Chemical Code to Good Storytelling

By: Kavita Balsara

Writing advice can often lean on idioms and fall into the trap of saying a lot and meaning very little. You need to connect with your reader, but how? With increased research into brain chemistry, we better understand the biochemical tools used to achieve your writing’s intended effect. 

Effective storytelling is always, to some extent, a manipulation. Stories are crafted using just the right words, order of events, and selections of events to draw out the emotions desired from their audience efficiently. We then judge stories by the feelings they were able to evoke, with it being a commonly held belief that if a story triggered emotions, it was a compelling and well-written narrative. As a result, industries will gamble billions on the idea that stories and their characters will resonate so well with you that you will consume the media and buy into corollary products and experiences. 

Communication Guru David JP Phillips describes the motivation behind our purchasing of all of these products as “biochemically falling in love with a story.” It is no easy task but it is important to understand the emotions and the biochemical building blocks to make our audience fall in love with our brand and our personal story. 

Emotion Defined 

In a clinical sense, what is an emotion? In its most reductive form, an emotion is a hormone pathway triggered by some event or external stimulus. The hormones create the ache in your chest when a character gets hurt or your sweaty palms during a jumpscare. The hormones we will focus on for storytelling will be dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins - also known as The Angel’s Cocktail. 

Creating an Addiction 

Dopamine is often thought of as the pleasure hormone. It plays a significant role in your brain's learning systems, which keeps your reader reading. It increases focus and motivation by providing a biochemical reward to your reader for continued engagement. Dopamine creates the feeling of being addicted to a storyline and helps the reader remember the story.

To some extent, all storytelling will produce this hormone, but it is also created by suspense. The creation of dramatic irony, pacing your story to build to a climactic scene fluidly, and giving characters stakes will all help to increase dopamine production within your reader. Your reaction to suspense is created by a function of your dopamine reward pathways. The dopamine-mediated pathway is called “reward prediction error (RPE) encoding”. The enticing quality of suspense is between the creation and conclusion of a suspenseful sequence. Between this time, you will guess what will follow from the information you have, and if the resulting end is unexpected yet satisfying, an extra reward is given. This is perhaps best showcased in microhorror stories. They quickly set up a situation that functions as the creation of a suspenseful event. Due to the story's brevity, it is within the first few sentences that you start making guesses about the reality of it. Then, the final line offers a twist that either satisfies your expectations or defies them. 

Example:

“You’re never alone. Words my sister scrawled into my dresser top drawer. They stared at me mockingly, cruelly, but in the cold shock of gasping for breath with her hands around my neck, I see they were her best warning.”

This does not mean that you want the entire story to feel suspenseful. In a longer narrative, humans prefer variation, and if these suspenseful moments happen randomly, people will check in frequently for dopamine highs. So it is crucial to vary where the suspense occurs.

Creating a Bond 

If dopamine keeps your reader engaged, oxytocin helps them truly fall in love. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone you want to trigger to ensure the reader connects to your brand and story. It increases generosity and trust, making your brand approachable. A mutual sense of trust triggers oxytocin. It is a cooperative hormone. So to trigger it, one must display a similar level of confidence in your reader. Thus, providing an anecdote or sharing elements of your brand and image readers can relate to will immensely improve your brand image. 

Example: 

“The best photo I have ever taken is a blurry photo of my mother hugging my brother.  My father had been hospitalised and, due to it being at the start of the pandemic, the only way I could see him was to stand outside his hospital window and call him. I had to support my shocked and hurting mother. I couldn’t touch my siblings because they lived far away and this was before the invention of the rapid test. This was the first time in months I had been able to hug my older siblings and physically feel their support after the hardest two weeks of my life trying to care for our parents. Small things can become luxuries and the relief I felt in that moment makes every hug I give and receive now extra warm.”

This anecdote depicts a period that not only shaped me as a person and could be developed into an analysis of my character or values but capitalises on a shared event. You may not have experienced my exact situation, but, having lived through a global pandemic, many people can connect to the specific loneliness and helplessness I felt at the time. This can build a sense of trust as my story is not only true to me but something that you can easily imagine. Reproducing this level of trust is what helps your reader see themselves in your brand. 

Creating a Varied Experience 

Dopamine and oxytocin are undercurrents that help the flow of a narrative to move readers, but what helps with the peaks and valleys of emotion? As mentioned earlier, what keeps readers hooked is variation. What hormones allow for this variance?  

The peaks would be positive moments of joy. The moments of success and peace in your story are felt through endorphins. Endorphins are created through comedic moments. They help your reader feel more relaxed and creative. The valleys would be the stressful moments. They would be caused by cortisol and adrenaline - the hormones you want to trigger to help someone feel stressed and irritable on your behalf. These hormones are created through suspense and through awareness of a looming threat. Cortisol and adrenaline make your readers feel distressed, enabling them to understand your story and motivations. These all help to create an engaging narrative full of twists and turns and give conflicts their gravity. 

This is not an exhaustive list of the hormones involved in media consumption, but it is a list of some key players. None of these hormones work in isolation. They work together to create your experience of the world; understanding them allows us to create an accurate description for others to understand. Ultimately, the goal is to allow readers to experience your brand the way you see it and how you want them to see it. Curate your work for this, and think about how someone will process your writing as you write it. You may need to create some chemistry in that interaction!