Writing, reading, and a game of chess
Certain questions always seem to arise as you read a thriller.
Why do we pay attention to fiction? Why do I read fiction, watch it on television, in the cinema? This question is a big part of the reasons I started this Substack, this blog, this publication. It’s why, late in life, I studied literature and creative writing – again. I still don’t have a good answer.
There’s a related and more difficult question, one that looks at the object – the work – rather than the subjective worker – the writer and reader: What makes one story worth the time? What makes another work, entertaining though it may be, fall short of commanding my, or our, attention? I have grappled with this issue before, in my PhD project, and in these pages.
The questions arose afresh as I was reading a thriller – we’ll come back to that shortly – and then as I stumbled upon a book written for creative writers based on the premise that the human brain is “wired for story,” as Lisa Cron (2012) writes. That book draws on scientific studies of how the brain works when reading fiction. It works like this: You give people a task of reading while they undergo an fMRI scan, for example. Or they scroll on a computer screen while the computer’s camera tracks the movement of their eyes. Or both together. The brain craves stories. It wants – structurally – in its architecture and behavior – to find meaning in the jumble of events. We humans are beings that seek meaning (Lear, 1998).
I had read several such academic papers – mainly in psychology journals – years before coming across Cron’s book. Some are experimental, others more analytic or conjectural (e.g. Cosmides & Tooby, 1994; Mak & Willems, 2019; Mar & Oatley, 2008; Mar, Oatley, Djikic, & Mullin, 2011; Tooby & Cosmides, 2001). Brian Boyd (2009) wrote a fascinating book that puts such work in the context of broader literary theory. Together they sketch a theory of how reading fiction builds the potential for empathy and develops moral sentiments. Story-hearing too allows us to move beyond both reason and instinct. Stories give humans, in some way still to be discovered, evolutionary advantage. So this line of argument goes.
Back to the novel.
I won’t name the thriller, not the author, the plot, or even the setting. It’s a good book. I read it cover to cover. But it’s not one I enthusiastically recommend. I’m not sorry I read it – but not, well, thrilled. I’ve no desire, though, to damn with faint praise.
I’ll tell you this much: It involves espionage, with the back stories of the characters providing a sweeping view of twenty-plus years of history, published by a reputable house, from an author with a decent track record. And maybe I missed something of value in it.
Two-thirds of the way through it, my mind wandered elsewhere. That is, my brain’s attention turned to the theme of Cron’s book, and I started thinking, metaphorically, about the process of writing and of reading …
This novel is like a game of chess, conducted pretty much in the way Cron is telling writers of fiction – storytellers of all sorts – how to offer a gambit readers cannot refuse, and then they are trapped. You’ve got them. It’s checkmate, for sure. It might take 15 moves, but maybe only three. You might even drag it out to 20 moves (chapters). But you’ve got them.
That demonstrates that you, the writer, know the rules of the game and the varieties of combinations of moves better than your opponents. If you don’t humiliate them, you can resolve the plot twists and develop the characters enough that readers empathize with them. If you create some sense of justice in the world, they’ll forgive you – maybe even praise you – for being cleverer than they are.
That’s how the brain, being evolutionarily “hooked” on story, responds to the writer’s game. But that’s not – or I hope it’s not – the reason why I read fiction. It’s not why, at my stage in life, I decided to study storytelling when I might have started taking cruises in the Mediterranean. Instead, I found myself reflecting …
What I long to read is like a chess game, yes, but one where each piece has two possible ways of moving, and after each piece has been moved four times the two ways of moving change. It’s played on a board with a wall along the center, separating the two sides. But the wall opens on one square every third exchange of moves, giving the opponents – the writer and reader – the chance to invade the other’s territory or escape from it. Except every third move – or it is every fourth? the rules aren’t clear – a knight on each side is able to jump over the wall and land on any space, taking any of the opponent’s pieces, except the king.
Now the game is much more complex, so complex that the even a first-rate plotter can’t know all the combinations. The writer and reader have work to figure out what happens next. They imagine together, sequentially separated, but oddly and in a dimension beyond time. Then it’s more like life itself, fiendishly complex but, because it’s fiction, still capable of resolution, of helping us – both, writer and reader – to achieve greater empathy for each other, and with the many others who are not even playing this particular game. The outcome isn’t certain, for the reader or writer, except – maybe – right at the end. The last sentence surprises, in the first draft even for the writer.
The thriller I was reading is pretty good, though not so compelling to prevent this diversion into metaphor and theory. When I finally went back to the novel, and after about twenty more pages, the book offered a scene involving a chess game. By the end of the book, the writer had beaten me in this game of characters, plot and settings. Losing is a form of justice, just what I deserved. I can live with that. The writer is simply better at the game than I am. But the game was a bit too simple.
One case can’t prove my argument. That would take much more evidence and better theory. But it suggests that richer, stronger, dare I say better fictions are ones that generate unconsciously other movements toward meaning, ones the story leaves dangling. The reader might see a move on this redesigned chess board that the writer hadn’t seen. My hunch is that this metaphor also works well for books other than thrillers. Complexity – of deliberation and instinct and whatever connects them – gives the reader a chance of winning the game, of finding meanings that weren’t intended, not even in the final draft. Like the writer and reader, the best stories evolve with each reading.
Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science. Cognition, 50(1), 41-77. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)90020-5
Cron, L. (2012). Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed.
Lear, J. (1998). Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mak, M., & Willems, R. M. (2019). Mental simulation during literary reading: Individual differences revealed with eye-tracking. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(4), 511-535. doi:10.1080/23273798.2018.1552007
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173-192. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Djikic, M., & Mullin, J. (2011). Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, during, and after reading. Cognition & Emotion, 25(5), 818-833. doi:10.1080/02699931.2010.515151
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts. SubStance, 30(1/2), 6-27. doi:10.2307/3685502