Writing & Content Creation
How to Spark People’s Attention with Storytelling
“Any communication can become an engaging narrative with enough effort and ingenuity.” — A.J. Ogilvie
Scene: There is a message in my inbox. It’s from the editor. It’s also sad. “Yes, I reviewed your first couple of submissions and they weren’t a fit. We want all essays to have a personal narrative interwoven even when they are about something else,” the message reads.
Thought: An interwoven personal narrative or telling a compelling story is the one particular strategy we’ve all seen used by successful speakers, leaders, and writers. It’s about transforming a boring dry speech or text into an enjoyable moment for the audience.
Marcus K. Dowling has recently written about how roughly 90% of his best stories are inspired by text messages with his friends. In this post, we’ll see — through five examples — how to use our daily life scenes and apparently boring conversations as a source of inspiration to tell a story and produce a creative piece of writing.
6 Case Studies of Creating a Story
Let’s imagine you have to write six articles about the following subjects:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Applying psychology principles to writing
- Failure and success in professional life
- Daydreams
- Human worth and appearance
- Programming
Take a moment of reflection. Do you have any memory or experience from your life that you can connect with these topics? Close your eyes and think about how you can start, what would be the title and the hook for each of your articles. I’ll wait here.
And by the way, a writing hook is:
“a sentence or group of sentences that sparks people’s curiosity, captures their imagination, and draws them into reading your piece. A good hook could be something completely unexpected.” — 5 Types of Hooks to Grab Readers’ Attention
Ok, if you have some ideas let’s check them with the examples below.
1. A Story About Artificial Intelligence
Title: What if You Need a Machine to Review Your Story Before Showing It to Any Human?
The Hook:
I used to miss having enough human reviewers for my drafts. I have never considered asking a machine to read my piece and give me feedback about it. This reality is changed the day I got a message from an editor saying that according to his machine, there are around 40 spelling, word choice, grammar, and hyphenation errors in my story which is too much to read for content and correct.
The machine was Grammarly, and the editor that pushed me to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in my writing process was Jonathan Greene.
2. Applying Psychology Principles to Writing
Title: How to Apply Psychology Principles to Writing?
The Hook:
Chris is a hostage negotiator, Timon is a mentalist, and David is a storyteller. What do these three persons have in common?
While this could be a strange question, the right answer might be slightly different from what you think. These people understand something important about human nature. They know how to interact with our psychology and emotions, how to influence them, and sometimes how to manipulate them.
3. Failure and Success in Professional Life
Title 1: What Could a “Character-Building” Moment in Your Career Be?
Title 2: What if You Need to Get Fired to Succeed?
The Hook:
Her name is Anna. Editor of Vogue for over 30 years and an impressive MasterClass teacher of leadership and creativity. Early in her life as she was a young lady, she got fired from her job. Later on, she fired many people.
My name is not Anna. But during my professional career, I got fired more than once. If I would tell this truth to my current boss and team, I wonder if they could believe me.
4. Daydreams
Title: A Day in the Life of a… Homo Sapien
The Hook:
“I hoped the forecasts will not be true, but hope alone is not enough,” I told my boss.
“Still human being needs hope.” He replied.
“That’s true, it just could transform us sometimes to a daydreamer,” I said.
All of us face challenging days, and without the capacity to envision a brighter future, life would be tough. Daydreams get us through life problems by creating in our minds at least the reality that we would like to have.
Yet, we need to be careful when being a daydreamer means looking for a resort and an escape from taking the courage to face our challenges and act to create the future that we seek.
5. Human Worth and Appearance
Title: Today I Met Four Unhandsome Men in Western Union
The Hook:
Today, I went to a western union location to send some money to my father. I found four men in middle age waiting before me to send money to their families. They were poorly dressed and apparently don’t have a good intellectual level. With their rough hands, I can imagine that they are the kind of immigrants who are practicing hard work that doesn’t give them the prestige that our modern society’s members are seeking.
Despite their uncharming look, I felt huge respect for them. Huge respect for their dresses, for their work, and for their efforts to support their families.
In our materialistic world, we are more and more addicted to appearances that do not exceed, in many cases, an attractive image with an inside emptiness.
6. Programming
Title: The Journey From High-Level Language to Machine Code
The Hook:
I still remember a discussion with a colleague of mine in which I said, “That’s the transpiler,” and he replied: “Trans…what?”
If you have never heard that name, you’re not alone. As developers, we all get used to writing code in a high-level language that humans can understand. However, computers can only understand a program written in a binary system known as machine code.
To speak to a computer in its non-human language, we came up with two solutions: interpreters and compilers. Ironically, most of us know very little about them, although they belong to our daily coding life.
Final Thought
The human brain has the ability to connect and find a subtle line between different things we have learned or experienced.
An encounter with someone you do not know while you’re doing your grocery shopping could be an inspiring event. With a bit of reflection, you may notice in this coincidence a link with a piece of information passed in front of your eyes many years ago. Your brain remembers it now and finds a place for it and for that person in a story.
In your way to ignite your creativity and write a narrative that resonates with readers, you need to cultivate your curiosity and learn to ask simple questions — like, “Why did the apple fall from the tree?” — before the hard ones. The thing that you overlook, and what is obvious on the surface, may just hold an undiscovered treasure when explored in depth.
“Being a writer takes all the random meaningless out of my life and puts it all under the umbrella of storytelling.” — Taylor Foreman
🧠💡 I write about engineering, technology, and leadership for a community of smart, curious people. Join my free email newsletter for exclusive access or sign up for Medium here.