Will Storr: The Truth About How Stories Control Our Lives

Will Storr has spent thirty years working out what a story actually is. He sits down with James for the longest, most personal version he has given of how that obsession started, and what it has cost him to get good at it.

It starts with six words. A tiger. A hunter. A tiger. Will calls this an ancient Bengali story, and inside ninety seconds it has done more to explain how stories work than most books on the subject.

From there he tracks his own arc against the architecture he has spent four books describing, Selfie, The Status Game, The Science of Storytelling, A Story Is a Deal. The Catholic-comp kid who failed every A-level and started a school magazine called The Groover.

The phone call from Loaded where, as he puts it, you were judged on how good your first sentence was. The Oxford open day where an English tutor asked his favourite Tennessee Williams and he wondered, briefly, if it might be a brand of crisps. The great-great-uncle, Samuel Smiles, who in the mid-1800s wrote the book that named the self-help genre.

The thesis of A Story Is a Deal: the most persuasive stories say I see you. I know you. I know how to get you from there up to there. And the question James eventually puts to him, would the boy who pinned a newspaper column to his bedroom wall have had any idea this was coming? Not a chance.