{"id":2659,"date":"2020-05-31T21:29:29","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T01:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=2659"},"modified":"2022-05-09T13:29:05","modified_gmt":"2022-05-09T17:29:05","slug":"another-way-to-tell-a-story-sociological-vs-psychological-storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/another-way-to-tell-a-story-sociological-vs-psychological-storytelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Way to Tell a Story: Sociological vs Psychological Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On the occasion of the largest pandemic in a century, you might\u2019ve watched or re-watched Contagion, as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas did<\/a>. The movie is a star-studded 2011 movie directed by Steven Soderbergh about a deadly virus originating from China that sweeps the globe. The film is currently having a renaissance on Netflix due to its striking similarities to real-world events, though its more cerebral and realistic take on a world-wide pandemic resigned it to an underwhelming box office haul upon its originally release in theaters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The\nthing you might notice when watching this movie is that it doesn\u2019t track with\nmost of my writing advice (\u2026assuming you\u2019ve read my writing advice\u2026if you\u2019re\nreading this then you\u2019ve probably read at least some of my work, so thanks!). There\u2019s\nno main character, nobody learns an important life lesson, and the narrative\narc doesn\u2019t match anyone\u2019s internal character arc. Rather than a character\nweb\u2014where the other characters are allies, enemies, or foils of the main\ncharacter\u2014the characters in Contagion are defined by their position in the\nsystem within which the pathogen spreads. Gwyneth Paltrow is patient zero who\ndies pretty much immediately, Matt Damon is her husband who\u2019s somehow immune\nbut still helpless, Kate Winslet is a doctor chasing the virus, Jude Law is a\nslimy blogger selling fake cures, etc. Many of the characters never even\ninteract with each other, and when they die there\u2019s no fanfare or catharsis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And\nyet this movie still works really well as a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does it accomplish this feat? Well, you know how I keep saying the \u201crules\u201d of writing aren\u2019t really rules so much as a recipe for success<\/a> that can be altered if you know what you\u2019re doing? This movie is a perfect example of successful deviation from the recipe, and I\u2019ll explain why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the advice I\u2019ve written in this blog is relevant for psychological<\/em><\/strong> storytelling. Contagion is an example of sociological<\/em> <\/strong>storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psychological storytelling<\/strong> is the story of a person\u2019s internal and external journey to get something they want<\/a>. They are the center of the story\u2019s universe, and without them the story wouldn\u2019t exist. You could say these stories look inward. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vast majority of modern stories are psychological in nature. Hollywood in particular tells almost exclusively psychological stories, mainly because by focusing on one person the story is easier to tell, easier for audiences to get invested in, and has a clear narrative path to follow with a beginning, middle, and end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sociological storytelling<\/strong>, by contrast, is the story of a system; specifically, how the system affects the people within it. Systems can be formal or informal. For instance, a family is a system; capitalism is a system; your workplace is a system; the law is a system, etc. Characters existing within the system still have internal motivations, as they do in a psychological story, but external factors are just as important as internal ones, if not more so. You could say these stories look outward.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In real life, we exist within a vast web of systems. Every system has sets of incentives built into it: conform to the system and be rewarded; go against the system and be punished. These incentives don\u2019t always align with an individual\u2019s goals or principles, so we\u2019re often faced with the choice of either relinquishing our individual preference to conform to the system or going against the system and being punished for it. Often the systems themselves will conflict with each other, forcing a character to decide which one to adhere to and which to go against. If choice is what defines a character<\/a>, then a character in a sociological story will make a choice based not only on their internal moral compass but also on how they anticipate the system will respond to their choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For\ninstance, in Contagion, Jude Law\u2019s character sells fake cures online because it\nmakes him a lot of money\u2014the system of capitalism incentivizes him to do so.\nChin Han\u2019s character, a Hong Kong bureaucrat, kidnaps a WHO doctor in order to\nransom her for vaccines for his village, because he knows they\u2019ll be the last\nto receive it, if they ever do\u2014the Chinese government\u2019s lack of concern for the\npoor incentivizes him to do so. These characters don\u2019t need to be good or bad\npeople at heart to make these decisions; people with good intentions can do bad\nthings if the system within which they live highly incentivizes them to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use the example of Game of Thrones all the time in my writing advice. Even though I talk about the psychological elements of the story, the truth is the story as a whole is actually a sociological story. In a now-viral essay for Scientific American by psychologist Zeynep Tufekci<\/a>, she explained how GOT worked as a sociological story and why it went off the rails when the writers ran out of book material and shifted the narrative from sociological to psychological\u2014because it was the only story Benioff and Weiss knew how to write, based on their Hollywood backgrounds. I\u2019ll go a step further and talk about how the psychological elements of GOT meshed perfectly with the sociological elements in the beginning of the series, and how they didn\u2019t at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I\u2019ve detailed in an earlier post<\/a>, in the first season Ned Stark functioned as the main character with a clear want and need: he wanted control of the Iron Throne in order to ensure peace throughout Westeros, but in order for him to achieve his goal he needed to learn more political cunning, to play the \u201cgame\u201d (as in, the game of thrones<\/em>…get it? GET IT?) His critical flaw, based on the system within which he lived, was that he was too noble and rigid in his moral code. In a psychological story of good versus evil, he\u2019d have the clear advantage, and we would expect him to prevail because this is a Hollywood product and that\u2019s what usually happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But\nhere\u2019s where GOT was brilliant in subverting our expectations. We find out in\nthe last episode of the first season that GOT isn\u2019t Ned\u2019s story, but the story\nof the system of governance in Westeros. In the GOT universe, power is held\nexclusively by the people who can enforce it through violence\u2014aka \u201cmight-makes-right<\/em>.\u201d Everybody else has\nto find a way to work within this system, either by manipulating those with the\npower to wield violence (via sex, family ties, blackmail, etc.), or by somehow wielding\neven more violence themselves (\u2026perhaps with dragons). Ned\u2019s flaw put him in\ndirect opposition to not just Joffrey but the entire governing system of\nWesteros, and he lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now jumping ahead to the end of the series, when Daenerys burns down King\u2019s Landing and turns full-on evil because her \u201cbad genes\u201d suddenly kick in. As Tufekci also noted, it\u2019s almost certain George R.R. Martin did in fact intend for this to happen, but not for the psychological story reason of a sudden onset of inherited mental illness. Throughout the entire series, Dany keeps saying she wants to be a benevolent leader, not like her crazy dad or those other assholes who sat on the Iron Throne. However, she never expresses any desire to change the basic governance of Westeros (Tyrion even asks her about it at one point\u2014who will rule when she\u2019s gone\u2014and she brushes him off).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nthing is, in this story the might-makes-right system has been shown over and\nover again to always lead to an unending cycle of bloodshed and eventual\nself-destruction. There is no way<\/em> to\nmake this system work to produce a thriving, peaceful, and just society in the\nway Dany wants it to because the system doesn\u2019t incentivize these behaviors. Ned\nalready tried, and got his head chopped off for his trouble. The entire system\nitself needs to go. But she only has the tools (dragons, armies) to work within\nthe existing flawed system, so she comes to believe massive bloodshed is her\nonly choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nthesis statement of the story is this: there is no such thing as a benevolent\ndictator, because the system that elevates dictators to power will never\nnurture benevolence. That was the entire\npoint of the series!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s<\/em> why Dany burned down King\u2019s Landing\u2026at least, that\u2019s almost certainly what Martin intended. This is how themes are supposed to work. However, there needed to be a lot<\/em> more foundation to get to that point\u2014Dany trying to get what she wants with peaceful tactics, resorting to violence when it doesn\u2019t work, etc. in a downward spiral\u2014but D&D were eager to move on to other projects so they didn\u2019t bother. The result was a whole lot of bullshit that didn\u2019t make any sense. Even if most viewers couldn\u2019t exactly articulate why it all went wrong, they still knew it was wrong. Oh boy did they know it. If only D&D had paid more attention in eighth grade English class!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that\u2019s the difference between psychological storytelling and sociological storytelling. Other examples of sociological stories include The Big Short, Star Trek, Wall-E<\/a>, The Wire, Ghost in the Shell, The Walking Dead, Dune, and Isaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation series<\/a>. Some stories are a mix of both; for instance, GOT is a sociological story with strong psychological elements, while the movie Parasite is a psychological story with strong sociological elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s say you want to write your own sprawling epic with a cast of thousands (figuratively). How does one write a sociological story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, you must start with the system.<\/strong> Specifically, what system are you critiquing\u2014and yes, I mean critiquing. <\/em>You must have a strong opinion of this system, you must understand it very well, and you must have something to say about it. All sociological stories have a thesis statement about the world; without it, there is no story.<\/strong> Psychological stories can also have thesis statements about the world\u2014in fact all the best stories do\u2014but it\u2019s not required. In a sociological story, it\u2019s required. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\nare my examples and their theses and systems being critiqued, in a nutshell:<\/p>\n\n\n\n