Jennifer Lynn Barnes, PhD, psychologist and author of The Inheritance Games was interviewed on a podcast (which you can read or listen to here) on how to use psychology to write a best seller. I found it a fascinating read – and even more so when I learnt that Jennifer had a number off books published before she applied this psychology to her next book – the first of The Inheritance Games series which was a blockbuster.
In general she said in answer to the question, “why do we like fiction”:
Well, we’re hardwired to find a bunch of different things pleasurable and clever authors take all of those pleasures and they cram their books full of them so that there’s just sort of these pleasure buttons that fiction is pushing over and over and over and over again. You think about something like television, and most television shows are filled with beautiful people and beautiful places.
Later in the article she says that for many authors, their first book has those pleasurable things in it, but for subsequent novels authors start to be influenced by craft more than their innate sense of what they like in stories – for example, this particular trope isn’t popular or is your story structure right and so on. In writing to these other pressures, the pleasurable things get lost.
For me, the pleasurable thing I like most in a story is happiness. A story that makes me smile, makes my heart swell and finishes with a happy ending tied in a big bow is guaranteed to make me remember and talk about the book.
What pleasurable thing/s do you like in a story?
October 6, 2026 at 1:31 pm
There are certain tropes that I’m a sucker for. Underdog stories usually get me.