Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019
Tell stories
Tips on writing
As soon as I was old enough to read real books, I found a flashlight and stashed it in my bedroom. While my family slept, I read under the blanket, muting any light that might find its way under the door, often until 3 or 4 in the morning. I knew I would be tired in school, but I couldn’t stop. I would read until the flashlight fell out of my hands.
Even now, once I start a novel with a good story, I can’t put it down. During the two weeks when I promised myself I would finish this book, after telling myself I wasn’t allowed to pick up any novels, I read John Banville’s Ancient Light and Lee Child’s Killing Floor. The styles are utterly dissimilar. I was reading for story. I needed to know what would happen. It was hard not to flip to the back. Sometimes I would, just a little, because I wanted to be sure a character I liked wasn’t headed for disaster.
All humans like stories. We get sucked in by the characters. Unlike facts, which can be tedious to read, stories are emotional. If you read an analysis about class distinctions, you might struggle through it. But have you watched Downton Abbey, a television series about how class is lived? It’s fascinating (even if not accurate down to the last detail). I still haven’t read a history book about the Nazi occupation of France, but I was hooked by the personal stories in the fictional-but-based-on-reality series A French Village. Even knowing the characters weren’t real people, I needed to keep watching to find out whether they became collaborators, or fled the country, or blew up their marriages.
Nonfiction persuasive pieces can do the same thing. They can offer characters, suspense, and some kind of satisfying conclusion. I once received an op-ed from a man who had been incarcerated for much of his life. John Thompson wrote about spending eighteen years in prison—fourteen of them on death row—for a robbery and murder he did not commit. Thompson didn’t use suspense to build his story; he told us right away that he had been freed from prison after his conviction was overturned. But he presented himself as a character the reader could identify with, mostly by talking about his love for his family. He described how one year, he was scheduled to be executed on May 20 and had come to accept it—until realizing that his final day was just before his son’s graduation and the day of his senior class trip.
Suddenly Thompson knew he had to do whatever he could to stop the execution, so his son’s experience wouldn’t be forever tainted. He begged his lawyers to get the execution delayed. They did get it postponed. More than that, they finally got him exonerated and freed after the courts ruled that prosecutors had covered up evidence that would have cleared him. He had a message and an argument, but he made his point through his story. At the Times we received few pieces from prisoners, so they were all special; but none touched me like that. Thompson made a prisoner a real person to me, not a statistic. If he had written a polemic about the risks of wrongly imprisoning people, I doubt that I would have remembered it.
There are classic story forms. I learned one of the simplest and most effective in a television writing course: Get your character up a tree. Then get him down, in 30 minutes. Done.
People are attracted to stories about disaster, about facing adversity and overcoming challenges, about conflict and self-doubt, and about connections made despite some kind of obstacle. Through story, we learn lessons about how to deal with our own lives. All of us have suffered or felt confused. If you start by telling stories that get people engaged, then you can later talk about larger issues and solutions—after, as my teacher said, you get that character down from the tree. Stories draw people in, and they connect brains. Neuroscience has found that when an engrossing story is told, the listener’s brain merges with the teller’s, and they manifest the same brain-wave action. Stories have been told throughout history as an efficient way to preserve and share information. We remember stories, by and large, better than we recall lists.
When you listen carefully, you’re likely to hear stories that you can use in your writing. The Op-Ed department had a party every year, most often near Valentine’s Day and usually organized by my old friend Gail Collins, who had become a columnist at the Times. It included our regular columnists, writers, editors, and any celebrities who might be entranced by our cerebral crowd and the dour file-cabinet decor of the office. I remember the year that Tom Hanks dropped by, which led to his contributing a charming piece on why he likes typewriters. At one party, the New School philosophy professor Simon Critchley told the story of his disastrous outing wearing a pink shirt, and I begged him to write it for us. He used the story as a reflection on class, clothing, and the nature of swear words.
More recently, I avidly read a story Margaret Renkl wrote for the Times about the experience of being loved by a dog. Hardly a novel idea. But she made it concrete and connected it to mothers, to widowhood, to family. By using details like chipped paint to illuminate the intensity of the dog’s obsession for its owner, she made the story memorable and the dog a vivid character.
Paul Smith, who trains businesspeople to use stories, sees certain mistakes among those who try but fail to tell stories, and his advice applies to writing as well. Too many people, he says, tell stories that aren’t stories—they’re not engaging or emotional. They’re just plugs for a company’s product or way of doing business. Stories have to be narratives about something that happened to someone, with a time, a place, a main character, and some interesting development. More of a problem, Smith says, is that many people don’t recognize a good story when they hear one.
Try this experiment, and see if it helps you develop storytelling skills. Before you go to sleep, write down something you saw or heard that day. There’s a reason it’s still in your mind. Recently I was walking down Eighth Street in New York, nearing a family that had just gotten out of a car and was headed to a restaurant. Three little girls were dressed in identical floral dresses. Suddenly I saw a phone hit the ground. I heard a crack. The mother started screaming at the girl who dropped the phone; she couldn’t have been more than four. “Are you out of your mind? What do you think you are doing?” The man she was with admonished her that it was probably an accident.
“No,” she screamed, “I saw it. It was deliberate.”
The little girl cried and cried in the face of that rage. I kept walking because to stand and watch seemed impolite. But I wanted to know: Why had the mother let such a young child hold a phone? Why was she so angry? Was it the first time that had happened, or the tenth? Or had she just been fighting with her husband about the hours he spent at work—or his failure to find a job? I still see that scene and think it could be the beginning of a story.
That’s the jumping-off point for an imagined story. But there are plenty of “real” stories, and you will collect them by listening.
There’s nothing new about the value of stories. The need for them is embedded in our biology and never disappears. If you tell stories, you can sometimes change the way someone looks at the world. Researchers have found that many people are reluctant to believe statistics because they associate numbers with the elite. But they believe stories, because stories are real to them. Although it seems counterintuitive, many people believe anecdote and story before they believe facts. British Future, a think tank in England, found that people responded to stories of individual immigrants much more positively than to statistics about immigration issues. They viewed numbers as manipulated and elitist.
The power of story to change minds has been documented in research settings where volunteers watch movies and then assess whether the movies have affected their opinions. In one study, researchers found that viewers who watched The Rainmaker, about a lawyer and a paralegal who get together to fight an insurance company that refused coverage for a couple’s dying son, became more liberal on health policy. People who watched the conspiracy drama JFK, which suggested the government was involved in the president’s assassination, felt helpless and had less desire to participate in the political system. Those who watched The Cider House Rules, which showed a compassionate doctor who performed abortions for young women, became more supportive of legal abortion. So movies reach us, as do television shows.
Comedians, because they are some of the best storytellers, are especially influential. In the spring of 2017, when Congress was debating changes to the health-care laws, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel told viewers about his son, who almost died from a heart defect when he was just ten days old. An alert nurse and a speedy surgery saved the baby’s life. Kimmel pleaded with politicians to make sure all Americans would have access to the kind of health care that saved his child.
The video of his monologue was shared millions of times; even Obama weighed in on Twitter, applauding Kimmel for defending his health-care act.
Stories make sense not only of the larger world, but also our personal world. The older we get, the more likely we are to create a narrative about the meaning of our lives. How lucky that you lost your job and had to move to California, because if you hadn’t, you never would have met the woman you married; how lucky that your house burned down, because it forced you to start over in a new and better place. What can seem traumatic, even disastrous, later becomes part of the story of your life. We don’t usually define ourselves by statistics, but by our progression.
In your writing, you don’t have to tell long stories. You just have to make your story specific and real. And don’t abandon facts; just weave them into your story. The lure of a story will get people to pay attention and painlessly consume the information. The popular TED Talks rely on story. The most successful ones have millions of views because, in a short presentation, the speakers tell a story about their work that differentiates it from what you would find in academic journals. And although those talks are presented from the stage, most of them would work well as pieces of writing, because the same detail that creates power in the speech would make a written work compelling.
Creating Stories in Your Writing
Look for suspense. What is the dilemma? How will it be resolved? It’s suspense that keeps us addicted to television shows that go on for many seasons. Create tension in the story by making readers wonder what will happen next.
Create a transformation. When people read or watch a story about someone who changed in a way they would like to emulate, they are more interested in the facts underlying that transformation.
Use images to help your viewers see. Kimmel did this when he described his baby waiting in the hospital for a lifesaving surgery. Our brains react to image and help transport us into the story. The characters and the setting are so real that they become part of your life.
Be logical in telling what happened. Otherwise people will get confused. You want to keep them engaged, not give them a reason to stop reading or watching.
Make sure the end focuses on the message you want your readers to take away. People are most likely to remember the ending, so don’t let your tale just trail off.