I was walking this morning through a business district, next to a fancy hotel. I saw a very beautiful blonde girl walking quickly across my path.
She was wearing a white top, which was too short for her, and a white skirt, which was also too short. She slowed down for a moment to adjust her skirt and pull it down into place. I guess she was excited about something coming up, because her eyes lit up with a smile and she picked up her quick pace again.
Suddenly, she spotted me staring at her.
Her face got stern, she focused her eyes on the ground in front of her, and she adjusted her skirt again.
She walked on out of my peripheral vision, and I resisted the urge to turn around and look after her.
I could hear her pressing a buzzer — I guess the staff entrance to the hotel. In a moment more, the door opened, and she slipped inside. She was gone, and we were both safe — her, from my calf-like staring, and me, from the daunting prospect of having to go and talk to her.
But wait, there’s more.
I mean, not with this girl, even though, who knows, maybe she was THE ONE.
But staring at girls is not all I did this morning. I also read an article about writing. It was written by a certain Jay Acunzo and was titled “Nothing Is Boring: How to Tell Gripping Stories About the Seemingly Mundane.”
Acunzo’s article gives you a simple three-part structure for writing engaging stories from mundane life events.
I will not tell you what the three-part structure is. That’s because I’ve already spent enough time in the past month talking about story templates, and because the conclusion of all that work was, story templates are best forgotten.
But I will share just one bit from Acunzo’s article, which is really all you need to know:
“All it takes to tell a meaningful story from the mundane details around us is some tension, however fleeting, however subtle. These tiny differences make all the difference in the world.”
So did the tension in my little story above grip you?
Well, maybe grip is too strong a word.
But maybe you did feel a certain contraction and then relaxation as you were reading.
Maybe you felt enough tension to turn this short story from just a random collection of personal facts into something that was sufficiently stimulating, that you enjoyed having communicated to you. And really, that’s the main point. As the original A-list copywriter, Claude H., put it,
“People will not be bored in print. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life histories, etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They want to be amused or benefited.”
In case you’d like to be regularly benefited, and occasionally amused, you might like my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.