The inestimable value of spinning a damn good yarn!
“I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
Woody Allen
The funniest joke of the year. It’s official…
The winner of the Dave Award for the Funniest Joke of the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been revealed. Here it is: “Hedgehogs. Why can’t they just share the hedge?”
The joke, which belongs to comic Dan Antopolski, was selected from more than 3,600 minutes of material by a panel of nine comedy critics.
Is it just me, or am I not alone in thinking that exercises such as these are a monumental waste of time? Surely humour, like so many other creative processes, is purely a matter of taste. Frankly, I don’t find this joke especially funny. Yet clearly the judging panel reached a consensus based on some kind of mutually applied criteria – if only subconsciously.
As with all jokes, of course, the real impact is in the delivery. We’ve all struggled on occasions to retell a joke that has made us laugh, only for it to fall flat on its face due to bad timing or a poorly delivered punch line. The same pitfall applies to writing. How is that it one author will possess the ability to take a potentially boring topic and bring it to life while another fails?
As writing skills go, this talent has to be among the most essential. Because you can construct the best crafted argument in the world, but if it doesn’t get read, then you may as well be banging your head against a wall. It all comes down to having a hook to draw the reader into your argument and keep them reading until they drop off the end. And the best hook of all is to tell a damn good story.
An example:
I’ve just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book, Outliers – the Story of Success.
The book’s premise, in a nutshell, is that early advantages plus talent plus lots of practice plus a good social heritage plus a large opportunity help people succeed. And that’s it. This is essentially a book of academic research; a painstaking inquiry into the social and psychological factors which determine success, backed up with a heavy dose of statistics and a bibliography of secondary sources which goes on for some ten pages.
Has the prospect of reading Outliers set you on fire yet? Probably not. Hardly sounds like holiday reading. And yet Outliers is an international #1 bestseller. Pick up a copy and I challenge you to put it down. Why? Because Malcolm Gladwell is a master story teller.
Every chapter of this remarkable book begins with an utterly compelling ‘story’. The author draws the reader into his world with the same grace and skill that a fly-fisher employs to land a trout. By the time Gladwell shifts out of storytelling mode to hit you with his intellectual arguments and statistical tables, you are so committed to finding out what happens there is no question of you not reading through to the end. But had Gladwell been a lesser writer, and neglected to include a ‘story’ element in his book, there would be little to distinguish it from any other competent piece of academic research.
What has all this to do with copywriting?
Everything. Because good copywriting has everything in common with good journalism: the compelling headline, the teasing sub-head, the hook, an appeal to curiosity and the emotions, self-interest, a desire to read through to the end to see what happens - in short, the ability to tell a story.
Regular readers will know that I frequently return to this parallel between copywriting and other forms and ‘literary’ writing. I labour the point because there is a tendency among some copywriting ‘experts’ to suggest that effective copywriting is in some way ‘process driven’, and that it depends not on solid writing skills, but on learning a repertoire of tricks, short cuts and closely guarded secret formulae that, once mastered, will somehow work a curious magic upon the reader and compel her to part with her money.
This is totally misleading. Good copy – copy that sells – depends on being able to produce a structured and compelling argument that will capture a reader’s Attention and appeal to their Interest while enhancing their Desire and satisfying their doubts to a point where they take ACTION, and being able to do it convincingly and in a way that stands out from the crowd. There are no quick fixes. It’s called the AIDA principle:
ATTENTION
INTEREST
DESIRE
ACTION
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