Imagine a fanciful scene, say:
A rough-looking man is walking down the street. He passes a rough-looking woman, who doesn’t mind that people can see her talking to herself (no headphones).
The woman bumps into the man but keeps walking without even a nod of apology.
“Watch where ya going, yea?” the man says.
“Tongue ma fart-box,” she replies with a smile and a little curtsy.
In one leap, the man catches up to the woman and grabs her by the sleeve. “Ya gonna shaw me a bit of respect.” He start to twist the woman’s arm.
But instead of whining or trying to pull away, the woman slams into the man, chest to chest, and gives him a kiss. Straight on the mouth, tongue and all.
The guy is stunned. For a second, he goes with the kiss, out of pure shock.
But then he starts to squirm… and then to scream, mouth closed, with the woman still attached to his face.
Finally, he manages to push her away.
There’s blood on her lips.
The man looks panicked and confused, like he’s just tasted something unfamiliar but awful. He looks down and opens his mouth. A red and bloody pulp of flesh rolls out of his mouth and falls to the ground.
The man staggers back in horror. “Ya bip my pongue off!” he yells.
And in that moment, a seagull swoops down from the solid gray sky, and lands right between the man and the woman. In a flash, the hungry bird picks up the fleshy red pulp off the ground and flies off, while the man looks after it, and after the displaced tip of his tongue, never to be seen again.
So.
The question I have to answer now is, why? Why tell you such a pointless and gruesome story?
After all, if I were practicing for a screenwriting workshop, you might rightly tell me to try again. “It’s a little forced,” you might say. “I guess you’re trying to go for some kind of Oldboy violence and bizareness… but it just seems made up and fake. Maybe tone it down. Get some inspiration from real life.”
And there’s my point. Because the above story, bizarre and unlikely though it might seem, is from real life.
It happened on August 1, 2019, in that ancient hub of learning and culture, Edinburgh. I invented the dialogue with the help of Scottish insults dictionary. But the rest of the story is all true, as far as the Daily Mail and the Scotsman would tell me. The aggressive kiss on the street… the tongue that wouldn’t stay put… the opportunistic seagull. All true.
But if this scene happened in a movie, who would believe it?
And like I say, that’s my point. Some things can be true. But there’s a difference between being true and seeming true.
And if you have to choose between those in your sales copy, always go with the seeming true. In your promises… in your case studies… in your warnings.
Yes, you want drama. But you want the kind of drama that movies and TV shows have taught us to expect. Not the crazy shit that happens in real life.
Another gruesome thought:
I write an email newsletters. The emails arrive to your inbox each day, like hungry seagulls. That probably doesn’t sound appealing. But if for some unlikely reason, you like bizarre and occasionally violent content, here’s how to get on the newsletter.