, we’re now able to prove scientifically what Aristotle and other great creative minds knew instinctively. Human beings are hardwired for story and we find ourselves thrust into the action through the structure of the three-act narrative. I’ve outlined for you the process of constructing this type of story in the preceding chapters. I also recommend you check out Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story to delve deeper into the process of how writers can empower their techniques based on discoveries about how the human brain works.

I believe Zak’s research corroborates another powerful key to storytelling that many of us know by instinct. Notice how basic exposition provokes no empathy at all? For example, when we see someone strolling along or even just chatting amiably with a friend—without any kind of struggle to overcome in the scene—we’re not confronted with the cues that trigger our brains to react.

Have you ever wondered why the three-act structure is so powerful? I believe it’s because the three-act structure, when it is well executed, pits two types of worlds face to face. On one hand, we have the ordinary world, ruled by what we have called the “dominant values.” On the other, we have the world as it could be, championed by the “underdog values.” In classic hero’s quest narratives (such as STAR WARS), we cheer for the protagonist because he represents a world and set of values in which we desperately want to believe. Good triumphs over evil; freedom trumps oppression; hope vanquishes fear. This two-world face-off is true of romantic comedies, adventure stories and all kinds of narratives.

In writing your draft, it’s not just about confronting your own desire to create and entertain. As a storyteller, you’re also called to communicate to the world something you believe in, something that’s worth the audience’s time, something that can help us experience some aspect of being human differently—if only ever so slightly. And that brings us to the question of storytelling ethics. There’s a reason every story and screenwriting course I’ve taught to university students or workshop participants includes an adventure into the “great books” tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to Marie de France, Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

Writers and story designers gain an immeasurable richness in their outlook by conversing with other creative minds, whether alive today or living on through the works they created. This process provides insight not only into the craft, but also the recurring questions human beings pose about the world and their existence with remarkable consistency. By reading and steeping ourselves in the storytelling traditions of the past, writers learn to understand their place within history, rather than positioning ourselves (falsely) as pure innovators. For example, medieval authors like Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes and Dante saw themselves as inheritors of bygone traditions, yet still relevant in their own times. “The ancients wrote obscurely,” proclaims Marie de France at the beginning of her Lais, “so that we, the moderns, might come along and gloss the letter, thereby revealing the meaning in the text.” Twelfth- and thirteenth-century storytellers saw it as their duty to make sense of what they had inherited from the past.

This process of translation and transmission, known to specialists as translatio, is not a zero-sum game. The role of the innovator is to bring some added value to the conversation or story. This is how, for example, we got from simple oral traditions about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to a plethora of medieval stories about quests for the Holy Grail and, in turn, the works of such literary giants as Thomas Mallory, Alfred Tennyson and T.H. White. Medieval storytellers took seriously their role as story designers. They inherited blueprints and models from the past, built upon and developed those models, and contributed them to the future. (Back then stories were going through as many redesigns as the iPhone does today.) Given what we’ve already discussed about neural coupling and brain chemistry, today’s story designers have a serious duty to decide what kinds of narratives we turn over to our peers and bequeath to posterity.

When I first read Elie Wiesel’s Night, I was struck by how it impacted me emotionally. Sometimes I would close the book at night and tears would stream down my face. I felt as if I’d been to the Nazi concentration camps with Wiesel. I was, of course, experiencing first-hand the kind of release of cortisol and oxytocin discussed by Zak. And through neural coupling, I had for all intents and purposes been right there in the death camps. I’d lived alongside the protagonist and experienced his struggles. His memories were imprinted in my brain as strongly as any moments I’ve lived in “real” life.

There are innumerable stories that need to be passed on…some are more suitable for adults, and others for children, no doubt. I’ve shared with you some of the more current research on the effects of story so that you can decide what kind of writer and storyteller you will be.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle advises us to have discussions about what the good entails so that we might better strive for it. I am proposing that we storytellers, too, must care about discussing such boundaries and ask ourselves: “What is the greater good? How does it impact my project? How can I be responsible and ethical in the telling of this story?” As story designers, we can no longer ignore the potential impact of our projects. The greatest thinkers throughout history have contemplated the weight storytellers must carry on their shoulders: With great power comes great responsibility, to borrow one of my favorite lines from SPIDER-MAN.

Plato shared similar concerns in his Republic long ago. He went so far as to kick the storytellers out of his ideal city-state, precisely because they had the power to corrupt minds. Check out some of the Nazi propaganda from World War II and I’m willing to bet you will come to some degree of agreement with Plato. However, we often forget that Plato doesn’t dismiss the storytellers altogether. After banishing them from the Republic, I would argue he rehabilitates them in his next work, the Timaeus. There, Plato’s narrator recounts the myth of Atlantis and admonishes us to understand the power of story. The message of the myth is simple: Without stories, we are but children. Stories withstand the tests of time and natural disasters—provided we record them. And when we do, civilizations may rise and fall but the power of story lives on. Plato rehabilitates storytelling in the Timaeus because he understands it to be the most powerful vehicle for showcasing ideas in motion. What we believe in theory, we can see played out in story. Story is the canvas against which we test our character, grow, and evolve.  Story is the key to cultural memory, and to our future.

Moreover, Plato hints that the truth of a story doesn’t always hinge on fact (although there’s a place for that, too). Rather, a story can be true because of the truth it points us towards. Thus WALL-E (2008) is true because it tells a story of love and friendship, even though it has no direct corroboration with fact and is set (like the Atlantis myth) in an imaginary world, distant in time from us. Whether the city of Atlantis ever existed or not is beside the point. How many stories have been lost to the mists of time simply because we didn’t write them down? Stories, whether recorded in books or on film, are the treasures of experience.

The stories we tell shape the lives we live. They call us to either be part of something greater than ourselves or to sink into the abyss of drudgery. Only you can decide what kind of storyteller you’ll become. I hope that, like so many great storytellers before you, you’ll choose to be an apprentice to the voices of the past and that, before designing your insanely great tale, you’ll pause to ask how humanity stands to be the better for it. Your story will matter, whether that’s because it teaches us to look at ourselves differently or it simply invites us to laugh and take ourselves less seriously.

© SJ Murray, 2018