{"id":245684,"date":"2026-10-20T09:03:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T14:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/lisa-cron-on-story-or-die-question-the-story"},"modified":"2026-10-20T09:03:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T14:03:55","slug":"lisa-cron-on-story-or-die-question-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/lisa-cron-on-story-or-die-question-the-story","title":{"rendered":"Lisa Cron on Story or Die: Question the Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/lisa-cron-on-story-or-die-question-the-story2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/1199986015-singularity1on1-lisa-cron.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>In January 2022, ten months before ChatGPT arrived, I spent two and a half hours with Lisa Cron trying to answer a question that had stalled my book: what is story, really, and why does it have such a grip on us?<\/p>\n<p>I was stuck. So I went looking for people who understood #storytelling better than I did. Lisa was the first.<\/p>\n<p>She wrote Wired for Story and Story or Die, worked as a literary agent and Hollywood story analyst, and has taught at UCLA since 2006. I expected craft advice. I got biology.<\/p>\n<p>Her claim that the brain uses story as a kind of virtual reality simulator stayed with me long after we stopped recording. If that\u2019s true, what happens when machines can produce stories endlessly, cheaply, and tuned to each of us? Whoever writes the story ends up shaping the simulation.<\/p>\n<p>We also got into why more evidence can push people further away, the one real way to step into someone else\u2019s shoes, the cure and the poison of story, and whether social media had already hacked our narrative wiring before #AI showed up to scale it.<\/p>\n<p>I asked these questions in 2022. They read differently in 2026.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/lisa-cron-on-story-or-die-question-the-story\">Continue reading \u201cLisa Cron on Story or Die: Question the Story\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In January 2022, ten months before ChatGPT arrived, I spent two and a half hours with Lisa Cron trying to answer a question that had stalled my book: what is story, really, and why does it have such a grip on us? I was stuck. So I went looking for people who understood #storytelling better [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,34,6,1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-robotics-ai","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}