If you want to tell more powerful stories that engage and persuade, try what I call the “Malcolm Gladwell Method.”
The celebrated author didn’t invent this style — in fact, PR pros will recognize it as plain old feature journalism — but it’s a great way to grab audiences from the start.
I briefly discussed the “why” behind this in an earlier post. Here’s the “how.”
Make Your Stories a Journey
Check out any chapter of one of Gladwell’s popular books and you’ll see a consistent pattern:
-
- He starts small by focusing on an individual, an object or a moment in time.
- Then he goes big, using that small moment as the launching pad for a larger discussion.
- Finally, at the conclusion, he returns to small — often at the point where he started.
It all adds up to more powerful stories that create a compelling journey for readers:
-
-
- The beginning draws them in with a relatable moment or familiar detail.
- The middle provides the “meat.” In some ways, it’s the easiest part.
- The conclusion brings things full circle, creating a satisfying experience for the audience — a feeling that they’ve come home.
-
How NOT to Tell Stories
Many organizations take the opposite approach. Their stories start big, giving us the 30,000-foot overview with the traditional “5 Ws” (who, what, when, where and why).
That’s a common standard, especially for “hard news” items and press releases. But for feature stories, it’s pretty dull. It’s like sitting down to watch a movie only to have a narrator walk out and tell us everything that’s about to happen.
Why not start with a hint of intrigue instead?
The Gladwell Method for More Powerful Stories
In his classic book The Tipping Point, Gladwell explores the concept of “social epidemics” — how ideas and trends seem to emerge out of nowhere and are suddenly everywhere.
Chapter 2 covers the “Law of the Few.” It starts small by putting us in a specific moment: it’s Boston, 1775, and a young stable boy overhears a British officer talking about “hell to pay tomorrow.”
The boy reports what he heard to a man by the name of Paul Revere, and the rest, as they say, is history — the famous midnight ride alerting the countryside that “the British are coming.”
Gladwell points out that another rider went out that night on a different route but left the colonials along the way snoozing in their beds. The difference, according to Gladwell, lies in the concept of “connectors, mavens and salesmen” (aka, influencers).
From there he goes big, with plenty of analysis, evidence and examples. Finally, he returns to small, taking us back in time to when “a word-of-mouth epidemic … spread from a little stable boy to all of New England.”
How to Start Small
Again and again Gladwell lures us in by starting small:
- In a chapter on how ideas stick, he examines the children’s TV shows Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, but he starts by focusing on an individual producer with a big idea.
- In the very first sentence of a section on context, he introduces us to Bernhard Goetz on the morning of that fateful New York subway ride.
- And it’s not always characters that kick things off. In a chapter on rumors he begins with a detailed examination of a particular skateboarding move called airwalking.
In many of the organization stories I see, these detailed episodes usually don’t appear until a few moments or paragraphs in (if at all). Challenge yourself to get small right away. Introduce a character. Get inside their head. Put us “in the room where it happens.”
Get Past Your Doubts
The 30,000-foot approach may be hard to let go of. Maybe you need that opening for SEO or some other purpose.
A client I worked with used that overview paragraph elsewhere online as a teaser to get people to click over to the story. I pointed out that while that approach certainly tells people what to expect when they click, it doesn’t exactly entice them to do so.
If you feel you really need a summary paragraph, try making it a spotlighted bit of text — perhaps in a sidebar — instead of the lead.
It’s All About Trust
The Gladwell method may feel risky or weird. But it all comes down to trust — trust in the power of storytelling, trust in your audience to join you for the journey and, ultimately, trust in yourself as a storyteller.
So take a leap of faith and give it a try.
[Image via PEN American Center, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
[A version of this post originally appeared in PRSA’s Strategies & Tactics]