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).