The rational response, when encountering someone with alien ideas, would be to either attempt to understand them or shrug. And yet we become distressed.

All the principles of storytelling combine into the art of dialogue. Dialogue should be changeful, it should want something, it should drip with personality and point of view, and it should operate on the two story levels – both conscious and subconscious.

Still, today, modern nations are principally defined by the stories we tell about our collective selves:

We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds.

Our beliefs feel personal to us because they are us.

Culture is another route by which characters in life and fiction become the flawed and peculiar people they are.

Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them.

These instructions make our environment predictable. They make it controllable. Taken in sum, the vastly intricate web of beliefs can be seen as the brain’s ‘theory of control’. It’s this theory of control that’s often challenged at the story’s start.

Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowledge. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers everything about them.