Five Ways to Control a Reader’s Mind

See that right there? I’ve made you curious. Curious enough to click this link and devote a few minutes to this article. But if a catchy title were all it took, I could stop writing here, and Son of the Mask wouldn’t make my “Top Ten Terrible Movies” list.

You’ve drawn the reader in and they’ve opened your book. Here are five tips to keep them reading.

1. Understand human evolution.

I’m not saying you have to run out and read On the Origin of Species (though by all means, do—it’s brilliant). But a cursory understanding of how the human brain works will help you influence it.

As a physical organ, our brain hasn’t had time to catch up with society. Human civilization is about 6,000 years old, while the human body is closer to 300,000. As far as our biology is concerned, we’re still some of the puniest creatures roaming the savanna. Our brain evolved with a hardwired goal: the survival of our species. Any action that furthers this goal will naturally grab our attention.

When done right, storytelling can be one of those actions. If a story presents realistic cause-and-effect logic as to why a character survives, thrives, or dies, we can use it to teach ourselves how to approach similar situations.

There are few lessons more valuable than “don’t poke lions.”

Spoken somewhere around a campfire, 300,000 years ago: “Once upon a time, Og went down to the water hole, but forgot his spear. When the lions attacked, he never stood a chance.” The listeners wince, see themselves in poor Og’s place, and resolve to keep their spears beside the hut door so they don’t forget them. By studying a story, they’ve increased their chances of survival.

It’s a simplistic example, but it demonstrates why imagination exists. It’s scenario testing.

Many people in the world today have imagined themselves in Harry Potter’s shoes. If they find themselves transported to a strange, magical world (i.e. any situation outside their normal routine), they know that if they’re brave and pure-hearted, they can defeat their evil nemesis and master their new life. Harry Potter’s story showed them how.

And therein lays the first trick. Give the reader a character they can relate to—a central reference from which they can view the story.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call this character your “protagonist.” Now, I could dash off a whole article on how “protagonist,” “main character,” and “narrator” are separate and specific concepts. But we’re going for simple communication here, and when I tried to write this using the word “avatar,” I got distracted by fond memories of Aang and friends. So “protagonist,” for convenience’s sake.

You want your readers to relate to your protagonist. This doesn’t mean you have to make the character a bland everyman. Humans are empathetic creatures. We’ll sympathize with the smallest glimmer of something familiar. Your protagonist can be a spider-shaped cyborg on an abandoned space station. Give that mechanical crawly a fondness for ice cream, and we’re rooting for them.

“I like ice cream too. We might make similar choices because we both like ice cream. I’ll follow along with their decisions and see how it all turns out.”

If you’d like a more in-depth look at the neuroscience behind our addiction to stories, try Lisa Cron’s brilliant Wired for Story and Story Genius. They revolutionized the way I went about plotting, and I highly recommend them to anyone with even a passing interest in storytelling.

So you’ve given the reader a way in. The protagonist gives them a seat from which to view the story. Now make sure they don’t get bored, stand up, and wander away.

2. Deny their desires.

The reader wants to watch your protagonist make decisions and survive (or not). Obviously, those decisions will be particularly gripping if it’s a life-or-death situation, but it doesn’t have to be. To an awkward kid in middle school, securing a date to the dance can feel every bit as dire as escaping a lion. (No, I’m not speaking from experience … much….)

This is often expressed in the writing biz as keeping the stakes high, or making your protagonist proactive. In typical Western narratives, the protagonist remains the driving force behind the action—their choices are the causes that leave them to deal with the (usually disastrous) effects.

This is the tidy structure I was taught, but this is a Western model, based on a highly individualistic culture. That classic “hero’s journey” hasn’t changed much since Aristotle. Chinese story structure, for one example, evolved differently. It often emphasizes parallelism over linearity, and uses external forces to harry the characters. Check out Ming Dong Gu’s Chinese Theories of Fiction if that interests you, or spend some time researching the cornucopia of other story structures out there. I’m hardly qualified to speak further about them, being a product of white privilege in the US. But I urge you to seek out those other voices, and to be aware of the culture that influenced my own.

So in most books you read these days, the main character desires something, even if it’s survival and a reasonable status quo. Your job is to thwart those desires, be it by the character’s own mistakes or the interference of a hostile world. This should happen on both the story and scene level. The more conflict you introduce, the more important a protagonist’s decisions become. And that’s why your reader is here—to scenario-test decisions.

If you leave that protagonist without important decisions to make, you’ve answered the readers’ questions. They’re more likely to put the book down, content that they’ve learned their lessons.

3. Make it sensational (literally).

You might have noticed my Og story in part one wasn’t super exciting. It served its purpose as a teaching tool, but you probably won’t remember it in a few hours. And that’s what #3 is about. Simply stating a lesson isn’t going to capture a reader’s attention. You’ve got to immerse them in it, and make them live it for themselves.

We spend large parts of our schooling learning how to translate squiggles on a page into fully fleshed stories—we don’t read and write naturally. Narrative is a relatively recent invention, so your survival-obsessed brain doesn’t always internalize the words you read. But your brain will internalize information that feels immediate, physical, and real. Convince some part of your reader’s brain that they are standing in your protagonist’s skin and going toe-to-toe with their conflicts.

How? Engage their senses. You don’t get much more immediate, physical, and real than sensation.

This is the first time I’ll trot out the “show, don’t tell” line, which we all despise because it’s so familiar. But it earned that familiarity by being valid. You can tell your reader that the character—we’ll say Suzy—is afraid. The reader’s brain will note the word “afraid” and understand it on an intellectual level. And it will be every bit as exciting as lion-lunch Og.

Instead, say that Suzy trembles. Her palms are clammy and she struggles to draw breath. This makes the reader’s brain infer “afraid” for itself. If your description is vivid and your reader is identifying deeply with Suzy, it will even cause the reader’s mirror neurons to fire.

The three pounds of water, salt, and fat that make your world.

Can you tell I enjoy neuroscience? Mirror neurons are brain cells that activate either when an animal acts something out, or when the animal observes the same action. So the neurons that note “trembling” fire up as though the reader themselves is trembling. Your reader will feel what Suzy feels. Instead of thinking, “she’s afraid,” we’ve flipped the brain to register, “I’m afraid.” That’ll make an impact.

Try engaging multiple senses in each description. Probably not all five—we have word counts to consider—but at least two. In revisions, if you notice you’re leaning heavily on sight, try to work more sounds and tastes in on your second draft. And don’t forget that smell is immensely evocative, possibly more so than sight. That’ll get their mirror neurons going.

4. A brain-deep point of view

We’ve addressed physical sensation, and how it guides your reader’s mind into emotion. There’s a parallel channel to engage as well. Many people treat thought and feeling as stark dualities, but it’s actually hard to see where one stops and the other starts. Your thoughts and your emotions are bound up in a tight feedback loop, and one naturally triggers the other.

Say you love kittens (aka, sweet lil’ floof balls). One day you see a social media post from some (horrible) person, calling for the summary destruction of all kittens. Your brain processes the information and you comprehend the message. You feel aversion right away, probably strong enough to evoke a physical reaction. Your brows draw together, you frown, and your throat tightens in your body’s natural “disgust” response.

This happens almost immediately, and there’s not much you can do to stop it. In psychology, this is often referred to as “System One” thought. In truly stressful situations, like a lion attack, people might not get very far beyond their System One reactions. They’re afraid or angry, and likely to lash out or run away. But in a less threatening situation, like the one where you’re chilling with social media posts, you’ll quickly progress to “System Two” thought.

Sweet lil’ floof ball?

System Two is more measured and often more verbal. It’s still emotional, and it doesn’t replace System One’s reaction. In fact, it almost always builds on your System One response, using logical arguments to justify the rapid reaction you’ve already had. In addition to your disgust, you think of examples of sweet and lovable kittens. You ponder the motives of this (monstrous) person who hates kittens. You start formulating replies and arguments to come to the defense of kittens everywhere.

As you build these System Two arguments, you’re enhancing and reinforcing your System One reaction. A clear thought as to why you must protect kittens will trigger another System One rush, provoking more System Two justification. The whole cycle builds on itself until you’re distracted by some other System One event, like your kitten interrupting you because you’ve been so distracted you missed her dinner time (some kitten protector you are).

Chances are your protagonist will go through these steps too. And since we’re trying to make the reader experience the protagonist’s conflict as realistically as possible, it’s a good thing to show both systems. In addition to the protagonist’s feelings, you want their thoughts on the page as well.

Deep point of view is quite popular in the publishing industry right now, and I’ll probably write a whole article on it someday. In simplistic terms, it’s where you plunk the protagonist’s thoughts down on the page, word for word, for all to see. You don’t put them in italics; you don’t filter them with attribution tags. You just write them out, exactly as they occur to the character.

So instead of: “Suzy angrily pondered the social media post. How could anyone hate kittens? she wondered.”

You get something like: “Suzy clenched her teeth. How could anyone hate kittens so much? The poster had to be some kind of monster.”

This is actually an extension of the old “show, don’t tell.” Instead of telling the reader what Suzie is thinking (“she angrily pondered the post”), you’re showing them straight up (“How could anyone hate kittens so much?”). As demonstrated with #3, showing the reader makes their brain walk the path right next to Suzie. “How could anyone hate kittens?” is no longer Suzie’s question. It’s the reader’s, and it’s more likely to trip the System One and Two feedback loop.

Don’t feel locked into this method, however. If every single experience the protagonist undergoes is described in physical detail and deep point of view, your book will be far too long. Reserve these tricks for the really important conflicts, and the decisions that truly define your characters. When you’re passing time or advancing your plot quickly, you can take a figurative step back into more distant narrative. Varying the depth of your descriptions can emphasize those vital moments you drench in detail, and heighten their impact on the reader.

5. Give those reactions time to soak.

We live in a culture saturated by visual storytelling. Just as there are more novels written and read than ever before, there are more movies and television series made and watched. Movies and shows can’t use these tricks as easily as novels, and often have more time devoted to action and visual spectacle.

As a product of that culture, when I first started writing, I naturally visualized my story unfolding as though it were a movie. Action led to action, in a chain of cause and effect. I hit all the requisite plot points from beginning to end. My characters had character, and they changed as the story progressed. I thought I’d checked all the boxes.

But my brave alpha readers agreed something was off. The characters felt just a little distant. Yes, they changed. But I had demonstrated their change by having them choose different actions at the end of the book than they had at the beginning. I was still a camera on their outside, failing to look in. The thoughts and feelings that lead them to their choices weren’t visible.

I had paid so much attention to getting the characters from plot point to plot point, I never gave the poor things time to sit down and process what was happening. Even in movies and TV, better writers than me know to avoid this—characters get slow scenes and dialog where actors can demonstrate their thoughts and emotions. I had just failed to translate that into writing.

My favorite tool for reminding myself to do so is the “scene-sequel” structure. This was first codified by Dwight V. Swain in his Techniques of the Selling Writer. Swain described a scene as a unit of conflict—the character sets out to do something, meets resistance, and either fails or succeeds. But in Swain’s structure, every scene is paired with a sequel. In the sequel, the character reacts to the scene, considers it further, then makes a decision about what to do next (in other words, System One reaction, System Two consideration, and a goal to keep your protagonist proactive).

Depending on the pace of your book, the relative lengths of your scenes and sequels might change. If you’re writing a fast-paced thriller, a sequel might be a few sentences. If you’re writing a romance, you might spend paragraphs on the thoughts and emotions of your characters as they fall into love. The way I use it, it’s less of a structure and more of a check-list: make sure you’re giving your protagonist time to react in all the ways humans usually do. As long as I’ve got all the basic elements, the length and exact order of each is flexible.

A surprising thing happened when I started using scene-sequel: my plot began to change. Not drastically … the big events in my novel stayed in place. But the scene-to-scene logic shifted. My characters’ actions became more realistic, and were now driven by the characters’ thoughts and emotions. As I dug into her head, I realized there was no way my protagonist would easily forgive her counterpart for some of his slights. She felt too betrayed. That led to new scenes exploring ways they could patch the relationship, with new actions that were more honest to the characters. Instead of my plot sweeping the characters along, my characters were driving the plot. Their reactions and decisions were the deciding factor.

After all, your reader signed up to watch your characters’ reactions and decisions. Even if the reader doesn’t realize it, they want to see the characters’ choices, and they want to learn from the logic (or lack thereof) that went into them.

* * *

There are no hard and fast rules in storytelling. There are spectacular books that don’t use these ideas. There are fascinating characters that don’t react in these ways. There are always exceptions, and there is always variety. That’s one of the beautiful things about literature—the scope of its stories.

But these are five guidelines that helped me. I set out to write wanting to evoke certain emotions and reactions. These tricks helped me take my readers by the hand, and lead them more surely to the reactions I desired.

1. Give them a protagonist to follow.

2. Make that protagonist want things, and make sure those things are difficult.

3. Describe the protagonist’s sensations.

4. Clarify the protagonist’s thoughts.

5. Always give the protagonist time to consider and decide what they’re going to do.

Calling it mind control might be a little dramatic. But what’s storytelling without drama? Drama is what triggered our evolution, and drama is what drives us to keep reading.

Acknowledgements

Charles Darwin, 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

Lisa Cron, 2012. Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

Lisa Cron, 2016. Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel

Ming Dong Gu, 2006. Chinese Theories of Fiction

Dwight V. Swain, 1965. Techniques of the Selling Writer

Image Credits

All images in the public domain. Click image for links.

"black and white striped box" by MK Hamilton (@mkhamilton)

"angry lion" by Jean Wimmerlin (@jwimmerli)