Storytelling Made Easy: Persuade and Transform Your Audiences, Clients and Customers-Simply, Quickly and Profitably by Michael Hauge

Author:Michael Hauge [Hauge, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Business & Economics, Business Communication, Meetings & Presentations, Sales & Selling, General, Performing Arts, Storytelling, -
ISBN: 9781941870846
Google: fplmAQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1941870848
Goodreads: 36316114
Publisher: Indie Books International
Published: 2017-04-14T19:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Success Story Mastery

Rewriting isn’t just a single pass through your story—it’s an ongoing process of reading and rereading, sharpening the story and increasing its emotional potential each time.

Writing Style Made Easy

With even a mention of improving the style of their prose, many storytellers get frightened and blocked, or give up altogether.

“I’m not a writer,” they tell themselves. “I barely made it through English. I’m an awful speller. And I can’t possibly compete with those writers who have big vocabularies, lots of education, and know how to weave magic with language. Who am I kidding?”

If this is you—if your stomach is in a knot, or you can feel yourself getting discouraged at just the thought of improving your writing, here’s what you don’t realize: almost everything you think is required to become a good writer is incorrect.

In fact, it’s the opposite: what you assume to be the qualities of great writing will actually work against you.

The marks of a well-written story—and certainly of a well-written success story—are simplicity and clarity. Neither of these is achieved through big words, convoluted prose, or abstract ideas.

This is not to say that the works of literary masters like Melville or Faulkner or Joyce don’t possess a lot of complexity and obliqueness—just ask anyone who had to slog through Moby Dick or Ulysses in college.

But would you want to read a how-to book or a marketing e-mail by any of those writers?

For our purposes, good stories are like good screenplays: fast, easy, and enjoyable to read.

Film stories move, enlighten, and persuade us by seducing us with vivid images and intriguing characters, then propelling us forward with emotionally involving action, conflict, and dialogue.

This is what you want your case studies to do. And you accomplish that goal by using your natural vocabulary, and speaking in your own voice.

Think of the last time you sat down with a friend to tell him about something that had happened to you. Did you stop yourself, worried your vocabulary wasn’t sophisticated enough to keep him interested? Did your friend start yawning or wander away because your prose was too simple?

I doubt it—in fact I’d wager that when you hear stories from others, your eyes start glazing over when the opposite happens—their narratives wander all over the place, or they try to sound smart or superior, and you simply can’t follow what they’re saying.

So, as you go through your completed case study, your goal is always to make it simpler and more personal. Your writing should have the feel of a conversation, where you’re saying to your potential buyer, “Let me tell you what happened to this person I know….”

With that in mind, here are the elements of your story I suggest you review, edit and polish:

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