This is And You’ll Be Okay Forever where I write about life, identity, society, storytelling, psychology, status, and other things. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. The next masterclass, on technique, is on December 11th 18:00 UK time. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

Popular posts:

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My new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

In my book The Science of Storytelling, I advocated a character-first approach to making stories. In doing so, I was pushing against a plot-first mindset that has dominated story scholarship since its inception. For thousands of years, the only way we could figure out what made stories work was by gathering a bunch of successful examples together and seeing what they had in common. This process inevitably produces a list: this thing happens, and then this thing happens and then this thing happens. In other words what you get is a plot and, with it, a promise: use this plot-recipe and you too can be a master storyteller.

And so, plot-first thinking became the norm. Nearly 2,500 years ago Aristotle wrote that,“The plot, then, is the first principle… character holds the second place.” Filmmaking in the second half of the 20th Century was dominated by Joseph Campbell’s ‘Heroes Journey’ which, in its full incarnation, has a 17 step plot, from ‘the call to adventure’ to ‘freedom to live’. The current most-popular storytelling guide is probably Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat, which instructs writers to use a 15 step plot-recipe, starting with an ‘opening image’ and moving through a ‘theme states’ and ‘set-up’ and ‘catalyst’, and so on.

I believe that developments in the sciences have shown this approach to be wrong – perhaps most importantly via the dominant theory in psychology that says human language evolved to allow us to gossip. Ours is a species of highly cooperative ape that uses gossip to teach and police its groups. Gossip taught us about other people – who were heroes and who were villains – and motivated us to reward and punish good and bad behaviour.

Gossip seems to be at the root of human communication, and therefore storytelling. And gossip is powered by questions about character. It asks of its subject, who is this person really? In archetypal storytelling the plot, although essential, has a secondary function. It’s there to test a character and change it, so that the answer to the question of ‘who is this person?’ keeps altering, and we see them learn and grow (or, in the case of tragedy, we don’t). Even in storytelling in which characterisation is weak – superhero movies; James Bond; the current era’s conveyer belt of ’girl bosses’ – a character will usually move between phases of coping with the plot’s challenges or not, thereby playing with our understanding of how capable they actually are, and how sure their claim to heroism. In the best kind of storytelling – tales that are memorable and profound and play with our whole palette of emotions – plot emerges from character, and is defined by the particular goals, values and flaws of its cast of players.

I bring all this up because I’ve just read an interesting paper by Robert Greens, a senior lecturer in Art and Media at the University of Brighton. In Character Over Concept, Greens argues too for a character-first approach. “There is a consensus within screenwriting manuals that the writer should discover the concept of their film before they write a first draft,” he writes. As a result, Greens finds that students who have read plot-first guides such as Save The Cat often start with a hook, logline or premise and then try to bend their characters around it. Then, as they write, they “become detached from their work... When a writer focusses on concept over character, the characters may become shallow and unreal, their actions implausible, and the audience may feel disconnected from what the protagonist may lose or gain.”

For Greens, story-making should be a character-led process, and a writer’s initial creative step can actually be the conjuring of dialogue: by first making its characters talk, a story can be created, developed and explored. This method, he believes, can lead to the creation of “compelling, engaging, true-to-life stories and characters.”

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A Crisis of Mattering: We feel alienated and dissatisfied because our world has grown too big

How To Be a Story: Rules for being an imaginary person

Wisdom Tooth: On the ordinary madness of grief

When the writer successfully describes something, they create an alternative reality into which their reader becomes transported. To achieve this effect, they can use specific detail that’s credible and sensory and somewhat surprising – a well-drawn passage might include an unexpected but still believable detail that helps make the scene ‘come alive’ in the reader’s imagination. From a science of storytelling perspective, this is pretty much what’s happening on the page: the writer creates a proxy conscious experience that takes over the reader’s actual consciousness. But there’s also a kind of advance mode of descriptive writing, used by many sophisticated authors, that creates an additional, magical effect. They call it ‘defamiliarisation’.

Because defamiliarisation has been studied by literary critics, its precise definitions are varied and can be opaque. But, most simply put, it’s the art of making the familiar seem unfamiliar, thereby making it seem new. Defamiliarisation was first defined in 1917 by the Russian author Viktor Shklovsky. In his essay ‘Art as Device’, Shklovsky noted that, in life, we often recognise familiar objects without truly seeing them. “After being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of ‘recognition.’,” he wrote. “An object appears before us. We know it's there but we do not see it, and, for that reason, we can say nothing about it.” An author can take advantage of this phenomenon by finding a way of describing an object or situation in such a way that it’s made to feel strange, and therefore fresh. This aids narrative transportation, and also fascination, as we’re nudged into seeing some aspect of the world anew.

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This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. The next course (non-fiction) is August 29th. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

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Popular posts:

How Art Makes Us: Inside my midlife identity crisis

Forever Seventeen: How your teenage self never leaves you

Rotten Material: Should we care what other people think of us? And if we’re disliked, can we change?

Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

THIS WEEK’S ESSAY IS A SPECIAL GUEST POST BY MY FRIEND JOHN YORKE, AUTHOR OF THE BELOVED CLASSIC INTO THE WOODS

Some of the best screenwriting advice I’ve read in recent years has come from the least likely of places, X, much of it from the account of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie. Just as he reached his imperial Mission Impossible phase he began a regular Q&A with his followers.“I’m waiting for a plane”, he would say, chucking in a little local detail, “Ask me anything”.

Generous of spirit, and fuelled by an encyclopaedic knowledge of film history he delivered an endless stream of nuggets distilled from a lifetime of honing his craft. My favourite of his many answers was sent in reply to someone asking, “What’s the most important thing about character development”, to which he replied, quick as a flash “Do I give a shit about what they want?”. Blindingly obvious once voiced – it’s a ridiculously simple point – if the writer doesn’t care what their characters want then an audience won’t either. It’s a simple note that would fix many television programs. It also explains why Killers Of The Flower Moon lasts three hours but feels like ten. Sadly, perhaps because he was making two Mission Impossible films at the same time, McQuarrie’s feed has been dormant for too long, but I still check regularly for signs of life.

Just as McQuarrie switched the lights off however, along came Tony Tost, a former avant-garde poet turned screenwriter from Missouri, now showrunner of the brilliant Poker Face, who stepped into the breach and now provides a similar service, tweeting fantastically insightful reviews of the whole canon and a series of posts not just on craft, but craft as he is discovering it in his working life. Like McQuarrie’s account, it’s fueled by joy and love for the medium, alongside a deep-seated admiration for the pioneers in whose footsteps they both tread.

Structural aficionados will know that there’s a but coming (That’s the Inciting Incident). But… last week Tony posted something that I just felt was wrong. Because I had developed a deeply parasocial relationship with him, I felt betrayed.

So what’s wrong with that?

Now I am not going to pretend to be in Tony’s league: he’s an American showrunner, and we in the UK are small outpost to their much wider industry. But I was a commissioning Editor for seven years – Head of Drama at Channel 4, Head of Independent commissioning at the BBC for five. These were fantastic jobs that largely went well, with only two failures (one of which ran for three seasons), some shows that ran for ten years and two that are still running (20 odd years later) today. During that period I began to distil the many lessons I was learning into six key questions I still use.

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Hello and and thank you for being a subscriber to You Are a Story.

This is just a quick message to announce my next masterclass: The Science of Storytelling for Nonfiction.

AUGUST 29th 18:00 GMT

A recording will be available for two weeks following the event, for those who request it.

You’ll learn:

• The science of nonfiction storytelling: what evolution t…

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This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

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Popular posts:

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Coming up:

The Me Devil: Hating ourselves at 4,000 words a minute (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)

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Closure part one: What is ‘closure’ and how do we achieve it?

Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

In her 1965 profile of the socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, written for the Saturday Evening Post, the journalist Jean Vanden Heuvel described walking into “Mrs. Longworth’s upstairs sitting room, where she often reads until six o’clock in the morning. Books were piled everywhere on the tables and on the floor, and contemporary newspaper clippings were strewn on the side tables. Coyote skins were lying on the backs of two large, comfortable chairs, and on one of the chairs was a pillow with the words, ‘IF YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT SOMEONE, SIT RIGHT HERE BY ME’.”

The eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, Longworth was a celebrity at the time and noted for her savage wit. Of all the descriptive nuggets in this short paragraph, one packs enormous power. There are books and newspaper clippings and coyote skins and comfy chairs – which tell us a little – and then there is that wonderful embroidered pillow, stitched with one of the subject’s own witty lines. Suddenly, Longworth’s character explodes into life.

The human brain is a world builder. It’s designed to take in scant information from its immediate environment and turn it into a perfect full colour, high-definition virtual reality that’s rich in narrative meaning. It does this during our every waking moment, when it’s building the world we experience around us in every minute of every day: our senses provide only rough, raw and incomplete data, and our brains have to fill in the rest. It also does this when we’re reading, or watching a story unfold on a stage or a screen. Whether fictional or real, the brain is hungry for meaningful information that it can use to conjure story-worlds. This is why the best storytellers understand that an essential part of their craft is knowing how to pack maximal meaning into minimal words. When they do this, their writing becomes atomic.

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This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

Subscribe now

Popular posts:

Scamming Substack?: How to get money for nothing and likes for free on the world’s favourite newsletter platform

How To Be a Story: Rules for being an imaginary person

Forever Seventeen: How your teenage self never leaves you

Coming up:

Decoding the Darkness: What if our depression was trying to tell us something? (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)

How Art Becomes Us: Inside my midlife identity crisis

Atomic Writing: The secret of the world’s best writers, revealed (SUBSCRIBER ONLY SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING SPECIAL)

Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

George Saunders is a Man Booker prize-winning author and highly regarded scholar of storytelling. By the time he wrote A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he’d been at teaching a class on nineteenth-century Russian short stories for twenty years, at Syracuse University in New York. The book was lauded by critics and a New York Times bestseller. These days, Saunders captains a highly popular storytelling Substack.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is structured around seven nineteenth-century Russian short stories, from which Saunders extracts valuable writing advice. He is superb company throughout, and his book is filled with wisdom for both storytellers and those who want to become better readers. My only personal hesitation about the book is that, to get the best out of it, it’s better if you at least somewhat share Saunders’ enthusiasm for this particular literary niche. In all honestly, I found myself inwardly sighing a bit when we were instructed to read all about “the barber Ivan Yakovlevich who lives on Voznesensky Avenue”, or whoever, and was always relieved when the perky and fascinating Saunders returned to comment. But this is surely a failure of imagination on my part, and certainly shouldn’t put you off giving this book a go, if you haven’t already.

Helpfully for us, all ten of the book’s most popular highlights are situated either in the introduction, or his discussion of one story, In The Cart by Anton Chekhov (1897). It concerns Marya Vasilyevna, a provincial schoolteacher who has come down in the world since her rarified childhood in Moscow. Marya is unhappy. She is lonely and also bored with the humdrum routine of her life. We meet her in the back of a horse-drawn cart. She has been out shopping. On the way home, she has a brief encounter with a man she is mildly attracted to, but apparently not romantically interested in. Her shopping tips over in the cart. She goes to a teahouse, where we note she’s comfortable in the company of ‘the peasants’. When she continues on her journey home, her cart goes through a river and Marya and her shopping get wet. She waits for a train to pass by and sees someone who resembles her mother. This triggers a powerful flashback of her happier childhood in Moscow. Elated by this memory of her former self, Marya starts to cry.

That’s the whole story. It feels like a pretty marginal work to me, I have to say, but Saunders bursts with love and compassion for his “new friend” Marya who “if my experience is any indication, will stay with you forever.”

Anyway, to the highlights.

10.

“The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.”

This excellent highlight comes as Saunders discusses Marya’s trip to the teahouse. His point is that this scene contains tension: the peasants are foul-mouthed and rowdy, and so give Marya reason to feel insulted – this makes it “entertaining in its own right.” But the scene is more than just entertaining. It tells us something interesting about Marya that’s relevant to the story: she is unphased, which shows the extent to which her status in the world has declined. “The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another,” he writes. “The story becomes a more particular version of itself.”

A well-constructed story is a symphony of change. What changes in this scene is the reader’s understanding of the protagonist. The essential ‘dramatic question’ of fiction is: ‘who is this person?’ Humans have evolved to be incorrigibly interested in the true, inner nature of other people, and investigations into private selves are one of the great, nosey pleasures of storytelling. Saunders reminds us that it’s also necessary for any successful scene to be entertaining in itself. You can advance your story – move your characters forwards – but, separate from that, you should also work to make each scene maximally entertaining.

From a science of storytelling perspective, we can also observe here that one of the principle ‘ultimate’ themes of the story is status (the other being connection. This is not a survival story.)

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Welcome to You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

Popular recent posts:

How To Be a Story: Rules for being an imaginary person

Rotten Material: Should we care what other people think of us? And if we’re disliked, can we change?

Wisdom Tooth: On the ordinary madness of grief

Coming up:

Forever Seventeen: How your teenage self never leaves you (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)

How Art Becomes Us: Inside my midlife identity crisis (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)

Decoding the Darkness: What if our depression was trying to tell us something? (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)

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Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

This essay is a cultural critique and personal observation about the stylistic trends emerging in online writing and the increasing use of AI tools in content creation. It does not allege or assert that any specific individual is definitively using AI deceptively or unethically, nor does it claim knowledge of the authorship of any quoted or paraphrased content.

In this Science of Storytelling special you will read:

• Why I suspect popular Substackers might be using AI to entirely or substantially write viral essays

• Why this matters

• Advice for human writers on survival in the AI age

• The exact ChatGPT prompt you can use to create your own bestselling Substack!

About two weeks after the launch of my Substack newsletter, I noticed the platform seemed to have evolved its own unique yet highly generic style of writing. I’d been trying to create personal essays, using memoir and insights from psychology. I soon began seeing wildly successful pieces – with thousands of likes, thousands of restacks and hundreds of comments, including from a bestselling Substacker who has hundreds of paid subscribers – that were attempting roughly the same thing. Curious, and wondering what I could learn from these masters of my new universe, I started reading.

The essays felt brooding and deep and insightful in tone, but I struggled to get to the end of them. None of their content stayed with me. I thought they were probably written by young adults, for young adults. There was a deepity-ness to the pieces: a surface profundity under which there was little actual meaning. Their most interesting quality was their style. I made a brief observation on Notes, screenshotting the following three quotes from two different writers who had spookily similar phraseology:

“There’s a kind of loneliness that isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t come with sobbing or panic or sleepless nights…”

“There’s a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too little, but from doing too much of what drains your soul.”

“There’s a silence that follows most men. Not because they have nothing to say but because they’ve never been taught how to say it.”

These three essays had 12,913 likes, 627 comments and 2,973 restacks between them. My only comment on the Note was ‘The Substack style’. Underneath it, a talented memoirist and writing teacher I know from the platform commented, “I suspect lots of people will relate to this. Is it from one of your posts?”

“Not mine!” I humbly replied.

Over the next few weeks, I kept having these kinds of essays recommended to me on Notes. I said to my wife, “It’s so fascinating. Substack has already evolved its own unique writing style. People absolutely love it.” In my most recent book I’d written about the tendency of groups to develop their own special insider language. I wondered if this might make for a neat case study.

As time went on, I noticed one of these authors was posting with exhausting frequency. “How is she managing to pump these out so quickly?” I wondered. It took me about three days to write an essay, often more. “It’s almost as if…” And then I thought, “Oh yes! Of course. I am a fucking idiot.”

Before I continue, I must stress that I don’t know if any of the pieces quoted in this essay are written by or with significant help from AI. I am suspicious, but suspicion is not a fact. I might be wrong. I have decided not to directly link to any writers, partly for this reason, and partly because doing so is ultimately not necessary. The only effect might be to encourage a pile-on, and what would be the point of that?

Firstly, the style. To give you a taste of the kind of thing I mean, here are three essay openers. To make it fun, and also make the point, we’ll turn it into a game. One of these openers is from a viral Substack essay that has 14,580 likes, 212 comments and 4,712 restacks. The other two took ChaptGPT a few seconds to generate using my special Substack Style prompt. Can you spot the difference? (Both the prompt and the answer will be revealed at the end of this essay)

1.

“There is a primal terror in being seen. Not just noticed, not just glanced at in passing, but truly perceived—laid bare before the judgment of others. To exist in the minds of people outside of ourselves is to surrender to a narrative we cannot control, to accept our complexity might be reduced to a single characteristic which may define how someone sees us forever.

We curate ourselves so carefully, crafting an identity with deliberate precision, choosing words, expressions, and actions that align with the person we believe ourselves to be—or, more truthfully, the person we wish others to see. But the tragedy of perception is that it is not in our hands.”

2.

“We live in a world where presence is performative, and silence is suspicious. Our lives unfold in feeds and stories, in likes and hearts and instant replies. We wake to notifications, fall asleep to blue light, and fill every in-between moment with updates from someone else’s life. We are never truly alone, and yet, so many of us feel unseen.

Somewhere along the way, solitude became synonymous with loneliness. To sit with yourself, unaccompanied and unplugged, is now framed as strange, as though choosing your own company means no one else has chosen you. But there is a quiet rebellion in being alone.”

3.

“There is a hush that follows an ending. A kind of sacred silence that falls after the goodbye, the last page, the moment the door clicks shut. It can feel like emptiness. It can feel like failure. It can feel like grief wearing the mask of confusion. But endings are not voids. They are thresholds.

We are taught to fear the final chapters, to cling to what we know, to define ourselves by continuity. We call it stability. We call it safety. But in truth, much of what we fear about endings is not the loss itself—it’s the uncertainty of what comes next.”

It’s tempting call this genre of AI-authored reflective self-help material ’slop’. Whilst that’s not inaccurate, I’ve come to think of it more as ‘gruel’: sloppy on the palette, thin, monotonous, tasteless, anonymous and yet you have the vague sense that swallowing it is supposed to be somehow good for you.

Here are some tell-tale signs that you are being served gruel:

Anonymous author

Gruel platforms tend to have vague names such as ‘Poppies and Seeds’ and ‘Notes From N’ and ‘Mia’. They may lack a full author name or bio, or links to works published elsewhere. Their author photo may be a stock shot of a model, an illustration or not actually a portrait at all. Their newsletter’s ‘mission statement’ may be vague and whimsical: “thoughts, insights, scribbles from the margins.”

Use of the ‘Impersonal Universal’

You’ll have noticed one obvious tic that features in many (but by no means all) of these gruelly essays: “There is a…” It’s emblematic of a voice that I’ve come to think of as the ‘Impersonal Universal’. Gruel doesn’t talk like a real person talks, but like a hammy actor doing ‘wise poetess on the mountaintop’. Whilst saying little about itself, it declaims grandly upon the human condition. There is a white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over. It is never funny. There are no surprises, true confessions or controversial moments. It is a description of the human average.

Anecdotes that are brief, bland and predictable

Good memoir writing from actual people with blood and brains and hearts tends to move from the highly individual to the universal. Gruel struggles with the individual. This becomes especially apparent when it attempts anecdote, and comes up with this kind of thing: “I once went to a house party and spent the entire evening worried I was coming off as aloof. I wasn’t looking down my nose at anyone. I just didn’t have the power, that night, to hold space for strangers.” These accounts have a one-dimensionality that indicates the essay’s true author has never actually had a human experience.

Uses one literary or philosophical quote (sometimes hallucinated)

Often, gruelly essays will contain one impressive-sounding quote from a writer or thinker. Sometimes the quote might not be real. One bestselling Substacker whose style is gruelly quotes Zadie Smith as saying, “People don’t want to be understood. I mean, not entirely. It’s too destructive. Then they haven’t got anything left.” I’m not convinced it’s genuine. Firstly, the quote doesn’t quite mean anything. Secondly, neither Google nor ChatGPT can find any evidence of its existence (although it might feasibly be from a podcast appearance).

The Pirouetting Aha!

Gruel often contains rampant contrasts, inversions and comparisons that are designed to make you go ‘aha!’. This rhetorical trick is perfect for making banal, stupid or nonsensical statements seem smart.

• “There is an X that is Y”

• “Not because X but Y”

• “Because X isn’t Y it’s Z”

• “Maybe that is what X is. It is not Y, it is not Z, it is A”

• “Once it was X. Now it is Y”

• “The problem of X is Y”

• “Not only do we X, but we also Y”

As I said, I don’t know if the gruel merchants of Substack are using AI, or whether they’ve all somehow developed writing voices that sound exactly like each other, and also exactly like the sound of 100,000 Nvidia chips. For what it’s worth, when I asked ChatGPT to analyse pieces by five gruelly authors, it concluded I was wrong about one of them, but three were “very likely” to have been “generated or at least heavily assisted by AI” and one – that had 9,196 likes, 2,947 restacks and 191 comments – had a “high likelihood of full or heavy AI authorship, with minimal or no human editing.”

What’s most shocking about the rise of gruel on Substack is its success. Many of these pieces have enjoyed a level of virality that I, a mere human, could hardly dream of. To give you a flavour of how truly beloved gruelly essays are, here are a few collated comments:

“I love this so much, it really resonated with me. it's beautifully real and honest and right. well done.”

“best. piece. i’ve. ever. read.”

“Beautifully written and so much truth in every word! Thanks for sharing”

”This is so comforting, thank you dear poetess”

“Not this making me tear up in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning…”

“Amazing & so heartfelt, thank you”

”Reading this felt like being held in a way I’ve never been held before. Thank you for your kind words.”

“Didn’t expect to cry on Substack today”

And, under one essay, I found this exchange:

“I’m in awe, I love this. You truly have a gift.”

“How about trying to stop using AI to write this god awful vacuous shit…”

“So what if it's Ai? Doesn't change my feelings towards the essay, it was beautiful and I'm glad she posted it.”

It seems to me that a rubicon has been crossed. AI is genuinely touching human hearts, and it’s making money, and at least some readers don’t seem to care. More scary: this is only the beginning. Right now, once it’s pointed out, the taste of gruel is obvious. But the better these models become, the better able they’ll be able to hide themselves, and the better able they’ll be to truly, deeply move people. And then what will we do?

Well, what? How can we humans rise above the coming tide of gruel? The answer is to lean into what the machines can’t yet do.

Develop your voice

The voices of the best writers are recognisable in their opening lines. That’s what we should be aiming for. This is not just a matter of ’finding’ your voice, it’s about developing it. With confidence and experience, a writer stops trying to impress a fantasy audience and instead listens carefully to how they themselves talk and think – their word choices, their rhythms, their sense of humour – and tries to lay that on the page. Whilst AI strains to produce a sum of the average, a human strains to produce an ever purer essence of themselves.

Obsesses on individual experience

But this is not just about voice. My journey through the gruel taught me that AI struggles to create genuine experience. Real life, and real people, are almost always somewhat strange. True incidents have elements that are unexpected – shocking, absurd, enraging, confounding, inappropriately funny. There’s always something a little out of place. If you’re writing non-fiction, look out for the unexpected. If you’re writing fiction, invent the surprising but still true-seeming detail. Be vulnerable. Be funny. Be ruthlessly honest. Try to develop the confidence to at least flirt with the controversial (AI hates to offend). The more true you are to your own individuality, the faster you’ll outrun the machines.

Experiment

AI does not take risks. You should. How can you structure your piece differently? Is there something interesting you can do with dialogue or subject matter or rhythm or your opening? Can you push yourself to come up with a surprising but true conclusion? Your experiments will sometimes fail (in my short time on Substack I have already felt the pain of the zero-paid-subscription essay) but failure is information that can be used when designing your next experiment.

Develop your personal brand

AI will evolve, but readers won’t. They will always be humans who value human things. I suspect that writers who heavily use AI (or, indeed are AI) will never not be seen, by most people, as low status. Artists tend to shrink from the concept of the ‘brand’, but a writer’s name is their brand, and it will be of enormous value to them in our new age. The authentic human author will be seen almost as a luxury good. People want to be seen reading the latest novel by a human they identify with and admire, and they will pay for that privilege. So make sure your name stands for something: define that thing, evolve that thing, perfect that thing.

Resist the temptation to over-rely on AI

A screenwriter friend recently asked ChatGPT to give him notes on his latest script. The notes, he said, were dreadful – clichéd, obvious, unusable. AI gave exactly the kind of advice someone with no real-world experience but who’d read lots of screenwriting guides would have offered. This won’t always be the case, I’m sure. But even when AI becomes more sophisticated, it will still be backwards looking, relying on an analysis of things-already-done. There’s certainly some truth to the claim that ‘everything is remix’ (Harry Potter = Star Wars; Jaws = Beowulf). But only some. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that ‘everything is remix + experience’. Truly creative people add themselves to what has gone before. I understand the temptation of using AI for a little lift, but the more you rely on it, the more your work risks leaning to the average, as the gruel seeps inexorably into it.

But in case you can’t be bothered with any of that, here is the exact ChapGPT prompt that can generate an essay in seconds that’s perfectly tuned for popularity on Substack. Think of it as a recipe for instant gruel.

“Write a motivational, mindfulness-style essay about <SUBJECT>. Make it poetic, uplifting, and emotionally resonant and reflective, like a piece someone might read on a mindfulness blog, support group, or Substack newsletter.”

And don’t forget, if you can’t come up with a subject for your essay, AI can do it for you. After all, if you want to be a viral Substacker, all you need to do is ask.

*The genuine Substack essay was example 1. ChatGPT’s verdict: “This essay was almost certainly written by AI, either fully in one pass or using multiple prompts and light edits… If any human editing occurred, it likely involved cleaning up transitions or choosing the topic—but the structure, argument flow, and stylistic fingerprint are deeply AI-native.”

Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

This is You Are a Story, the place where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

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Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

Every student of story is familiar with the story arc. From Aristotle’s three acts of drama to Joseph Campbell’s twelve-beat ‘hero’s journey’ to the five acts of Gustav Freytag’s pyramid, all seem to offer an alluring Ultimate Secret of Success for authors, screenwriters and playwrights – and all have been deployed by countless storytellers, over the decades, to massively varying degrees of effect. When I was writing my first novel, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone, I studied Christopher Booker’s five act plan (call to action, dream, frustration, nightmare, resolution) from his book The Seven Basic Plots as if it was a holy instruction, naively convinced that if I could only follow it with religious precision, I’d triumphantly enter the heaven of the bestseller lists.

Even after the gods of the lists denied entry to my novel, I remained a believer in plot-plans. Indeed, readers of The Science of Storytelling will know that I designed my own version of the five-act arc, that tried to marry movement in the layer of dramatic action with character change, so that the protagonist’s interior development was the active ingredient that pushed the story through its various stages to completion.

Arcs such as these are often oversold by their creators, who can be guilty of asserting that their version is essential and non-negotiable for any writer who seeks success. A mere glance at the variety that exists in human storytelling demonstrates such claims to be bullshit. But, for those still not convinced, we now have evidence in its untruth from the sciences. In 2020, researchers published the surprising results of an analysis of 40,000 ‘traditional narratives’, such as novels and film scripts, as well as 20,000 non-traditional narratives, from places like TED Talks and newspaper articles. Using a computational analysis of language, they found “strong, highly consistent evidence” of “narrative processes and structures that have been theorized by historical scholars such as Aristotle and Freytag.” In short, lots of traditional story structure. But were these structures successful? That is, was there a correlation found between their use and that story’s popularity? Stunningly, the answer was no. The researchers “found no clear differences” between highly rated and poorly rated stories “in terms of their narrative structure.”

Of course, we must as a rule be extremely careful about accepting counter-intuitive results from single studies. We might note, too, that their secondary analysis – the one that looked at whether arcs predicted success in fiction – used romance novels as a significant quotient of their source material. Most of these authors, they admit “were not professionals.” Indeed, the titles they analysed comprised “639 self-published books retrieved from Smashwords.com, a free e-book and online publishing platform.” If this material was of mostly low quality (and, dear reader, it was), no arc on earth would’ve saved it. But! As well as these amateur love stories, they also analysed 18,074 films, using their IMDb ratings. And still, then, they “found no evidence that people’s ratings of narrative quality or popularity were related to narrative structure.”

So what does work? Does anything? Are we to simply abandon the ancient pursuit of crafting story? Just dribble out some shapeless thing? Not according to a 2024 study

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This is You Are a Story, the place where I explore the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal, and explore ways in which science can make us better storytellers. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain …

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This is You Are a Story, the place where I explore the blessings and curses of our being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. Please consider joining our community. Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to quarterly ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online mastercla…

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Storytellers sometimes worry about making their protagonists ‘likeable’. This is a mistake that invariably leads to dull fiction. I won’t last many pages of a novel in which the author seems to have tried really hard to make their lead character as inoffensive as possible. Their doing so is a signal that the story ahead is likely to be flat, boring and …

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