This Is How you Own Your Story

byTheCatherine

14K followers

Updated 3 years ago

Tell your story properly

Mistake newbie writers often make when telling their story is you often omit to tell the best part. When you forget to tell the important bit, that is the bit that contains the nugget of the story then your story fails to resonate.

I remember reading the copy writer Robert Allen saying once that he had a job to write the sales copy for a cholesterol reducing supplement. He said this was about the most boring assignment he had ever accepted. He had spent two weeks on the dry facts about the benefits of this supplement and come up with absolutely nothing in terms of good copy.

In desperation, he found the owner of the company the CEO and in the course of the conversation the CEO recounted a story that he'd read an article in the New York Times. That article was about a natural supplement grown in Italy. Within three hours of reading that article the CEO and his son was on his way to Italy. He went to the area, spoke to the growers, and bought the product which would eventually become the supplement.

That's what I mean about the nugget of the story that goes unsaid. The essence of the story isn't the fact that there's this fantastic cholesterol reducing supplement. The essences in that an article about a product was so powerful so life changing within hours someone actually went to Italy to investigate the story further. After communicating with local doctors the two Americans found that absolutely no one in this town had high cholesterol levels because they get this product on a daily basis.

The result of leaving out this part of the story often results in a financial loss. This is because if you tell your story in the right way people resonate with stories far more than they can ever resonate with products or brands. If you can't tell your story right then you will have a hard time grabbing attention and fans and getting people to share your content.

You only have to go back to Aesop's fables which is probably the greatest collection of short stories of all time. They all tell the story of the hero's journey.

1. The hero sets out to complete a task

2. The hero experiences a setback

3. The hero overcomes the obstacle and wins the day

Let's take the example of one story of a gladiator being forced to go into the lions den. The people that made him going to the den intended that he would be killed. That's part one of the story.

Part two of the story is by a twist of fate the lion that day had a thorn in his paw. The gladiator realize that something was wrong and he got close enough to the lion. He spoke to the lion gently and got the lion to trust him.

Part three of the story he takes the paw and removes the claw. Consequently the lion didn't kill him and the man lived.

Often when you read the story people tell on their websites they don't tell the complete journey. They start off with step one and they conclude with the fact that they succeeded. They don't recount the story of the struggle in between.

They skipped the setback

this is the most important part. This is the part that contains the humanity, the struggle, the hardships and also the embarrassments. It's where mistakes were made, people fell, their ideas were ridiculed. It's the heart, the essence of vulnerability.

Part two is important because your audience connects with you. It may be the only part of the story that your audience can connect with. They may have set out to do a task in a different way it may well mean that your solution will work for them but they don't resonate with how you did it. Part three they may not be able to resonate with because they may have a different result.

This means that the only bit that they can really truly understand and the only thing that makes the heart resonate with is a struggle and embarrassment and the shame.

Brenee Brown is an American shame psychologist. She studies shame for a living. In a Netflix documentary she recounts the story of doing a TED talk and being absolutely lambasted for her physical appearance. She is an Amazonian lady.

In her shame she hid at home and read all these horrendous reviews. Her way of coping was to watch a full box set of "Downton Abbey". She couldn't cope with the fact that a lot of people said what she said they may have listened to as she was three stone lighter!

After she'd finish watching the complete series is of Downton Abbey she still wasn't ready to face the world. She then proceeded to Google who was president when Downton Abbey was filmed. She found out that Theodore Roosevelt was president in 1910. Now neither Downton Abbey nor 1910 is relevant to the back story.

She was publicly humiliated and shamed after doing a TED talk. She then read one of Theodore Roosevelt's speeches, the man in the arena speech. In my view this goes down together with Martin Luther King's speech in 1963 in Washington DC about I had a dream. These two speeches were the two greatest speeches of the 20th century. I'm only going to quote one of them here but it's something I read often

That's not the whole speech it can be foud here

http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm

Reading that speech changed Brenne Brown's life, it ultimately made her a world-famous speaker. It catapulted her into the limelight because suddenly she didn't speak about shame in statistics but in real stories, stories that made people cry. She tells a story of her daughter at the end of the Netflix documentary. i have seen it at least six times, I know what the story is, I know how it ends. All the way through that documentary I say to myself nothing has changed I know the end, it won't touch me, I won't cry. Guess what every time it costs me a pack of tissues.

Another reason why part two really matters is that nobody really likes a success story. We are hardwired to go for the underdog. On their own success stories are completely bland and totally boring. To really relate to stories we have to see the part of ourselves and that story. If you read a story of a millionaire/billionaire who everything he touches turns to gold it doesn't touch your heart. However if that billionaire had lost his money overnight and had to start again that puts a completely different complexion on the whole story.

So start to own the part two of the hero's journey, completely embrace it and totally share it is the reason that people will love you and become raving fans. The reason they will love you is that at one time you would just like them. It doesn't matter if you're not like them now the important thing is that you were, and they recognize it hopefully in the core of their being.

how do you evoke emotion in your story please let us know it will be very helpful to newbies