I had something disgusting happen to me yesterday.
I was having breakfast, my usual fare of testosterone yogurt, steel-cut oatmeal, and a few frozen raspberries and blackcurrants.
So I sat down in my usual breakfast armchair and took hold of the oatmeal bowl. On the underside of the bowl, though, I felt something dry and hard.
“EW!!!”
It turned out to be a dead, flattened, and desiccated insect of some sort, perhaps a cockroach. I instinctively shook it off my hand and stared after it in disgust.
How the hell did it get under my yogurt bowl? And where did it come from in the first place?
I zoomed in over the cockroach corpse. And as my eyes adjusted, so did my brain. It wasn’t really a dead insect. Instead, it was just the dried calyx from a cherry tomato that I had eaten last night. But in that split second, my overactive and anxious brain had convincingly transformed it into something much grosser, more frightening, and more unpleasant.
I don’t have a particular point in telling you this story except to illustrate one thing:
You’ll often hear that good copy is based around a story. And you’ll see many people take this advice to heart.
“I had some yogurt this morning,” they will start. “Yogurt is my favorite breakfast food and this morning was no different. The end.”
(I’m exaggerating, but I think you get the idea.)
Yes, that’s a story, but it’s not very good. And it doesn’t really have a place in sales copy. Because sales copy requires stories that are dramatic, or that evoke strong emotions – fear, surprise, or even disgust.
So keep that in mind in case you’re writing some copy of your own. And in case you want help writing dramatic stories, you can find more of my disgusting advice here: