Stories

A watermelon-headed politician walks into a flat-earther’s house…

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I’d like to tell you a story but first I have to give you a bit of background. Our story has two characters:

First, there’s Pericles, a famous statesman in ancient Athens.

Pericles led the Athenians at the start of their war against the Spartans. He was also well-known for having a watermelon-sized head. That’s why statues most often show him wearing a helmet.

Second, we have Anaxagoras, a philosopher who came from Asia and settled in Athens.

Anaxagoras brought with him the spirit of scientific inquiry, which wasn’t common in Athens before. He also happened to be a flat-earther.

Now, on to the story:

When Pericles the Athenian was a young man, he studied philosophy with Anaxagoras.

Later, Pericles became a powerful man. When he needed to make important political decisions, he still consulted his wise old teacher.

But as Pericles sailed the seas, leading the Greeks in battle, Anaxagoras grew older and poorer. There aren’t many drachmas to be made in explaining rainbows or what the moon is made of.

In time, Anaxagoras became so poor he could no longer afford even a bit of cheese and wine. So one day, he did the only philosophical thing:

He covered his head with a robe, and determined to starve himself to death.

When Pericles heard about this, he rushed to Anaxagoras’s house.

He started begging his old teacher to live. He lamented his own hopeless future if he should lose so valuable an advisor.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

Then Anaxagoras yanked the robe off his head, looked at Pericles, and said, “Pericles, those who want to use a lamp supply it with oil.”

So that’s the story.

I don’t know about you, but when I first read it, it made me laugh.

And because I like to kill a good joke, I asked myself why I found this story funny.

Was it the idea of an old man starving himself to death?

Not really funny.

Was it the lamp analogy at the end?

Not so funny either.

I realized it was the robe.

​​Anaxagoras put it on his head and then pulled it off. It made him seem like a petulant child. It was such a contrast to the image of a sage and self-possessed philosopher.

So there you go:

Seemingly irrelevant details give all the color to a story. They can create suspense. Enjoyment. Or, of course, humor.

But perhaps I didn’t kill enough jokes for you today.

If so, then subscribe to my email newsletter, so I can kill another joke for you tomorrow.

And then, then take a listen to the 2 minute and 45 second clip below. It’s a recording of a young Woody Allen, delivering a standup routine in the 1960s.

Then listen to it again. And notice all the detail — seemingly irrelevant, but really, just what makes the skit funny. it might be something you can use in your own writing.

​​Here’s the video:

Knock twice before you open this email

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Welcome. First, let me share the traditional greeting:

“Email is great! Yes it is.”

And now, you and I can get started with today’s content:

A few weeks ago, I was rea​ding a New Yorker article. In that article, I came across an interesting idea that’s stuck with me since. ​​I’ll share it with you in today’s email and then we can wrap up this part of our lives and move on to other things.

The article I read was about how good technology is getting at reading our minds, in a very literal sense.

You can now scan people’s brains and have a good idea of how their brains are lighting up in real time.

Combine this with a lot of data of other people’s brains and a lot of fancy software… and we are nearly at a point where somebody can know exactly what you’re thinking… even if you’re just sitting there, eyes closed, doing nothing but smirking.

Anyways, the idea that stuck with me had to do with “event boundaries.” From the article:

He had the class watch a clip from “Seinfeld” in which George, Susan (an N.B.C. executive he is courting), and Kramer are hanging out with Jerry in his apartment. The phone rings, and Jerry answers: it’s a telemarketer. Jerry hangs up, to cheers from the studio audience.

“Where was the event boundary in the clip?” Norman asked. The students yelled out in chorus, “When the phone rang!” Psychologists have long known that our minds divide experiences into segments; in this case, it was the phone call that caused the division.

In other words, neuroscientists now know something that writers have known for millennia:

Our brain loves to create scenes, snapshots, and scripts as a way of making sense of the immense complexity of the world.

This is so obvious that it might not sound like much of a breakthrough. But it has some interesting consequences. Again from the article:

Walking into a room, you might forget why you came in; this happens, researchers say, because passing through the doorway brings one mental scene to a close and opens another.

But perhaps more interesting is the basic influence idea of exaggerating what people already want and respond to.

​​For example, is it any wonder so many religions have strict rules for entering and leaving a place of worship?

When entering the church, dip your fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross… do not enter or leave the sanctuary while the ark is open… leave the mosque using your left foot while reciting the dua.

And the point of this sermon is:

People want scenes… clearly marked beginnings and endings… so give it to em. Create doors, entrance rituals, dramatic event boundaries.

You will be helping your audience make sense of both you and of their world. They will thank you for it, with their attention, trust, and perhaps even money.

And that all I wanted to say. Except of course the traditional farewell:

“This email is finished! You can sign up here to get more. Yes you can.”

Fake stories in copy

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A man sat down at a classy restaurant. It looked great.

There was a plant next to his table. A big ficus.

“I’ve got one of these at home,” the man said. He passed his fingers over the leaves and—

He realized they were plastic.

The plant looked real, but it was fake. In fact, on closer examination, the man realized the plant looked fake also. There were things that gave it away.

Suddenly, the man found himself questioning the whole restaurant, even before he had a chance to order.

Speaking of ordering, I got a couple questions recently. They were on the topic of, “What do you think of using fake stories in your copy?”

One question had to do with the claim that fake stories are illegal to use.

I don’t know about that. I’m not a lawyer. But I doubt it’s illegal. At most, I think you might have to add some kind of disclaimer, like they do at the bottom of TV commercials. “These are paid fitness models, and they have never used the Ab Rocket and would in fact never use the Ab Rocket.”

So I don’t have a problem with fake stories from a legal standpoint. But I have a problem with them just because they sound fake and made up. Because people will spot a fake story, just like they will spot a fake plant. And then they will doubt everything that follows.

“But what about parables and fairy tales?” That was the second question I got on this topic.

That’s something completely different, I think. Parables are powerful. Pop culture illustrations are great also, even if they come from a comic book or superhero movie. Fairy tales work too, whether you made them up or somebody else did.

The key is the subtext.

A fake plant in a restaurant signals tackiness and makes you doubt the quality of the food.

A fake plant as part of theatrical scenery, during an engrossing play that leaves you with some sort of lingering moral… that’s a welcome aid to imagination, understanding, and maybe, to being persuaded.

Now if you feel persuaded by this fairy tale:

You might like to read some other stuff I write. In that case, you can sign up for my email newsletter.

Conflict produced this legendary ad — do you know it?

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“We’ve spent a fortune,” screamed the red-faced exec, “but this damn thing still won’t sell! What the hell am I paying you people for?

The gray suits around the table hung their heads.

The time was 1911.

The executives at Colliers Publishing had heard an incredible idea. It came from Harvard University President Charles Eliot.

Eliot said any man could get a world-class education in 15 minutes a day, just by reading a few books. All the books could fit onto a 5-foot shelf.

So the Collier’s people asked Eliot which books exactly… and Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf was born.

Collier’s ran ads in their own magazine to get leads for the Five Foot Shelf. The ads talked about the joy and satisfaction of owning and reading great books. They featured the Harvard coat of arms.

​​And yet the damn thing wouldn’t sell. It looked hopeless. But it turned around, by accident.

Advertising man Bruce Barton had to fill some empty advertising space. So he flipped open one of Dr. Eliot’s great books and landed on a picture of Marie Antoinette in a rickety peasant cart. He ripped the picture out. And he scribbled the headline above it:

“This is Marie Antoinette riding to her death. Have you ever read her tragic story?”

According to Barton, Marie Antoinette outpulled the old “joy and satisfaction” ads 8-to-1. She kept running successfully for years, and helped sell hundreds of thousands of copies of the Five Foot Bookshelf.

This shows the power of a dramatic snapshot. This is a great way to start your sales letters, advertorials, and even emails.

Of course, that’s not the only good thing Barton’s ad has going for it.

The whole thing is full of copywriting and marketing tricks which worked in 1921… and continue to work in 2021. It might be worth taking a look and seeing how many you can spot.

And if you’d like to do that, I’ve tracked down a copy of Bruce Barton’s original Marie Antoinette ad for you. You can find it below. And if you’d like more occasional trips down 1911 marketing lane, you can sign up for my email newsletter here.

Parents and frenemies in stories of fear and shame

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When I was 23, I had this accident. It was quite serious.

I was gripping a dull butter knife. In a moment of anger, I decided to stab the knife into the wall.

Stupid.

Because the wall was fine. The knife was fine. But I was not.

There was a lot of blood. I wound up in the ER. And my right ring and pinky fingers would no longer obey when I told my hand to close.

A few weeks later, I had to get surgery to fix those two fingers, if they could be fixed.

And I remember when I got back from the hospital.

I was living in something like a crack house, with four other college guys, including one who was actually dealing drugs.

So I locked myself in my room, which was empty of furniture except for the mattress on the floor.

I was still groggy and confused from the general anesthesia.

I had this giant plastic-and-wire contraption on my right arm to keep my fingers and hand in place.

And panic came over me. I was alone out here, I realized. My closest family was thousands of miles away. I felt vulnerable and in pain, a step away from death.

My point in telling you this personal anecdote:

Human beings have twin drives. To preserve face… and to preserve body.

Preserving face is about avoiding shame and humiliation.

Preserving body is about getting free from pain and fear, like in my story above.

Now I’ve recently been looking at stories I’ve written in sales copy. And I noticed something in each type of situation:

It makes the story more powerful to either bring in an audience (face threatened) or to make the hero isolated (body threatened).

When I think back on my post-surgery panic, the biggest thing that sticks out is the loneliness and isolation of it.

Because we have a weird relation to other people.

Sometimes others are good. Sometimes they are bad.

I felt especially vulnerable because I was alone curled up in my empty crack house bedroom after a three-hour surgery. It would have been great to have somebody there.

​​But had I been in a situation where I had done something shameful… the last thing I would want is an audience to witness it.

So that’s my takeaway for you for today.

If you’re telling stories, you can can selectively bring in an audience… or take out a community. Do it right, so it matches your primary emotion, and you will get people more motivated than they would be otherwise.

But community or the lack of it can also influence the attractiveness of your offer. That’s something very intriguing I learned only recently… which I will talk about in my newsletter email tomorrow.

In case you want to read that when I send it out, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Hitchcock sales structure

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The exciting climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest goes like this:

Eva Marie Saint is about to fall off a cliff.

Cary Grant is reaching down to try to keep her from falling.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Yes you can,” he says.

And then one of the evil guy’s henchmen comes and starts to crush Cary’s fingers underfoot. But Cary needs those fingers to hold on to the cliff, and to keep himself and Eva from death below.

Like I said, that’s the climax.

But don’t worry.

It all turns out fine. The police arrive and shoot the evil henchman, who falls off the cliff. The main bad guy is caught. The secret microfilm is safe. And some time later, Cary and Eva, who made it off the cliff and got married in the meantime, head back east by train to start a new life together. The end.

Pretty usual Hollywood, right?

Right. The only unusual thing is the speed:

That entire anti-climactic sequence, from the moment Cary gets his fingers crushed to the train ride home, takes a total of 43 seconds.

​​43 seconds!

For reference, North By Northwest is a movie that lasts 2 hours and 16 minutes.

Of the total, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 17 seconds goes to building up tension and misery.

The last 43 seconds goes to relieving it.

And yet people watch. And more relevant for us, they buy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve previously had the task of selling many generic, unremarkable, sometimes suspect physical products. To boot, these products often sold at 3-4 times the price you could find on Amazon.

How can you possibly sell millions of dollars of a commodity at three times the price that anybody can get, just by shopping as they always do?

In my case, the answer was stories. Full of tension and misery. That’s how the bulk of the sales message went.

And when you thought things were bad, an evil henchman came to make it all worse.

The relief of all that tension, in the form of talking about the product, was really an afterthought. Not quite at Hitchcock levels, but still.

So that’s my takeaway for you.

Don’t sell overpriced crap.

​​But even if you sell something great, it probably makes sense to talk less about it than you want to. Instead, focus more of your prospect’s time and attention on that “I can’t/Yes you can” drama.

And in case you want more storytelling and selling ideas:

You might like my email newsletter.

Chance encounters with Blackie

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And somewhere in the darkness
The gambler he broke even
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keep
— Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

This morning, I started writing my bread-and-butter piece of copy. It’s an advertorial of a person on a quest.

In this case, the quest is a mom looking for a way to cope with her 8-year-old’s ADHD without drugs. I’ve also used the same quest structure to sell tens of thousands of shoe insoles, silicone kitchen sponges, even fake diamonds.

The quest has 3 acts.

Act 1 is the hero coming face-to-face with the horror of the problem… and then getting sucked deeper and deeper into promised solutions that don’t work or even make things worse. Despair sets in.

Act 2 starts with a chance encounter. And that’s what I want to tell you about today.

In my advertorials, this chance encounter is usually a friend or acquaintance the hero hasn’t met in a long while. The friend casually mentions the key missing ingredient for the hero’s quest.

At first, the hero is skeptical. But the friend isn’t pushy, plus there’s a good reason why the solution could work. So the hero goes home to do more research and— EUREKA!!

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something like it is present in more than 99% of all make money, rags-to-riches, “I was living in a trailer but look at me now” sales letters. The hero in those stories wouldn’t be the success he is today were it not for the trick he learned from a Yoda-like guru who lives on top of a mountain or in a gated retirement community in Florida.

In fact, according to Dan Kennedy, this same trope goes back to at least the middle of the last century. It’s called a “Blackie story.”

Old Blackie was this horse track regular until the day he died. He had a secret for bettin’ on the ponies… and then on his death bed, he revealed the secret to the writer of the sales letter.

What do you think? Corny? Overplayed? Transparent?

Think what you like. The fact is these Blackie stories work.

Because chance encounters in stories are like spike proteins on the surface of corona virus. They jam themselves into your soft defenses so the payload can worm its way in.

And if Blackie dies to boot, like The Gambler in the Kenny Rogers song, it’s even more powerful. Because the secret is now lost… unless you buy the product on sale.

This all reminds me of a run-in I once had with an old door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He showed me a neat little trick to get your foot in the door, every time, without fail. It works brilliantly online too.

Unfortunately the poor bastard died just a few weeks later. Rest in peace, Jerome.

If you’re curious to learn Jerome’s “foot in the door” copywriting trick… it’s one of the things I share inside my email newsletter. It’s free to subscribe. You might find it entertaining, and you can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it. Here’s where to sign up.

Free bonus: Storytelling for sales

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Here’s a shameful confession:

My only ambition in life was to be a novelist, but I’m largely cured. An article by Robin Hanson, titled Why We Fight Over Fiction, does a good job explaining why:

We tell stories with language, and so prefer to tell the kind of stories that ordinary language can describe well.

[…]

Stories that take place in modern settings tend to focus on personal, romantic, and family relations, as these remain to us relatively familiar moral universes. Or on artist biopics. Or on big conflicts like war or corrupt police or politicians. For which we have comfortable moral framings.

In other words, we almost always tell the same stories, reinforcing the same mores we’ve been reinforcing for a long-ass time, dealing with the same types of characters we are already all-too familiar with.

This might be bad news if you had hopes of being a novel novelist… but great news if you want to influence and persuade people. Because even though we’ve heard the same stories over and over, we keep craving more. Storytelling remains a powerful way to persuade and get attention. And yet it’s as formulaic as making a soft-boiled egg.

Which brings me to the bullets course I am launching next Monday. Bullets happen to be great for mastering most of what copywriting is about. But one big piece is missing, and that’s telling a story.

So to fix that, I’m including a free bonus along with the course. It will be a special presentation, delivered by me, on how to tell a story in copy or your other sales messages. And for the record, this is something I know pretty well.

Over the past several years, I’ve written dozens of front-end advertorials — basically mini sales letters — all following the same “horror story” structure.

By my estimate, these advertorials have made several million dollars worth of sales from cold traffic, mostly Facebook and now YouTube. I think a big reason for this success is the stories right at the top of each of these advertorial — they grab prospects and keep them reading, all the way to the point where they are wondering, “What the hell did I just buy?”

So in this bonus presentation, delivered over Zoom so you can ask me questions, I will tell you how I come up with these effective stories… how I organize them and present them… and how you can do the same.

Again, this is a free bonus that you get if you sign up for my bullets course by Sunday. If you’re interested in signing up for the course, or just to learn more about it, then the first step is simple and risk-free. It’s to sign up for my email newsletter. You can do so here.

My whole life has been leading to this

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1. Age 7, second grade. I’m standing in front of the class and reading a little story I’d written. It’s about a yellow raincoat I had and a googly-eyed giraffe sticker on it which I tried to rip it off and give to Ivona, the girl I was in love with back in kindergarten.

Some 7-year-old monster in my class gets restless and starts to talk. The teacher shushes him angrily. “Listen!” she says. “It’s such a wonderful story.”

2. Age 17, English class in 12th grade. We break into groups of four and read each other’s college application essays. Everybody else’s essay is a dutiful list of lessons learned and life goals to be achieved. My essay is about my first time waiting at the DMV. I know when people are reading it, because they first snicker and then start to laugh.

3. Age 23, senior year of college. I’ve taken an advanced math class, thinking I might go to graduate school for the same. Well, we’ll see about that.

“Roses are red,” the intimidatingly smart professor says. I nod. I believe I understand what he’s saying.

“If roses are red,” he goes on and faces me, “then violets are…?”

My mind is blank. I can’t follow his simple reasoning. I squirm in my seat. But he wants an answer.

“If roses are red,” I start, “then violets must be… a type of common flowering plant?”

Not the right answer, it turns out. Graduate school for math? No.

Instead, pretty much my whole life has been leading me to this point right here, where I write copy for a living and I write these daily emails for fun.

Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. In fact, it’s very much an exaggeration. But you might believe it, based on the little snippets I just shared with you.

And that’s my point. Because snippets are often all you need.

Yesterday, I gave you a Dan Kennedy story titled, “My chief asset was a cat who licked stamps.”

Part of that story was exaggeration and absurdity and humor. But there was something else. Because Dan’s story wasn’t really a story. It didn’t have a tail and horns and everything in between.

Instead, it was really a snapshot, a scene, an episode.

That’s often all you need. And in today’s world, where everybody and his cat is forcing their life to fit a “hero on a quest” story mold, you might even stand out as somebody more honest. A few snapshots from your life to add color. An episode to make a point — without making yourself out to be Luke Skywalker.

And by the way, if you want a real-life example of selling yourself for millions of dollars using this episode-based approach, track down Dan’s Magnetic Marketing stump speech. It’s available online, and it’s a great sales presentation. Plus, it’s as funny as a Bill Burr comedy special — pretty amazing, considering Dan gave these speeches almost 30 years ago.

And for more intimate snapshots from my private life, you might like to sign up to my email newsletter.

“My chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps”

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A few days ago, a reader of this newsletter wrote in with a problem.

He’s an expert in his field. But he feels sick telling his mess-to-success, rags-to-riches origin story. He hates hyping it up and repeating it over and over, even though it’s all true.

I can understand. So here’s an alternative. Take a look at the following background story from Dan Kennedy:

I often tell the story, when I went through a divorce and went broke I started over in info-marketing and my chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps.

My wife abandoned the cat and left the cat behind. We quickly came to an agreement that, if it was going to get fed, it had to do something other than hiss, and snarl, and scratch, and bite, which were unattractive attributes of this little monster.

We arrived at a working relationship where it sat on the coffee table, I sat facing the TV at night stuffing my envelopes and getting my mail ready. It sat facing me, and I took the strip of stamps and held it out and the cat licked them and then I did all my stamps.

I kept a little bowl of water there so the cat could, you know… I’m sure all that glue … but they’ve got nine lives! All the glue probably didn’t kill it, its personality probably did.

That’s the end of Dan’s story. In the presentation he gave, he moves on and talks marketing.

So what’s my point in bringing up this story?

You might think it’s humor. And yes, humor is a big part of the story above. If you can be funny like Dan, you are that much ahead of the rest of us.

But there’s something else to Dan’s story. Because it’s certainly not rags-to-riches, is it?

No, something else is going on. I’ll spell it out in my email tomorrow (click here if you wanna get it), and I’ll tell you how it’s relevant for your sales copy… or for your in-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes origin story. Whether you are funny or not.