The Simple Yet Powerful Ingredient All Viral Stories Share
Sometimes we overcomplicate the most basic things
People are lonely and thirsty for hope.
You probably read a thousand times how important it is to use storytelling to connect with our readers. It all comes down to one thing: we are fed up with being invisible.
We wake up in the morning and go to work, whether that happens in the living room or an office, and sometimes we don’t exchange a word with a single person.
We don’t know our next-door neighbor, our friends are too busy to arrange a gathering (who isn’t?) — and just wait until they start a family.
We spend so many hours in front of a screen that our best friend became a phone or TV platform.
This is not meant to make you unhappy, just to state that we are moving towards invisibilization. Our human interactions are less frequent because we rely too much on devices to keep in touch.
That’s why we are starving to feel something. Anything.
To have some human feelings that make us feel alive again.
And stories can bring that. They make us cry, laugh, connect, be heroes, love and feel loved, hate and feel hated. They have all that power over us.
A loved sad lemon
My little cousins were spending the Easter holidays on the beach. When their brother went for a swim, his sisters played an innocent joke on him.
They drew a sad face on a lemon and left it on the path to their house with a note saying, “Hi, I’m sad. Sign up here, please.” They hid behind a tree to check if he’ll stop and write.
He knew his sisters were behind it, so he ignored it and went back home to have a shower.
When the disappointed girls went outside to pick up the lemon some time later, they couldn’t believe what they saw.
Lots of messages to cheer the lemon up.
In a very quiet street at lunchtime. I was surprised anybody walked by at all.
You could tell children wrote the original note, but people probably took it as a call for attention from a sad child, and they stopped on their way back from the beach to leave a lovely message for “the sad lemon.”
Then one old man took the lemon. It looked as if he was going to take it with him, but he left it back.
He was drawing a smiling face on the back.
What all viral stories have in common
This silly anecdote was the equivalent of virality in that context. We are talking about a small coastal town in its low season. It was an isolated empty street on a hot day, at lunch and siesta time in the South of Spain. I didn’t see a soul walking there.
Yet, people noticed the lemon and stopped to write something. To cheer a stranger up. That’s the power of connection and feelings. That’s what the digital world and a too-fast society are stealing from us.
Should it have been online, that lemon would have traveled worldwide and would have thousands of comments because nothing moves us to action more than someone asking us for help.
Especially when that help doesn’t imply any effort or money from us.
The kind of help even a child can give, our ears, and some comforting words. Telling someone in a bad place, I see you, I’ve been there, you aren’t invisible.
Empathy is our superpower: Embrace it
When we write from the heart, we connect with readers on a deep level. Heart to heart. It’s a profound, invisible connection.
Whenever we dare to be vulnerable, when we use the power of words to communicate our true selves, readers feel seen.
We are starving for some recognition, not based on our merits, work, or achievements, but on a basic human level. A simple “you are not alone” will be enough.
That’s what all viral stories share, the human ingredient, the something that connects with our heart and makes us go soft, laugh, cry, or moves us to help others.
The reminder that we all matter.
Think about it next time you write a story.
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