30 - Will Storr - The Psychology of Stories

5:20 How to begin a story with a moment of unexpected change 5:58 Evolutionary psychology and storytelling 11:46 Status 16:38 Anti-heroes 24:31 Three routes into story: milieu, what if and argument 28:05 The problem with recipes for storytelling 30:01 The broken protagonist 38:37 Loss of control 50:20 What psychology teaches us about stories and vice versa 53:23 Plot-driven versus character-driven novels 57:08 The novel and the advent of human rights 1:00:18 The idea of the ‘trashy’ novel 1:01:48 TV series & soap operas 1:08:04 The story event 1:14:56 Fantasy 1:16:32 Avoiding cliché & other pitfalls Will Storr’s book, The Science of Storytelling is available in the UK here (and is forthcoming in the US): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Storytelling-Will-Storr/dp/0008276943. You can find Will’s The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (2014) here: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/will-storr/the-heretics/9780330535861 Complete details of all Will’s work can be found here: http://willstorr.com/ You can follow Will on Twitter @wstorr Literary works mentioned: Shakespeare, King Lear and Julius Caesar; T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926); Jane Austen, Emma (1815); J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997); Patrick Süskind, Perfume (1985); Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824); Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749); Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748); Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (ca. 1610); J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). TV, radio, film: Game of Thrones; Lost; Twin Peaks; Breaking Bad; The Sopranos; The Archers; Babylon 5; Star Wars; Star Trek Discovery; Six Feet Under. Other references: Amy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY9HuVYWn_Y; Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (1986). The critic of Tanner’s I refer to around the 39 minute mark was John Mullan; Roy Baumeister http://www.roybaumeister.com/; James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (2007); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem Call’d the Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734). In the podcast, I misattribute lines from this to “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace” (1733).