Lend me your ears: Telling stories your readers want to hear

 – posted April 2nd, 2009 by Elizabeth McGuane     One comment

Marlon Brando as Julius Caesar (copyright MGM)

As a writer, it’s hard to break out of the moulds we cast ourselves in. I’m sure Julius Caesar would have had trouble writing web content, despite being a dab hand at rabble-rousing oratory. (He doesn’t seem like a bullet-pointin’, PowerPointin’ kind of guy).

As a former journalist, it was my job to say exactly what I meant, in sentences as short as possible. In fact, one of the first rules I learned in the newsroom was to remove nearly all instances of the word ‘that’ from my copy. Surprisingly, you can delete it nearly every time without losing any meaning. Who knew a word could be so useless? And when you’re writing to word count, every word – well, counts. It became my go-to pre-deadline exercise to tighten up a story.

But there’s a lot more to writing an engaging story than taking out unnecessary words. I’m no Michelangelo, chipping away at stone to reveal the sculpture hidden within.

In the same way, writing for the web is usually an impassive, objective exercise: shaving off a word here, a paragraph there, and putting everything in lists. So it was a change of step for me, last week, to go back to something more creative.

Writing a press release for the new iQ Prize was (sadly) the most creative work I’d done in months. Not that I don’t love painstaking editing as much as the next grammar nerd: clearly, I do. But it took a change of perspective to write the release as a complete story rather than a pared-down information pack. It got results, and I had fun doing it.

So why do we go to all the bother of crafting great web content, even when we aren’t trying to get the notoriously jaded press to pay attention? We do it so that people will read us. To get them to hear our ideas, and pay attention to our stories.

But because of the web’s freedom, it’s harder than ever to reach an audience. It’s like an infinite library of tales on endless topics. What do you do when you need to go beyond pure information, to tell a story that people will want to read?

The best stories are the simplest ones

Whether you have something to sell or you just want people to take notice, you have to reach beyond the essentials of who, what, when, where and why. But this doesn’t mean just shoveling in extra words to try to get your point across.

It means knowing what your message is, and taking away all the words that don’t serve that message.

The allure of the wall of words

For most of us, words are something we’ve learned to hide behind, rather than something we use to reveal meaning. We may not trust our own skill, or we’ve just grown used to the business jargon we hear every day.

And it’s not just big, flowery verbiage we have to guard against: even simple words can trip us up. Most marketing copy created for the web is crammed with empty qualifiers like ‘really’, ‘very’ or ‘great’. And it suffers for it. The words feel disingenuous. If someone tries to reassure us that something’s really great, we believe them less and less with every reassurance. Even here at iQ, where we believe in the sacred art of Plain English, we have to be ever-vigilant against the creep of grandiose prose and consultant-speak.

So here are my tips on great storytelling. They won’t help you churn out that 3,000-page novel, but they will help keep you on the straight and narrow, true to your message and your readers:

  • Spend most of your time on your introduction – but don’t give the ending away, or there’ll be no impetus to read on. Keep a little mystery.
  • Get to the point quickly – no later than your 2nd or 3rd paragraph.
  • Read your copy out loud to catch repeated phrases and see when you’ve veered off the point. Reading aloud will also help you hear if the finished product ’sounds like you’ or your business.
  • Word count still counts: keep it short, with a clear call to action if it’s needed.
  • Remember your brand - even if that’s just you. And edit like crazy. Stories are made by editing.

A lot of it, though, comes with practice, practice, practice. It’s easy to get into a writing rut (or a design rut, a business rut, or any other kind). Creative writing of any kind is an art - but combine it with a deadline, and countless edits, and it becomes a practice.  One that results in real improvement and renewed energy. (I’m sure Julius probably practiced his speeches to his cat first time round).

The results - well, we’ve been amazed and chuffed at the response to the iQ Prize so far. Not that it’s all down to my finely honed wordsmithing - I’m sure the 10 grand has something to do with it too.

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