This guide reveals how writers can utilize cognitive storytelling strategies to craft stories that ignite readers’ brains and captivate them through each plot element. Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets—and it’s a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper. The vast majority of writing advice focuses on “writing well” as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail—they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do: ignite the brain’s hardwired desire to learn what happens next. When writers tap into the evolutionary purpose of story and electrify our curiosity, it triggers a delicious dopamine rush that tells us to pay attention. Without it, even the most perfect prose won’t hold anyone’s interest. Backed by recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as well as examples from novels, screenplays, and short stories, Wired for Story offers a revolutionary look at story as the brain experiences it. Each chapter zeroes in on an aspect of the brain, its corresponding revelation about story, and the way to apply it to your storytelling right now. As both a publishing veteran and a TV pro, Lisa Cron knows storytelling. In Wired for Story she shares her fascinating psychological approaches to the craft. Her fresh way of looking at the core essentials of writing has our neurons firing. - Writer's Digest . . . how can you craft a story compelling enough to keep readers turning the pages deep into the night? The answer lies in a new book linking writing to neuroscience, Lisa Cron's Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science . - Arnie Cooper - Poets & Writers Lisa Cron's Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence is relentlessly interesting because it reveals how our brains perceive and process stories and narratives. Ms. Cron walks the writer through the mental architecture of a story, patiently revealing what works and what doesn't and why. She writes with clarity and humor about elementary things every writer could profit from revisiting under her auspices. Who would have thought anyone could make the intricacies of brain science accessible? - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette LISA CRON is the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius . Her TEDx talk, Wired for Story opened Furman University's 2014 TEDx Conference, Stories: The Common Thread of Our Humanity. Lisa has worked in publishing at W.W. Norton, as an agent at the Angela Rinaldi Literary Agency, as a producer on shows for Showtime and Court TV, and as a story analyst for Warner Brothers and the William Morris Agency. Since 2006 she has been an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, and she is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA Program in Visual Narrative in New York City. She is a frequent presenter at writers conferences, universities and schools nationwide, and in her work as a story coach Lisa helps novelists, screenwriters and journalists wrangle the story they want to tell onto the page. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. —Flannery O’Connor   In the second it takes you to read this sentence, your senses are showering you with over 11,000,000 pieces of information. Your conscious mind is capable of registering about forty of them. And when it comes to actually paying attention? On a good day, you can process seven bits of data at a time. On a bad day, five.(1) On one of those days? More like minus three.      And yet, you’re not only making your way in a complex world just fine, you’re preparing to write a story about someone navigating a world of your creation. So how important can any of those other 10,999,960 bits of information really be? Very, as it turns out—which is why, although we don’t register them consciously, our brain is busy noting, analyzing, and deciding whether they’re something irrelevant (like the fact that the sky is still blue) or something we need to pay attention to (like the sound of a horn blaring as we meander across the street, lost in thought about the hunky guy who just moved in next door).      What’s your brain’s criterion for either leaving you in peace to daydream or demanding your immediate and total attention? It’s simple. Your brain, along with every other living organism down to the humble amoeba, has one main goal: survival. Your subconscious brain—which neuroscientists refer to as the adaptive or cognitive unconscious—is a finely tuned instrument, instantly aware of what matters, what doesn’t, why, and, hopefully, what you should do about it.(2) It knows you don’t have the time to think, “Gee, what’s that loud noise? Oh, it’s a horn honking; it must