I was on a train a few months ago. A woman sitting across from me was wearing a face mask, even though nobody else on the train was wearing one. Perhaps a sign of things to come?
The woman had wool-lined boots on her feet — way too hot for the warm and sunny afternoon. So as the train rumbled along the Catalan seaside, she pulled off her boots and propped her feet up on the seat opposite, to cool them off.
The other people around her, myself included, started exchanging looks — disgusted, amused, incredulous. And yet the woman kept sitting there, eyes beatifically closed, mask on her face, her sweaty feet drying in the sealed wagon air.
I talked to a budding email copywriter a few days ago. He said he wants to learn storytelling.
I feel there’s been a lot of mystification around that topic. It’s something like the guy who wrote a book all about breathing — you’re not breathing optimally, you need to read this book to find out how to breathe better.
People breathe fine. People tell stories fine. You don’t need a course or even a book on it. You just need to do it.
That said, there is something approaching a “secret” that makes for better stories, particularly in print.
At least that’s how it’s been in my experience. When I first heard this advice, I felt enlightened; I felt the doors of perception opening up. Maybe I’m just very dense because I needed to have this pointed out to me:
I used to think of a story as a timeline, a series of facts that need to be laid out and arranged in some kind of order. Then you pepper in details to make the important parts come alive.
“Once upon a time, I was born, a baby with not very much hair. The date was February 19, 1939. My family stock was originally from England but my ancestors had settled in Gotham City many generations earlier. My father, Thomas Wayne, a kind, gentle, mustachioed man, was a highly respected physician here…”
The secret is that you often don’t need any of this — the timeline, the explanatory facts, the logical order. If anything, they probably make your “story” less effective.
A much better option is to think comic book, to think movie, to think of a story as a series of snapshots. Even one snapshot can be enough — like that thing up top with the woman and her wool-lined boots on the train.
Anyways, that’s really the only big storytelling secret I have to share with you.
Maybe you don’t think it’s much. All I can say is that if you apply consistently, it produces real results.
And this brings me to my current offer, my Horror Advertorial Swipe File. Each of those advertorials starts out with a snapshot — scary, disgusting, outrage-forming.
You don’t need this swipe file to learn storytelling. But you might want this swipe file if you have a cold-traffic ecommerce funnel, and you want to squeeze more results from your cold traffic. In case you are interested, you will have to sign up to my list, because this is an offer I am only making to my subscribers. If you’d like to do that, here’s where to go.