Cut a long story short
In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee shares this tiny tale:
In just 61 words, Mukherjee gives us:
- Motivation. The subject wants to live to see his daughter graduate from high school. The motivation is what gets the story started.
- Obstacle. The subject has multiple myeloma, a cancer that starts in the plasma cells in bone marrow. That’s what gives the story its tension: the conflict between the motivation and obstacle.
- Result. He lives to see her graduate, not only from high school, but from college! But, making this success bittersweet, he’s bound to a wheelchair.
- Punch line. Surprise! He’s in a wheelchair because he was in a baseball-coaching accident.
Master writers can engage raiders with emotional, compelling stories in just a few words. In fact, a short-form story may well be more effective than long-form storytelling in social media and other channels.
1. All the lonely people …
“I once wrote a 75,000-word series on local hospital politics, after which a wise friend said, ‘Walt, you cannot exhaust a subject but you can exhaust a reader.’”
— Walt Harrington, former staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine
The Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby” has only 179 words. Yet the song contains three stories — and a chorus.
Can you do as much with so little?
2. Snowball, Snowball
I still remember — more than a decade later — one of the thousand heartbreaking stories about Hurricane Katrina victims, an AP report about the Superdome evacuation:
Many people had dogs, and they could not take them on the bus. A police officer took one from a little boy, who cried until he vomited. “Snowball, Snowball,” he cried.
3. Portraits of grief
The New York Times Portraits of Grief series tells the stories of every single person who died in the 9/11 attacks. Here’s the life of Eddie D’Atri, stitched together from just 157 words:
“Hello, I’m Eddie,” he said. “You mind if I borrow your power?”
“Eddie D’Atri was a handsome, muscular fellow. “I told him, ‘You can borrow anything you want,’” Ms. Mari said the other day.
She asked him if he was a fireman. “I just felt it,” she said. “Something just told me.”
He told her no, he was just a working man, but she didn’t believe it. Her brother is a fireman, and something deep inside her made her fearful of falling in love with a guy like that.
But she did. They were engaged June 30.
Mr. D’Atri was 38. He studied nursing and was a lieutenant at Squad 1 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He was crowned Mr. Staten Island in 1987.
Sadly, steel is stronger than muscle, and Mr. D’Atri leaves behind a broken heart.
How did reporters pull off these tiny profiles? Times editors write:
“The portraits were never meant to be obituaries in any traditional sense. They were brief, informal and impressionistic, often centered on a single story or idiosyncratic detail. They were not intended to recount a person’s résumé, but rather to give a snapshot of each victim’s personality, of a life lived.”
Not bad for mini portraits that weigh in at roughly 200 words each.
Cut a long story short.
Cutting a long story short is often a matter of selection, not compression. So start by focusing your story angle as tightly as possible.
Would your story be twice as good if it were half as long? Write short-form storytelling.
How can you tell better business stories?
Stories are so effective that Og Mandino, the late author of the bestselling The Greatest Salesman in the World, says, “If you have a point, find a story.”
Learn to find, develop and write stories that engage readers’ hearts and minds in our Master the Art of Storytelling workshops.
There, you’ll learn how to find the aha! moment that’s the gateway to every anecdote. How to start an anecdote with a bang — instead of a whimper. And how to use “the most powerful form of human communication” to grab attention, boost credibility, make messages more memorable and communicate better.
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