Authors often come to me to help them write because they want to spice up their book with anecdotes. What better way to take the dryness out of a conceptual topic than adding the human touch. That usually raises the question, though: Do you have the complete stories needed to condense into good anecdotes?

Complete stories. That’s the key. We all tell anecdotes all the time, but in writing, authors often don’t have the basic elements to tell one fully. And that leaves readers wondering about the gaps.

Many books have been written about what makes a good story, and one of them is Wired for Story by Lisa Cron, a writing teacher in California. Cron argues that science shows “the regions of the brain that process sights, sounds, taste, and movement of real life are activated when we’re engrossed in a compelling narrative.” In other words, you feel what the person in the anecdote feels.

Which brings us to the singular mistake of authors striving to tell an anecdote and not coming up with a good one: Not specifically identifying the human being who will trigger the reader’s emotions.

Having a human being in the story is an obvious necessity, but non-professional writers often talk about things and not people.

Other ingredients in a good anecdote include putting the person in the story in a jam; showing the person wrestling with solutions; and showing the person overcoming the jam, often on the second or third try, by learning something new and changing.

The purpose of an anecdote is to help a reader reach new understanding along with the anecdote’s protagonist. That’s when you trigger empathy.

When this happens, research shows oxytocin is produced in the reader’s brain. This “bonding hormone” makes elicits trust, compassion, and charity. Professor Paul J. Zak, a pioneer in researching the effects of story on people, notes, “By taking blood draws before and after the narrative [in our experiments], we found that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis.”

The Content Marketing Association has a fun infographic that shows what makes a good story. Find the graphic here. It details what makes anecdotes so successful: Authors put the reader in the shoes of another person struggling once, twice, three times to get out of a fix—and becoming a new person in the process.

Think about the story of a gunslinger coming back from the dark side in a Western movie. How did the gunslinger grow past evil to embrace good—did he lose a son and sanity to gunfire? What prompted fresh insights that led to his reform?

If you really want to affect the way people think, make sure during book research that you get all the key ingredients to produce a full story. It’s often easy to not ask about what went wrong before you get to what went right. If you’re writing about the renaissance at a former rust-belt manufacturer, what hard times and hard lessons did engineers go through before the final success?

 With the right background and the elements of suspense, the story ignites sparks of drama that will make your reader’s emotions light up. The story doesn’t even have to be long—it can just be a few sentences, the length of a joke—but it needs the right ingredients to grab your reader.