Your Next Killer Technique for Telling Compelling Stories (It’s easier than you think)

January 2, 2010 By 22 Comments

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

What do the bloggers Naomi Dunford, Johnny B. Truant, Kelly Diels and Hugh MacLeod all have in common?

Think about that for a bit.

While you’re thinking…

Imagine raising your family off the grid. Miles past the end of the road. No electricity, save what you can generate for yourself.

No neighbors.

Heh.

The mind boggles.

You can do anything you want, whenever you want. Ride your horse over the mountain. Play Led Zeppelin until you’re deaf in both ears. Shoot guns! Any caliber! Anytime! Frolic naked in the glorious rays of the sun! (Ok maybe not, but still.)

But when the weather goes bad… or the snowmobile breaks… what then?

Sounds like a story in the making.

I’d better back up a little bit. A few weeks ago I was emailing back and forth with Marshall, who (by the way) lives off the grid. We were discussing his website, in particular how much potential he has for hitting it really big. His story has got to be fascinating. I’m sure of it. The key is in the storytelling.

So I promised Marshall I’d start writing about storytelling:

I don’t know how to help you directly with story telling, but there’s bound to be a lot of information online. In fact, I’ll look up story telling myself right after I send this [email] off to you.

Thus, a blog post is born.

Storytelling seems like hard work

Some people seem to be natural born storytellers. I am not one of these people. I have to work at it. Hard.

Working hard means I have to practice telling lots of stories, even when the stories turn out crappy.

Like the following.

A few weeks ago I posted a request for an accountability partner to give me motivation to finish 12 short screencasts on Practical WordPress Tips, or…

I pay $100
.

Deacon took me up on it, and sweetened the deal with an incentive: finish 2 days early, dinner is his treat wherever I want to eat.

How hard could it be, right? These screencasts are short, 2 – 5 minutes long.

But the screencasts have to be done in one take.

After procrastinating 10 days, I spent Tuesday – all day – recording the screencasts. All day to produce 12 stupid little videos. Easy peasy.

Yeah, right.

Everything seemed to start just fine. By mid-morning I had five of the 12 complete. By late afternoon, things weren’t looking quite so good. Think of any mistake possible, I made it:

  • Leaving the microphone off. Check.
  • Forgetting to plugin the microphone in. Check.
  • Forgetting to turn the power on the mixer. Check.
  • Coughing, check. Scraping chair, check.
  • Forgetting what I wanted to say, check.
  • Getting frustrated: check check check!

Even worse, I recorded in the wrong video format and had to spend a bunch of time finding software to convert the videos from swf to mp4.

And worst of all, the end result, the very best I know how to do… is crappy. Bummer.

But…

crappy is better than nothing.

Since I finished the videos early Deacon bought me dinner at Macaroni Grill. And ripped up my $100 check:

That felt pretty good.

Even better, a few days later I had to record a 2 minute screencast several times to get it right. I slurred my words, forgot what I want to say, had the microphone off, you name it, it was just like that Tuesday from hell. But nothing I hadn’t already dealt with.

This screencast turned out better than the first 12. I whipped it out really fast in spite of the mistakes. Progress in inches is still progress.

You can learn storytelling

As I promised Marshall, I did look up storytelling. Even bought a book: “How to Tell a Story – The secret of writing captivating tales.”

Turns out it’s not that hard. Stories have a standard structure. Learning – and using – story structure will improve your storytelling. As you can see above, I’m teaching myself.


In previous articles, I’ve taught you about titles, and about subtitles and teasers. Next up, let’s steal borrow an absolutely killer technique from screenwriting and playwriting: the inciting incident.

The inciting incident allows your reader to emotionally connect with your motivation for writing, drawing them further into your writing and setting the scene for your story.

In short, the inciting incident messes with their heads and sucks them in.

From Richard Toscan,

Inciting Incidents can be the vaguest hints of concern. Or the most obvious sledgehammer. Either kind works. You just need to have one.

(What’s my inciting incident for this blog post? Does it work well, or could it be better? In your opinion, do I use a vague hint or a sledgehammer? What about for my screencast story, hint or sledgehammer?)

Write better stories now!

If you suck at storytelling and want to improve, you’re probably going to tell a lot of crappy stories too. Might as well get started. As my Great Aunt Vina Williams used to say “Time’s a wastin’.”

Here’s a Website In A Weekend challenge: write a simple story (300-500 words is fine) about something as mundane as screencasting, taking special care with the title, the teaser and your inciting incident. Make it easy: use your next blog post; you’re writing it anyway.

After you publish your story, send me an email or leave a comment (you’re probably in my RSS feed anyway), and I’ll link your story right here anchoring with your title. I’ll support the link with your teaser or inciting incident, whichever seems best.

Here’s our #3 storytellers

  1. Justin Matthews gets the first slot with Cloris Leachman and Christmas Lights in the Nose…, a shaggy dog story nicely tied up at the end. Here’s the inciting incident:

    I had a dream last night. Cloris Leachman was the sexy starlet in an unfolding drama that had someone very generic as the leading man. I was off to the side. Good thing too, I could turn my back on the love scene that was just starting.

  2. Anne On Line gives us “I Always Admired Mr. Franklin, But Now I Truly Respect Him.” Check this out:

    Teddy had his stick.

    Martin had a dream.

    And Ben, well, Ben had gas.

    Why is it I am only now learning about this?

    Good question Anne. I thought everyone knew this. *snicker*

  3. Marshall from Real Off Grid Living (mentioned above) weighs in with another driveway story: Backwards Skiing with 1500 Pounds and Wheels. At the end of 3.8 miles of dirt road, Marshall is inventing a whole new genre, driveway stories. Here’s how he kicks off his latest:

    “Ok. Jackie, kids, I think its time to wait outside the rig, I don’t think it or the snow is too stable!”, I heard myself saying New Year’s afternoon. I keep swearing to myself that this won’t happen again. Another year and another incident on the “washboard” with snow. At least this year it wasn’t dark, but unfortunately I wasn’t alone, so my family got to witness the sometimes frightening madness.

    You gotta check out the picture that goes with this, classic stuff. Takes me back to northern Indiana, ca. 1978. *shudder*

By the way, not that it matters (*cough*), but Website In A Weekend just picked up Page Rank 3. Proceed accordingly.

Once you learn to tell the stories you already have, you will acquire a very large audience. I’m sure of it.

If you forgot, Johnny, Naomi, Kelly and Hugh are excellent story tellers. Each of them transform the mundane into magnificence. If you aren’t reading them, you should. I’m learning loads from reading their writing.

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Key Difference Between Internet and Print Headlines

June 15, 2009 By 1 Comment

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Writing a good headline is simple, but not easy. In print literature, luring readers into the article is the overriding priority. But on the internet, luring readers isn’t the only thing. On the internet, your headline needs to attract the reader’s attention, AND attract search engine attention.

Attract reader’s attention

Attracting your reader’s attention is ground well-plowed by at least 80 years of marketing literature. Headlines must provide a reason why for people to continue reading.

This “reason why” could be some emotionally compelling claim, a promise to benefit the reader, words to induce curiosity, etc. John Caples in “Tested Advertising Methods” covers headline writing in the first several chapters. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

The serious student of the title will go further and get a copy of First Hundred Million by E Haldeman-Julius. This book was first published in 1929 and contains 10 years of publishing experience on the Little Blue Books. Little Blue Books were 3×5 inch volumes, sold only by mail, and only in lots of 20 at 5 cents each. Customers ordered by placing check marks next to titles on large, broadsheet inserts or pages in their local newspapers. The only difference to the customer… was the book title.

Little Blue Books lived and died by their titles alone.

That’s all well and good… but that was also before the days of search engines…

Attract Search engine attention

Titles have two roles in search engine results. The first is purely mechanical: does a properly specified title for a web page even exist? WordPress takes care of this issue automatically, we won’t discuss it further.

Given a title exists, the title heavily weighted in search engine results. You can demonstrate this to yourself by doing a search on the renown headline “How a Fool Stunt Made Me a Star Salesman.”

See how much bogus information is returned?

Disgusting, isn’t it.

A few days ago, while researching this whole series of articles on titles, my search turned up, as the top result on Google, a web page with just the title “How a Fool Stunt Made Me a Star Salesman.” Ads were packed in everywhere else. Total waste of bandwidth for everyone except the site owner, who is [was] very successfully gaming Google’s search algorithm. (I just checked: this result disappeared for me! Go Google!)

Since search engines can do at least matching between title and content based on keywords (and possibly semantic meaning), titles completely incongruent with articles are going to eventually get punished… even if the title is valid for attracting reader attention!

So you have to make a choice when you’re writing titles: do you please your reader, or do you write for high SERPs?

If possible, do both.

Satisfying readers… and search engines

Writing compelling titles or headlines for internet readership differs from print writing in one key aspect: your headline should reflect the content of the article to encourage better search results. In contrast, print media headlines really only need to attract the readers attention. As long as the reader is entertained, or benefits in some other way, having a headline that doesn’t mirror keywords in the content isn’t that important.

When you’re crafting titles, keep the following points in mind:

  1. Search results are partly calculated according to the content of the article, and the title is a heavily weighted part of the content. For short term results, titles probably ought to contain one or more keywords.
  2. From my experience, for high quality content sitting way out on the long tail (years in Google’s index), titles are much less important for SERPs. 1,2,3 word titles may rank very high with longevity.
  3. Another part of the calculation is backlinking, which is an effect of having high readership. If your blog is widely read, you will get links pointing to your articles. If your article titles are just link bait and don’t reflect the content on the page, you’re going to piss off readers.
  4. Use all the techniques from masters such as Caples and Julius-Haldeman to craft compelling titles inducing readers to “Click to continue,” and worry about the SEO content later. If you do what the “old masters” recommend… finding a title satisfying both readers and search engines will be easy.

You do know what the old masters recommend about crafting titles… right?

Tell me and get 30 minutes free WordPress or blog post writing consultation.

(Offer expires October 7, 2009) If you don’t know what they recommend, both authors hammer it repeatedly in the books given above. You can probably get both for $10 + shipping. Take action now. Get the books. You know it’s the right thing to do. Speedy implementation of good ideas is a characteristic of all successful entrepreneurs.

In truth, the readership-driven and the SEO-driven aspects of title creation are related, but my personal preference is to serve the reader over serving the search engine. In my experience with blog posts years old on There Is No Box, I get search results for really bad blog post titles (3, 2 or even 1 word titles!)… and people click through on them anyway.

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: , ,
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