The late, great Patrice O’Neal — the man was literally great, weighing in at over 300 pounds — had a standup comedy routine about how women tell terrible stories.
“I always make my girlfriend tell me the end of any story she’s getting ready to tell me first, before I invest in the whole,” Patrice said. Then he gave an example:
“‘What’s the end of the story?'”
“‘Somebody got shot!'”
The big man grimaces and weighs his options hard for a moment.
“‘… ughhh… all right. Go ahead. Try to tell the story.'”
I thought of this last night as replies poured in to my email yesterday.
That email started with the story of a friend who wants to introduce more stories into her corporate presentations. The email ended by asking my readers to write in with their questions about storytelling.
So far, less than 12 hours later, I’ve gotten more than 40 replies to that email. And here’s what got me:
Except for one of those replies, which came from the friend I referenced in yesterday’s email, who also happens to read this newsletter and also happens to be a woman, all 40+ replies came from men.
I thought this was very curious.
For the record, my almost nonexistent bro-aura means I do not repel female readers in general. And typically, whenever I ask for feedback or solicit replies in an email, I get a healthy mix of both men and women replying.
And yet, yesterday, no women replied, except for my friend, who might have replied only because the email talked about her.
Clearly, all this is evidence that Patrice O’Neal was wrong, that women in fact tell amazing stories, and that they do not need any help with telling stories better.
But what about all those luckless men?
Many of them did ask really “male” questions, basically variations of:
“I want to know the algorithm that produces stories that are guaranteed to force every reader to read even if they don’t want to read and even if they don’t know me or want to know me, and also the algorithm should never fail and it should always specify exactly which word to insert in the next slot in the word-chain, given the totality of input that preceded it.”
I’ll tell you right now, I do not have that algorithm. And if I did, I wouldn’t share.
Fortunately, other men wrote in with more reasonable questions like:
– Where do I find stories to tell, or how do I come up with them?
– How do I know if my stories will be interesting to readers?
– How do I tie a random story into the thing I’m selling?
– Which types of stories to avoid?
All reasonable questions. But I won’t talk about them in any detail in the presentation I am preparing.
The reason why I won’t talk about them is that I’ve already created an entire course that addresses all of those questions in detail, and then some.
This course is clearly not meant for women, since they apparently don’t need it. But if you’re a man, looking for a rational, systematic, solution-oriented method to write sales emails, including ones with stories, then go here: