One powerful way to write a compelling business story
Every successful business book or self-help guide has one thing in common: it contains lots of compelling stories.
Stories are what bring books to life. They add interest, help with understanding, and make the content memorable.
The secret behind their success is that we humans are wired for story. Ever since the first cavepeople sat around a camp fire swapping tales of woolly mammoth encounters and conflicts with neighbouring tribes, we’ve been primed to pay attention to stories for our very survival.
We have to know what happens next. We just can’t help it.
And yet, as a ghostwriter and book coach, I work with many authors who find it hard to work out what stories to include in their books. Often these stories are based on their real-life work with clients and customers, and sometimes experiences from outside their professional lives as well.
It can be tempting for them to crowbar a great story into a chapter which isn’t that relevant to it, just for the sake of including it. Or maybe the essence of a story is spot on, but the details don’t fit.
If only there was a sure-fire way to decide if a story is right for a business book.
Luckily, there is.
The 5 part checklist for a compelling business story
Recently I was listening to the fabulous podcast by Amy Harrison, Write With Influence. Amy is a brilliant copy writer, and shares her expertise through her podcast on a regular basis. The episodes are not only informative but great fun – I highly recommend it.
The episode that grabbed me was number 40: 5 Steps For Using Cinematic-Style Conflict in Your Copywriting. In it, she walks her listeners through a 5-part checklist* for the elements that every successful story must contain if it’s to convince its readers to keep turning the pages.
My take on this is is that if these five elements are key to all compelling stories, then they should also apply to the stories you include in your business book or self-help guide. If you run the checklist by your business story idea, you can see at a glance whether your story is worthy of your book or not.
Let’s explore what those five elements are.
#1: It has to be about one big problem
For your readers to understand your story, it has to be based on a significant problem that they can relate to.
For instance, suppose your book is about how to lose weight and one chapter is about overcoming specific issues to do with willpower. To help to make your point, you tell the story of a woman, Helen, who’s been trying to shed the pounds all her adult life.
Her big problem is that she lives in a house with a husband and two teenage sons who can eat whatever they like without putting on a pound, so there’s a constant supply of junk food in the cupboards. It calls to her, and she often finds herself eating it.
What you wouldn’t want to do is complicate your story with more of this woman’s problems. Keep the issue simple.
#2: Solving that problem should seem impossible
Helen loves her family and doesn’t want to curtail their enjoyment of food. But what can she do?
She works from home while they’re out at work and school all day, so she has multiple opportunities to dip into their forbidden food supplies. She can’t afford to rent an office, she can’t seem to push the food out of her mind, and she certainly doesn’t want to move out of the family home just to stop herself from eating her way through it.
#3: The difficulty of the problem pushes the main character to their limits
Helen is finding the situation more and more debilitating. She’s desperate to lose weight, but she feels like a failure because she can’t resist the temptation of chocolate bars and packets of crisps in the kitchen.
She starts to wonder if there’s any point in trying be healthy and slim. Maybe she should just give up. It’s obvious that she has no willpower in any case, so why carry on?
#4: Trying to solve it leads to further problems and complications
In one last-ditch attempt to put temptation out of reach, Helen decides to put a lock on the door of the cupboard containing all the forbidden goodies. She gives the key to her husband to take to work, so she can’t get at it.
At first this solves the problems, but after a few days her sons complain that they can’t help themselves to the food when they come home from school.
Then she finds herself obsessing about the snacks just as much as she did before. It’s as if the padlock is adding an extra attraction to what’s inside the cupboard.
One day she finds herself wondering if she could pick the lock, and actually starts Googling how to do it.
#5: The problem grows until it seems lost and then a final battle resolves it
On the ‘lock picking’ day, Helen finally realises that she’s lost the plot.
But instead of coming to her senses, she goes out to the corner store to buy (and eat) five chocolate bars and three bags of crisps.
When her husband comes home from work, she has a huge argument with him about how it’s all his fault that she can’t eat healthily. It seems so unfair that he and her sons never put on weight. She hates them all!
Shocked, her husband sees how much the problem is upsetting her and proposes a solution.
He’ll remove all the unhealthy snacks from the cupboard and keep some at work instead. The boys can buy them from the tuck shop at school, and will promise never to bring them into the house.
The End.
Can you see how this story, while being about a relatively mundane issue, ticks all the boxes of a dramatic and compelling story? If this were your ‘how to lose weight’ book, you could use it to illustrate the importance of bringing your family on board for support.
Your book may be about a different topic altogether, but if you use this 5-step checklist to see whether your stories contain the correct elements, you’re well on your way to writing a book that your readers can’t put down.
*Amy Harrison credits Erik Bork’s book The Idea for a version of this checklist. That’s next on my reading list!
