Everything around us is a story. Whether it’s the way reality is, or whether it’s how we’re programmed to see the world, we seem to be surrounded by meaningful sequences of events that tell us how and why things happened. They range from great world events to jokes or urban legends, and to some extent it doesn’t matter if those annoying little details known as facts don’t entirely fit. What counts is that the story makes sense.
Your business is certainly a story. It has a beginning (inevitably), it has development and characters, it has exciting or moving episodes and moves from one to another in a way that at least seems to make sense. Hopefully it doesn’t have an end, but “to be continued” is an acceptable alternative.
It’s important to remember this when you’re communicating about your business. Of course it’s important to show what you sell, or offer statistics to show why your product or service is essential, but it’ll mean little to most people if this isn’t framed as part of a story.
Now, of course I’m not suggesting that every blog has to start “Once upon a time”, “It was a dark and stormy night” or “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”. What this is about is how you structure the information you need to get over. Like a story, it must have a beginning, middle and end (though not necessarily in that order) and lead the reader from point to point of the development.
This applies to any written media you put out, however brief — even tweets. Hemingway once proposed that a story could be told in six words, and put forward the story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Even if a story is only one beat, it needs to lead the reader from the point they start to the point you want them to finish.
Of course, the point you want them to finish, whether in a blog or a tweet, is where they click through to your website and let you take them further with the next chapter. To achieve that, though, you need to guide them through a satisfying story, or why would they care?
And this blog is no exception. I started at a point that hopefully engaged and intrigued you, guided through a story, to here, where we are now. An ending where I point out that I’ve been writing stories all my life, both fictional and factual, and suggest you look through the other pages of this website to see what kind of story I can write for you.
Which I’ve just told you.
Nick Blatchley
Copywriter and author, known as the Word Wizard, based in Hertfordshire. I’ve been writing since the age of four and writing for businesses since 2014: websites, blogs, books and social media, all in my clients’ own voices.
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