The classic approach to the creation of a story taught at storytelling and narration courses, traditionally puts emphasis on the structure. Having said that, I feel that there is another approach to capture our reader’s attention so that they really experience the story: an approach based on neuroscience and psychology, that creates effective and irresistible narratives, which stimulate the human mind, exploiting its very mechanisms. Mind scientists and storytelling scholars have in fact come to the same conclusion: after thousands of years of evolution, the human brain is the perfect listener and narrator.
The storytelling skills of the human mind are all aimed at one purpose: to maintain control over the world around us. To do this, we focus on what interests us most, because it can offer us valuable lessons and suggestions about people and their experiences.
In my view, to create truly compelling stories, what we need to do is to shift attention from the structures to the characters, who should be interesting, truthful and three-dimensional. To be able to create such characters, it is essential that we understand the mechanisms that regulate their actions, thoughts and relationships, and this can be done by referring to studies on behaviour and on the mind. Science can provide us with explanations for human conduct, helping us to understand it and make use of it, as though it were a set of rules. We can then put these rules into practice now and then, or even rewrite them.
The sacred flaw approach arises from this premise, the approach that I myself developed for the creation of narratives which capture the attention of the human mind, starting from its very mechanisms.
