A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos likes to tell the story of how he became a copywriter. I’ve heard him tell this story multiple times, mostly online, and once in real life as well.
I forget the details of how it all goes, but there’s one detail that I never forget.
At one point, Parris was working at a real estate office, and the office manager at the time, in a fit of fury and impotence, punched his hand through a window.
And now comes the bit I always remember, which I’ve heard Parris repeat every time I’ve heard him tell this story:
There was a thin trail of blood on the floor, from the broken window to the elevator, as the manager walked out of the office, never to return again.
And that, in a snapshot, is THE secret of storytelling.
In a few more words, from an article I read about Irving Thalberg, a movie producer who was called the “Boy Wonder” of Hollywood, and who invented and popularized many Hollywood tropes that we now take for granted as elements of effective storytelling:
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The real reason for the enduring Thalberg myth has less to do with any of this than with that perennial idea, which fascinated [F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, and who wrote a novel with a fictionalized Thalberg as protagonist] as it does us, that there are secrets of storytelling, to which a few are privy.
Yet good Hollywood films have more or less a single story. Raise the stakes, place insuperable obstacles before the protagonist, have the protagonist somehow surmount them while becoming braver and better. What works for Dorothy works for Rocky. In truth, we may follow stories, but we respond to themes; the story is just the tonality in which those themes are played. […]
No one can recall the ins and outs of Salozzo’s drug scheme in “The Godfather,” but we remember Pacino’s face in closeup: we come for the story, stay for the sublimations.
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I don’t really know what the guy behind this article is talking about when he talks about “themes” and “sublimations.”
I do know that few stories are memorable… that the structure of storytelling, hyped up as it is, is often irrelevant… and that what actually makes a story work is not the rags-to-riches, or riches-to-rags, or hero quest skeleton underneath… but a few dramatic and memorable snapshots:
The “kiss of death” that Michael Corleone gives his brother Fredo in the Godfather II; Rocky running up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the thin trail of blood from the broken window to the elevator.
So if it’s not the structure but the memorable snapshot that is the secret of storytelling… then how do you come up with memorable snapshots?
I hate to break it to you, but if that were a knowable secret, then every Hollywood movie would be a forever-beloved blockbuster. Which is clearly not the case.
The best you can do is to come up with the best snapshots you can, and then to test them out on your audience. See if the audience oohs and aahs, if they feed you back the same snapshot days and weeks and months later, and if they come back for more. Then double down on what works, and discard the rest.
And since I gotta sell you something, let me tie this into the topic of writing daily emails, because daily emails make for a particularly easy and fertile way to test out new ideas and ways of presenting those ideas to an audience.
I’ve written books and created courses that people buy and enjoy and then come back for more of. One secret of how I make such info products is that I repurpose my daily emails, or rather, the emails that worked — ideas and snapshots that I field-tested on my audience, and that I got positive feedback on.
If you want to start writing daily emails of your own, and if you want a field-tested guide for how to do that well: