Everything I know about Story I learned from Lisa Cron. Well, not entirely, but sometimes it feels that way! Lisa is the author of two groundbreaking books, Wired for Story and Story Genius, which are devoted to her passion to educate us about what Story is, and also, how to harness its power—both on the page and in life. It turns out that most of her teachings are based in brain science.
Her latest book, Story or Die, extends her knowledge beyond the world of writing and applies it to the public and political sphere. She shows us how we can strategically use our deep understanding of story to persuade and change minds, around the issues that matter most to us.
Scroll down to read our full interview below!
Lisa Cron is a story coach, speaker, and the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius. She has previously worked as a literary agent, a television producer, and a story consultant for Warner Brothers and The William Morris Agency, among others, and currently advises writers, nonprofits, educators, and journalists on the art and craft of story. Cron has also served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in visual narrative, and since 2006 has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
In her new book, Story or Die, Lisa decodes the power of story, first by examining how the brain processes information, translates it into narrative, and then guards it as if your life depends on it. Armed with that insight, she focuses on how to find your real target audience and then pinpoint their hidden resistance. Finally, she takes you, step-by-step, through her method for creating your own story, one that allows your audience to overcome their resistance and take up your call to action, not because you told them to, but because they want to.
KARIN GUTMAN: How did this book emerge after your first two books? It feels like you're entering new territory. Did it come from your political frustrations?
LISA CRON: Yes, it did come from the political. I had written a proposal for this book at the exact same time I wrote the proposal for Story Genius, which was 2014, and my publisher wanted both of them. And I thought, “You know, let's just do Story Genius and then we'll see.” And then I decided, I really don't want to do Story or Die, because I was looking at the world of advertising and the last thing I would ever want to do is help advertisers, because it's like now we're going to help you go sell something that people don't want. I mean, the whole world of advertising has always turned my stomach.
It's funny, in the TED Talk conference I did, the last person talking was Jonathan Gottschall who wrote The Storytelling Animal. He's one of the nicest people on the planet, and I asked him at that time, “Have you done any consulting with businesses?” And he said, “Oh my god, yes. I did it once. And I will never do it again.” He said, “I did it for Pepsi and I realized, the last thing I wanted was to help them sell,” and these were his words, “diabetes juice.”
He's just like, “I don't want to be part of that.” That so stuck with me. Politicians and advertisers and televangelists, they understand story way better than writers and way better than the rest of us. Stories are affecting us every minute of every day whether we know it or not. And we don't. We tend to think of story as soft science or not science at all, and it's just wrong. That's the myth. The truth is story is literally how we make sense of absolutely, positively everything.
KARIN: So obviously you changed your mind and decided to publish?
LISA: It felt like, it’s important to get the information out there in whatever small way that I could by writing this book. Because my other goal—besides bringing the world back from alternative facts and demagogues like Donald Trump and QAnon—was to reframe how we see emotion. Because again, we get it completely wrong—150% wrong—in terms of what we think emotion is, and what we've been taught emotion is. We're all afraid of emotion. Even our fear of emotion is gendered, in that men are terrified of emotion and women are terrified of what the patriarchy will do to them if they express emotion. We tend to think of emotion as that big, nebulous, ephemeral cloud that’s going to try to get in our way and make us do something wrong. That is not what emotion is. Emotion is literally the way that our brains are wired, our body's wired, our nervous system is wired to telegraph meaning.
Emotion tells us what the facts mean to us, and that's why every decision we ever make is made by our emotion. Emotion is just telegraphed meaning. Again, we don't make decisions based on our rational analysis of something, we make decisions based on how the analysis makes us feel, because the feeling is telling us what that analysis means to us. And the meaning that we read into things comes from one place and one place only, and that is what our past experience has taught us those things mean. It's all biology.
KARIN: But some people perceive themselves as rational, relying on logic to make decisions, and accuse others of being highly emotional.
LISA: Well, define emotional. What does that even mean? A strong feeling? Emotional sounds like it means a bad nebulous thing that's over the top and has nothing to do with logic or rationality—two things that are opposites. Biologically, that isn't true. It's a great model, because it makes us feel safe secure, but it just isn't true. That's why I love brain science so much, if you dive into the biology of how and why we feel emotion and what emotion does.
KARIN: So, both of these people—the “rational” one and the “emotional” one—are more similar than they are different?
LISA: Oh, 100%. The example that I always give is the guy Elliot whom neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was evaluating, because he'd had part of his pre-frontal cortex removed when they took out benign brain cancer. At that point, his life completely fell apart. He lost his job, he lost his family, he lost his money to con men. What Damasio discovered was that he'd lost the ability to feel and process emotion, and so he could enumerate every possibility of any question or problem asked of him. He couldn't pick one, because emotion is what allows you to pick. Emotion telegraphs meaning. And Elliot was someone who would've never said he made decisions based on emotion, ever.
KARIN: That’s fascinating.
LISA: Obviously, he's male. He was brought up in that male notion of, “Be careful of emotion, don't feel it, because emotion is weakness.” Western society equates emotion with weakness. And when we think about the word emotional, we know which societally defined gender it's applied to, because men are afraid of women. I think men are afraid of women, because women are way more powerful than men. The irony is that because women are allowed the full gamut of emotion, it makes women so much smarter than men, because what any evolutionary biologist, evolutionary psychologist or neuroscientist will tell you is that the smartest among us aren't people who are good factually, who can rationally go in and figure and analyze and do it just with data. The smartest among us are people who are emotionally intelligent, who can read other people. That's what genuine intelligence is.
Obviously, women have way more of that than men, not because men couldn't have it. It's not like there's some biological reason why women have it more than men, it's just that in our societal construct, women are allowed to feel every feeling, and men are allowed to feel about four. Like anger and pride. It's just the conditioning, which is what gender is.
KARIN: I can really feel your underlying frustration that fuels this book.
LISA: I realized that what I really wanted to do is smash the patriarchy. I wrote Story or Die to do that, because the way that we get people to change their minds or open up is through story, meaning narrative. We tend to think of story as a novel or a movie or once upon a time, and I don't mean that at all.
We make sense of things through narrative, and the only way to change anybody is to change their narrative, and the only way to do that is for them to change it, not us. Not with facts but by creating a story, by creating something that speaks narrative to narrative. People don't listen until they feel heard and it doesn't mean you just hear what they're saying to you, but you go deeper and you understand why they believe what they believe and then you can feel what they feel. You can feel that same feeling that they feel given what they believe. Once you've got that, you can create a story that can change how they see things, provided it's not such a core belief that nothing could possibly touch it.
KARIN: Who are you hoping to reach?
I'd like to reach everyone. It's literally how to change someone's mind, anybody's mind about anything, and I think the really good thing about it is that it helps instill empathy. Because when we really understand why someone's doing something, even if what we think that they're doing is horrible, to some degree it gives us empathy, because we get the why behind it.
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To learn more about Lisa Cron visit her site.
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