A few interesting thoughts related to storytelling hit me this morning. I did some research on it, and I’m far from the first to come up with this stuff, but it seems worth considering.

Part of human evolution involved developing the ability to track the social status of members of small groups/tribes, etc. So, knowing when a certain person has upgraded or degraded their social worth by their actions.

Stories, both fiction and nonfiction, exercise our tracking of characters’ social status. Over the course of a story, multiple characters will move upwards or downwards.

To a degree, we anticipate people receiving their “just deserts.” Characters deemed immoral should end up socially degraded and vice versa.

But, if things are too pat, if everyone gets exactly their just deserts, it feels trite. What I might call “mature“ fiction acknowledges that sometimes bad guys win, good people suffer, etc. A modern, well-crafted story will involve some people getting what’s coming to them, but not all.

(This ties in with my complaint about fiction where the author has a clear ideology, and seeks to impose it on their characters in such a way that you can basically predict how things are gonna end up halfway through the story.)

But my main idea here is that tracking social status is an evolutionary evolved muscle and good fiction gives that muscle a workout.