January 27, 2006
Telling stories for fun and profit
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If
we accept that story telling has been the main way of communicating with each other since when Adam and Eve first decided to fill up their time making babies and that our brains are hard-wired to create and receive stories — and I think we should — then we should ask what the main elements that all good stories have are. We need to know this because if our business ’stories’ don’t have these elements our message may not get across to the reader.
Business, and indeed life, is all about conflict — the conflict between different forces (profit, competition, buyer inertia, buyer preferences) and how these conflicts are resolved, ideally to mutual satisfaction.
For example, we may want a prospective customer to buy our product or service, but the customer has a history of buying from one of our competitors. So to meet our need of selling something to them we must meet their needs.
We must not only meet their needs as currently met by our competitors, but we must create a conflict within that customer that informs and educates them as to how we can meet their needs better than our competitors, then drive them to take action and actually purchase from us. And then not just once, but change their purchasing habits away from our competitors and toward us.
And naturally our competitors are going to create conflict in our new customer to get them to switch back.
So conflict and its resolution is a key component of writing — whether for business or for pleasure.
As James Frey* says, the three greatest rules of writing are:
1. Conflict
2. Conflict
3. Conflict.
It’s only by creating a conflict strong enough to make someone pay attention that we can then introduce a resolution that meets both their needs and ours.
We also need characters, people that are either causing the conflict or are being affected by it.
We need a plot — how the conflict came to be, what is happening or not happening while in this state of conflict, what further conflicts are looming up ahead if we don’t resolve this current conflict now.
And we need a resolution — a number of different scenarios or options that lead to various outcomes, and one option that meets all of the needs of the characters.
Remember, this is business writing not novel writing. So whilst we can use the structure of great novel writing to create powerful business writing, in business we are always striving for a solution that resolves the conflict to everyone’s satisfaction.
Because we want everyone to want to do business with each other again. The cost of doing business with someone who already does business with you is far less than the cost of turning someone into a customer.
The same goes for your management — it is far easier for you if you keep your managers and internal customers on your side than if you have to repeatedly convince them how worthwhile it is for them to listen to you and your views.
In business we don’t have the luxury of 400 pages to tell our story. So our business communication must always be
- concise
- clear
- easy to understand
- memorable, and have a
- ‘call to action’ that is specific and measurable.
Plus, and this is my own personal preference, we should always communicate with passion.
Frey, J.N. ‘How To Write A Damn Good Novel’. New York: St Martins Press. 1987.
No, I don’t know if it is the same James Frey
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