Hello,
This week’s newsletter has been a few weeks in the making. Reading, researching and thinking time has lasted over many walks and runs. Sometimes an idea needs a little time to brew before you can see what it is meant to become.
I make notes and thoughts in my writing app (Bear if you’re asking) and then bring it all together into something that hopefully makes sense.
This week’s long read is essentially about structure but it’s also about story-telling and human nature. It’s based on John Yorke’s superb book, Into The Woods and if you want to get a deeper understanding, I wholeheartedly recommend reading it.
While on the subject of books, I was trusted with editing a book this month. It’s been a joyful experience and I’m looking forward to more business book editing in future. Reading about structure has certainly helped with the editing process for both the book and other work.
If you want some book recommendations for writing, do let me know and I’ll pop some onto a future newsletter.
What can TV shows teach us about blogging?
What do soap operas and blogs have in common?
They tell stories. And movies, social media captions, videos, adverts, and books.
We tell ourselves stories all the time. It’s in our nature to create a story - even if there isn’t one. It helps us make sense of the world and makes us feel like we have some kind of control.
So what can we learn from the likes of Breaking Bad and Stranger Things for how we write our business content?
According to John Yorke, “Stories allow us to understand and navigate a strange and alien world. By rehearsing situations, problems, conflicts and emotions in the fictional form we grow more adept at understanding, coping with and resolving them in real life.”
Yorke argues in his book that the reason good TV, books and film all do so well is because they have an innate story structure. And that this structure is part of who we are as humans.
In the same way, we’ll make inferences about a text message or email and then jump to a conclusion about what someone thinks of us. How many times have you read an email and decided someone is being a bit passive aggressive but when you speak to them in real life, it’s just how they talk?
Even when there is no connection, our brains will make a connection to make the world make sense.
The same is true for everything we encounter in the world. We turn it into a story to help it make sense in our worlds.
Start with the middle
The premise of Yorke’s story structure is that everything can be laid on top of five acts. And that these acts mirror each other. So the first mirrors the last, the second mirrors the fourth and in the middle third you have a definitive mid-point.
It is at this mid-point that you get your revelatory piece of information.
You start with no knowledge, get the knowledge and then find out how to use the knowledge.
Okay, it’s slightly more complex than that but it is still essentially a beginning, a middle and an end.
In some places, you’ll hear this referred to as the mirror middle. The idea is when you start writing if you start in the middle - the revelatory piece of knowledge - you can work backwards and forwards on either side from this point.
As a side note - this is something I covered in my Thursday Brew series on writing a long read. Sometimes it’s easier to start writing with the main point you want to make and work outwards from there.
And if we apply a story structure to all our writing, it can make it more powerful.
Yorke argues further that: “ take any factual book, any treatise, any piece of journalism and you will see a striking familiar pattern, one in which the author will actively pursue a specific goal (the point they are trying to make), positing a theory, exploring it and coming to a conclusion. The writer becomes the protagonist. What all these different forms of narrative are doing is behaving like detectives, enclosing phenomena into linked chains of cause and effect. Their structure is identical to dramatic structure.”
Let’s take a blog as an example and overlay the five-act story structure.
Act 1 - the inciting incident
This is your opening paragraph. The who, what, when and where. You get straight into the action and to the point in this first part of your blog structure.
It is at this point that your reader has no (or little) knowledge of what you are explaining in your blog. They’ve asked a question and you are answering it.
Act 2 - Acceptance
If the opening gives new information and takes the reader to the point, then the second act needs to explain it. Here is where you add your “why” or “how”. It’s the part where you include some research or quotes to add evidence to your argument.
Act 3 - Midpoint
As I described earlier - this needs to be revelatory information. In terms of a blog, this would be your thought-leadership take on it. Your insight puts a different angle on what you’re saying. It’s what makes your blog different from all the many other blogs on the internet about the same subject.
Act 4 - Doubt
In drama, this is when you’ll see the main character have the piece of knowledge but revert back to their old ways. You can see it wonderfully in Cressida Cowell’s books - both How To Train Your Dragon and Wizards of Once.
Just when you think your hero has achieved their mission, they do something monumentally stupid or another incident stops them from reaching victory.
I watched Big the other week and Act 4 is the moment that Josh tells Billy he can’t go look for Zoltar because he has work to do. He has the knowledge of how to get back to being a kid again - his mission - but decides not to use it.
In a blog, you’d do this by looking at the other side of the argument. For example, here I’d analyse if you really could overlay a five-act structure over a blog - and indeed any piece of writing - before coming to a conclusion.
In fact, you don’t need to consciously place this structure over any of your writing. Good writing will do it naturally because we, as humans, do it naturally. Ask a kid to tell a story and they’ll tell one in the five-act structure without knowing it even exists.
And if you’re unsure about it, it’s something you can always add to your editing process.
Act 5 - Acceptance or Full Knowledge
This is the transformation of the character in drama. Look at the character arc of Walter White in Breaking Bad split across each episode, season and the series as a whole. You can see this in absolute clarity.
If you’ve been watching Better Call Saul - no spoilers - you can see which act has played out in recent episodes.
In terms of your blog, act five is your conclusion. It’s where you bring all your arguments together and give your reader all the knowledge they need.
We’ll usually finish with a call to action - this is to tell them what to do next. In terms of film, it’s a bit like that last bit at the end where they prep you for the sequel. It leaves you wanting to know more.
Something that films have taken from soap operas. Think of the dun-dun-dun moment in Eastenders (for my non-UK readers that’s the cliffhanger ending). It leaves you wanting more.
As Yorke says: “stories work exactly like essays, like lawsuits and indeed, like perception itself: they posit an idea, explore it, then come to a conclusion that, if the drama is convincing, is proved true.”
How I help
Get your content reviewed with a Content Clinic.
Have me write all your sales content with my Kick-Ass Sales Bundle
Get a whole year of me helping you with content on my PIMP Your Content Programme
Next Thursday I’ll be sat in a field in Wales watching some bands and drinking a brew. But there will be a lovely Thursday Brew appearing in your inbox in my absence.
I’ll see you next Thursday (in spirit)
Fiona