Let’s get experimental.
I once read a book on fiction writing. In that book was a genius way of padding out short stories getting into the head of your reader and giving them a more immersive experience.
That technique basically involved repeating the same thing three times:
- The protagonist imagines an outcome
- The outcome happens
- Both protagonist and reader relive the memory; putting their own spin on it
Throw in the five senses, and you have the bare bones for three scenes that’ll be deeply immersive for your reader.
Now, that’s a noble pursuit, but we’re busy being silver-tongued scallywags. As such, we want to use this and take it further.
Enter copywriting.
Copywriting And Other Silver-Tongued Stories
In copywriting, we have our nightmare story and our dream vision. We have our customer’s aspirational self and we have the problems they’re facing.
You can use my above three act structure for all of those.
You can also use it specifically for the catalyst.
And this isn’t really sales letter stuff, but you can use all of it in the form of emails and funnel stuff.
Remember that time I emailed you about the story about what your future life will be like if you took the course? Well check out David, who took the course last month. Don’t take my word for it, here’s what he says:
The crazy thing I find about copywriting is that you’ll get a bunch of naysayers who’ll tell you that the whole “persuasive writing” thing is out-of-date and that it might have worked in the 1970’s… but not now.
Yet in reality, we haven’t really scratched the surface yet.
There are behavioural studies coming out every day that further our understanding of human behaviour. People still haven’t drawn basic dots between disciplines.
So far as copywriting, very few copywriters study fiction and practically no fiction writers study copywriting.
This is a mistake.
Anyway, let’s get back to the point.
Building A Multi-Point Imagination
This is something I’m research and development –ing right now, hence the dork terms and the not-so-fully-fleshed-out ideas.
If you experiment, you stay young in the brain. If you don’t experiment, you get old and then a young lion comes and steals your girl, possibly biting your head off in the process.
Anyway, there’s the general branding advice that someone needs to see your brand seven times before they’ll consider purchasing from you. That’s always sounded pretty stupid to me, but let’s take it at face value.
But only because it serves my purpose in bringing my next point out.
It stands to reason that the more you show your customers the value in your offering, the more likely they are to buy.
So it therefore stands to reason that the more you make them imagine an outcome, the more they’ll want it.
And the more you make them remember that they imagined the outcome, the more they end up like some criminal getting caught in Spiderman’s web.
Imagination Is A Shared Experience
I knew a guy who was heavily into the pickup artist stuff at one point.
Now, I’m not talking about a guy who has read a couple of books and then goes out to the bar and tries to get with a couple of girls.
I’m talking about a guy who used to think for hours and hours about the most micro details about human interaction you could imagine.
His big thing was/is storytelling and using it to push deep emotional buttons.
And I don’t know about his success with women, but if I could bottle his ability to tell a story, I’d be a lot richer than I am now.
(It’s funny how the most interesting people don’t have the same instincts to commercialise their abilities as you’d think.)
Anyway, he could take the most bland story about some political strife or a chance encounter with a shopping assistant and turn it into this epic story about male/female polarity, subtly embedding his own positive traits and anecdotes in a way you didn’t notice them.
It was weird, because most natural storytellers aren’t analytic in the way that this guy was.
Anyway, the big takeaway from this guy’s storytelling is that in the imagination, you can do whatever you want.
And this isn’t harnessed very much by us down-to-earth business-types.
In a person’s imagination, they can do whatever they want. If you give them the gift of imagining something really awesome, then you create an incredibly addictive experience for them.
And then you can pull it back and make them remember it. Finally, you can say “I told you so” when they experience it.
This is deep and powerful, and I’m not really doing it justice.
So go and experiment, and consider the exercise I opened this article with the quickest way to get started.