A Course To Make Them Care
(Please don't click on the schlager music.)
Hi! This is Everything Is Amazing, a science newsletter about the wondrous things around you that you never knew you didn’t know - which is unfortunately being written by this idiot:
Today is launch day of my non-fiction storytelling course, for all paid subscribers! Or it would be - but I still have some audios to record for it, so I’ve decided to push back the launch date a few days so I can get everything finished and properly tested and checked. Hope that’s okay.
We’ll finally be ready to go on Monday 18th November instead.
This also gives me a chance to quickly explain what this thing is, how it could be used, and why I think it matters. That’s going to be the subject of this newsletter and the next one.
If you’re here purely for the science stories that make you go ‘wow!’ and couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the art of telling a good story, don’t worry, that’s still the normal order of business round here!
(Maybe there’s something in EiA’s nearly 4 years of archived editions that you haven’t read yet, like this one about paint that works better than A/C, or the one about the final & perhaps most ludicrous territorial acquisition of the British Empire?)
But for the rest of you - here’s what this course is about.
Ugh. “Storytelling?”
Yeah. I know. It’s a term that comes with a lot of baggage.
If you roll your eyes when you hear it - well, that was my initial reaction too. especially when I saw it being used outside of fiction. I knew, with the unshakable certainty of the deeply incurious, that it was a pretentious, vacuous, spammy buzzword hijacked by over-eager marketers and sales people from actual storytellers (who never bothered with it either, because they were too busy telling actual stories).
Also, I assumed it was a disgracefully evasive way of saying “good writing.”
Then I did the smartest thing I could have done with my righteous indignation: I took it as a sign that I’d misunderstood something, and I looked harder.
I talked to smart, thoughtful people doing great, demonstrably non-lame work who described themselves as non-fiction storytellers.
I threw myself into the work of narrative journalists and creative nonfiction writers.
I read some popular science books on the subject, and picked my way through narrative theory research papers until my head hurt…
It became clear that I’d totally misunderstood what storytelling actually is.
Storytelling is not just “good writing”. It is possible for someone to tell a stirring, rattling yarn and yet do a sub-par job with the writing itself. Some of the world’s best-selling page-turners probably fall into this category. It’s certainly related to being able to write well, but it’s also a separate skill.
Storytelling isn’t just for kids. Once I changed my snobbish definition of it, I saw it everywhere. I saw it being used in military simulators, in business negotiations, in hostage situations, in therapy, in courts of law, in sports, in finance, in every computer application and mobile phone app, every marketing campaign and sales page, and in every single open loop of worry I ever pointlessly but uncontrollably fretted over. If storytelling is just for kids, well, the modern world is entirely run by kids?
Storytelling isn’t something you’re born with. If your parents surrounded you with stories as you grew up, it might look like you’re a born storyteller. But it’s actually as much about perspiration than inspiration. It’s a skill. You can learn it.
. . . and yet, it kinda is. We do seem to have storytelling wired into us from the earliest age. Children are master yarn-tellers of the most ghoulish kind. The stories they invent for themselves are often about fear, pain, violence, playfully blowing each other up with bombs, getting lost in supermarkets and never finding the exit, having child-eating monsters get the drop on them. Children seem to come up with these vignettes of pure horror all on their own. Why? Nobody knows for sure – but one theory is that stories are survival simulators. (Super-interesting!)
The most profoundly useful thing that storytelling is?
It’s a way of successfully getting your best ideas into the heads of complete strangers.
You know: that thing every single person wants to achieve with their creative work (including writers of fiction).
So I started writing about all this, and speaking about it at conferences - and in 2013 I made an email course on it:
Note “for bloggers”. Remember when everything was about blogs? Those days are gone - sort of. (I’d say there’s a good argument for newslettering being the new blogging when those newsletters have simultaneously Web-published versions, like Substack does.)
But the basic principles of good storytelling don’t change. A fine, well-delivered story will hook you whatever the platform it’s delivered on. It’s not a tech thing - it’s a human thing. In this sense we haven’t changed for thousands of years, and probably won’t do so for thousands more.
This stuff just works. That’s why the right people are still using it today.
(And some of the wrong people too! We’ll cover that as well.)
Everything I learned in the making of that course is what I’ve now put into practice to grow Everything Is Amazing to over 26,000 readers - and write storified threads on social media that have reached millions of people.
That said…
These aren’t “my secrets of storytelling,” mind, because they’re not mine, and they’re not secrets. I didn’t uncover anything wildly original that deserves to have my name on it. All I’ve done is pull together lots of rock-solid case studies from all my favourite working storytellers, map patterns, tactics and strategies that can help people send eyeballs towards creative work, even when everything around it is a frenzy of noisy, incoherent distraction.
There will be no tiresome promises of "nine-figure incomes" and “how to go viral” and “instantly become famous” and that kind of seedy, semi-predatory twaddle. If you want my tips on going viral on social media, click here and prepare for my uncomfortable conclusions. If you want general newsletter-writing tips, go here and also here. All of those are free to read. As for moneymaking advice - a long while back, I was chatting to the extremely smart
of and we both agreed that the most fun and ethically credible thing to do with a ‘How To Make Money’ course would be to release it for free! And since I still like this idea way too much to ruin it, even if Candace and I never do anything about it - this course isn’t that.
How Does It Work?
It’s 5 weeks of emails, 3 emails per week.
Each lesson comes with an audio version, just like previous editions of Everything Is Amazing like this one.
You’d be done with it just before Christmas … or you can take as long as you like. There’s no ticking clock.
How Can You Get This Course?
If you’re an existing or former paid subscriber (monthly, yearly or founder tier) to Everything Is Amazing, on or before Monday 18th, you’ll be able to get access to the course for free.
In other words, if you’re not a paid subscriber and you want the course, sign up before the end of Monday:
After that, it’ll only be available to new yearly paid subscribers - or for a standalone fee.
I’ll be sending out an email with all the details of how to access it when the course launches.
Honestly, I believe in this thing and I’m proud of it. I ran previous versions for over a hundred students - and I hope the latest version will give some of you some recklessly ambitious ideas and the confidence to tell the stories you’ve always wanted to tell, in a way that cuts through the noise and actually gets noticed.
Cheers!
M
Next time: How to get them hooked on a feeling.
BONUS:
Think that adults are good at distinguishing make-believe stories from the real world? Tell the visitors of this coffee shop in West Village, NYC.
Check out this truly terrific multimedia story about a Tasmanian bushfire, courtesy of The Guardian.
This is the best introduction to storytelling I’ve ever read, closely followed by this one.
“The Man Who Sailed His House”, by Michael Paterniti in GQ: a deeply lyrical piece of journalism (yes, it’s journalism) that walks unsettlingly close to the edge of being fiction. But I dare you to stop reading before the end.
The title of the next newsletter is inspired by my fascination for this thrillingly awful video from musical "genius" David Hasselhoff. Now THAT'S how to use blue-screen, people. If you can manage more than a minute of watching this, you must be German. (Actually I have it on good authority from many German friends that 99% of Germans are just as bemused about the Hoff's singing career as the rest of us. Unfortunately, it's far too late - it's international folk-lore now. Also, you're not off the hook for schlager music, Germany, and maybe you never will be.)
You have no idea the willpower it takes not to click on the schlager music--only because you said, "Please don't click on the schlager music." I can't be your only reader with oppositional personality issues, can I? Or is this like reverse reverse psychology?
I like this framework. I think of myself as predominantly a storyteller, in a manner of speaking: I try to get the idea from my head out and into someone else's head for them to spin around. To me, this is the "story" aspect- the "poetry of prose" still matters too, but it's less important to me than the idea and concept being presented.