Repost This on Your Site!I recently gave a Skype interview on how to use stories to make sales.
I’m sure you guys know, I’ve talked about this a few times in my weekly e-letter (see the sign up box on this page).
We even had a full chapter on it, in the book “Great Leads,” which I wrote with copy mentoring great, Michael Masterson.
(I swear to you — it’s *finally* going up on Amazon.com, sometime this week. I’ll get you a link as soon as there’s one available.)
I had a great time doing the interview. Enough that I kept thinking of things I wanted to add, long after finishing the call.
I’d just come across a few great tips, for instance, from a semi-surprising source (though not so surprising when you think about it): Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the cartoon South Park.
Parker and Stone popped in on a freshman writing class at NYU –where yours truly also studied some screenwriting — to talk for a few minutes about how they keep their story ideas compelling.
One secret they offer is… get yourself a deadline. A hard, serious one that drives you. Stone and Parker write an episode per week. “We’ve got a scary deadline every Thursday morning.”
Another tip I’m sure you’ve heard before, which is to put your ideas out there quickly. Don’t wait until they’re fully baked. And when they get out there, make sure you’ve got a roomful of critics who understand they need shaping, rather than critics who will just shoot the idea down.
First ideas are rarely amazing.
And here’s the tip I like best. When you’re writing out a story to sell, to tell, or whatever… look for what writers call the “story beats.”
These are the spots where you plot twists and turns, the angles on which you frame an outline.
Once you have those beats, read through and see if you can put the phrase “and then” between each beat.
If you can… that’s a problem. Every “and then” is a moment where you could lose your reader (or viewer) to some distraction.
Better is writing that turns on the phrases “therefore” or “but.” That is, every moment in the story either forces the next one, creating continuity or flips away from the last “beat” in a way that creates tension.
In selling, the stories you’re telling are usually short, just long enough to illustrate an idea or sneak in a proof or promise.
But this is a good way to think about your copy throughout, too. That is, is your sales letter just one long string of disconnected sales points? Or does it follow a flow that your reader can’t swim against?
And just when they think they know where you’re headed, are you waking them back up with a rhetorical explosion or “twist” of their expectations?
Something worth thinking about.
