Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (media.blubrry.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
Story telling is a super power. However, even writers often struggle to find and tell stories in a way that makes them compelling and persuasive. On the 407th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Rob spoke with author and story teller Matthew Dicks. Matthew has a new book called Stories Sell that walks through how to find and tell stories. In this interview, we talked in depth about this critical copywriting skill and how you can develop it for your own business.
Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
Stuff to check out:
The Moth
Story Worthy by Matthew Dicks
Stories Sell by Matthew Dicks
Matthew’s Novel that is a bunch of lists
Live Life Like You’re 100
Matthew’s Website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Full Transcript:
Rob Marsh: Whether you write copy or content, chances are you’ve heard the advice that you need to be telling stories. Stories are powerful… they help us bond to one another, they help communicate ideas and information far more effectively than if we just share the idea or information alone. They trigger the release of a variety of good hormones and they’re just plain entertaining. But often the advice to tell stories is hard to follow because it’s not always clear what counts as a story or how exactly you should go about telling one.
Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, teacher, novelist, non-fiction author and famed story teller Matthew Dicks. Matthew is the author of Story Worthy, a book that is often recommended and shared in the copywriting community as a how-to manual on the art of story telling. And he has a new book out called Stories Sell that takes much of what he shares in Story Worthy and puts it in a business context. I read it a few weeks ago, and honestly believe that every copywriter should have this book on their shelf. And just in case you want a quick link, we’ll have one in the show notes for this episode. This is a great conversation that I think you’ll want to listen to at least twice.
Before we jump in with Matthew…
If you’re listening to this episode when it goes live, we are about a week away from opening up The Copywriter Accelerator for the only time this year. The Accelerator is our 8-part, 16 week program that helps you build a successful freelance business whether you’re a copywriter, a content writer or you use your writing as a strategist, a social media specialist or something else. You’ll learn how to position your business so clients want to work with you. You’ll learn what it taks to create successful products and services that solve real client problems that clients can’t wait to buy. You’ll learn the various ways to price what you do so you get paid for the value you create, not the time that you work. You’ll set up the right processes and learn how to manage clients. You’ll get more than 29 different ideas for ways to get yourself in front of the clients you want to work with and you’ll take the first steps toward creating a brand that resonates with you and the people you want to work with. Many of the copywriters who have gone through The Accelerator have gone on to build six figure businesses. And if that’s something you want, it might be worth checking out. To find out more, go to TheCopywriterAccelerator.com.
And now, let’s go to our interview with Matthew Dicks…
Matthew Dix, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. As I was saying just before we started to record, I’m excited to have you here. I’m guessing that there are a lot of our listeners who know who you are and may be aware of your work. But for those who aren’t, will you just give us the story on how you became writer, novelist, storyteller?
Matthew Dicks: Yeah, that’s a tricky story. But Well, I mean, I became a writer. I like to say on November 30th, 1988, when a teacher in my high school recognized that I had something to say. And at that point in my life, I was sort of a little lost. I was a senior in high school. My parents had indicated to me that when I graduated, I was. out on my own, like college was a word that was never spoken to me as a child by a teacher, guidance counsel, or parents. So, you know, I spent my senior year of high school worried about where I was going to live and what I would eat. And so, you know, I had a moment in a classroom where a teacher gave me a chance to share my voice with the class and it worked out really well. And I discovered that maybe this would be something that could save me someday.
And so I started writing on November 30th, 1988. And I have not missed a day since that day for my entire life. I’ve written every single day of my life through COVID and pneumonia and the birth of children and my wedding day and my honeymoon and everything in between. I have yet to miss a day. Actually, the next day after that sort of momentous moment in high school, I started my first business writing term papers for my classmates, my first writing gig. And with the money I earned from it, I bought my first car, a 78 Chevy Malibu. So I’ve been writing for a very, very long time. It took me 17 years after that day to publish my first novel. So I published my novel, Something Missing, in 2009 with Doubleday. And that basically made my dream come true. You know, at that point, if nothing else had happened, I would have been a happy human being. I would have made my dreams come true.
So since then, I’ve published six novels and three books of nonfiction. I thought I was going to be a novelist for a long time only. Uh, and that would be the extent of my literary career. And then in 2011, in July of 2011, I went to New York city to tell a story on a stage for an organization called the moth, a story slam. You put your name in the hat, you hope it gets picked out. You stand on the stage and you tell a five minute story. I was basically pushed there by my friends who said, you’ve had a terrible life. go talk about it on stage. It’s not true. I’ve not had a terrible life, but I’ve had one of those weird lives of misfortune. You know, I was homeless for a period in my life. I was arrested and tried for a crime I did not commit. I spent time in jail. I’ve been killed. I’ve stopped breathing and my heart has stopped beating twice in my life. And CPR has been performed on me both times. And obviously it worked. So I’ve had all these odd things happen to me. So my friends say, go to the moth and tell stories about it. And so I thought I was going to go and tell one story. And I got on the stage. I hated every minute of that evening until I began speaking into the microphone. And that was the moment I sort of fell in love with telling stories about my life, and being funny, and being heartfelt, and doing all those things that storytellers do. So I started going to New York, and then later Boston, and now all over the world, telling stories on stages large and small. And then I thought that was what I was going to do, which is I’ll be a storyteller and maybe a stand-up. and carve a little bit of a career out of that while I’m writing my books.
I’m also an elementary school teacher for the last 25 years. So, you know, also making a dream of mine come true. I wanted to be a teacher for all my life and I didn’t get to go to college until, you know, six years after I graduated high school. So I never really thought that would come true either. So I’m still teaching elementary school today. But, uh, you know, I started telling stories on stages and business people started to notice me and they understood before I understood that what I was doing on a stage would be helpful to them in the work that they did, whether it was marketing or branding or sales or. you know, advertising, all of those things. And so the business community came to me, I told them they were all crazy. And then it turned out they were not crazy.
And so in 2017, I wrote my first nonfiction book Story Worthy, and that got some attention. And the business world found that book too, which was not written for them, it was really written for people to just want to tell stories about their lives. But the business community sort of took a round peg and shoved it into a square hole and made it work. And then, you know, I started working for some of the biggest companies in the world. Oddly, my wife is still as amazed as I am. Like I’ll walk out of my office and she’ll say, you were just talking to Amazon. And I’m like, well, I was talking to a VP at Amazon, like not Amazon. You know, I work for the FBI now. I help their hostage negotiation unit learn how to tell stories like weird things keep coming over the transom that I can’t believe are happening. And then last year or this year, this year I published Story Sells, which is the story book for business people, it’s the one that they don’t have to jam the square peg into the round hole anymore. So. So that’s where I am today. I’m writing every day, still and telling stories and helping businesses with the work they do.
Rob Marsh: The way you talk about it, storytelling is, is definitely a superpower that opens all kinds of doors. It sounds like.
Matthew Dicks: It really is, yeah. I often say, actually, my friend said, and now I repeat him, Matt’s kind of an unlikable person who tells a good story. And that’s a little true. It can get you out of a lot of trouble telling a really good story.
Rob Marsh: So I want to go back to that first story on the moth stage, because you said you hated everything about the night until you started telling the story. Like, what is the thing that makes because a lot of a lot of people are the opposite, right? They’re OK at the event until they get on stage. And as soon as they’re on stage, everything goes blank. You know, they sweat. You know, they freak out… all of the things. I mean, the joke, you know, that, you know, people would rather be in the coffin at the funeral and giving the eulogy. Right. So what was it that made that difference for you? How did that switch flip?
Matthew Dicks: Well, first my wife pointed out to me that I had been in training for that moment for a long time in my life. I didn’t understand it at the time. I thought I had stumbled onto something in 2011 later in life that I was uncommonly good at. Lucky me. And I said that once, or I said it many times. And then finally my wife heard me say it and she said, really, that’s what you think? And I said, well, I wasn’t performing on stages before then. And she pointed out I was actually a wedding DJ for almost 30 years. So I was accustomed to standing in front of groups of people I had never met before and speaking extemporaneously. So I didn’t have any fear of audiences. I never had that. And I’ve never been nervous in my life, almost never in my life period. I’m just one of those people that sort of moves through life without anxiety of any kind. I’ve also been writing since I was 17.
So when I took that stage that night, I understood something about story structure that maybe other people didn’t. When I was 10, I actually saw the movie E.T. and there’s a scene in E.T. that offended me so much as a 10 year old and even today as a 53 year old that I wrote to Spielberg. And basically the letter said, I love your movies, but you keep having these scenes that screw everything up. So if you’d like to run the movie by me first, I could help clear up this problem for you. And I gave it to my mother and said, mail this to Steven Spielberg, please. And she said, okay. And it took me like 35 years to realize my mother never mailed that letter. Cause I’ve been mad at Spielberg. I was like, how could he not write back to a kid? And then it occurred to me in 1981, a mother who could barely hold it together as it was, how was she going to find without the internet, the address for Steven Spielberg, right? She looked at the letter, she read it and she threw it away for sure. But even at 10, I was watching movies and I was not thinking so much about the movie as it passed through me, I was actively deconstructing it and thinking about what was making it work.
So my wife pointed out, like, you’ve been doing this all your life. When you took the stage at the Moth, you were already ready to go. But the thing I love the most was, as a novelist, you write a book, and it takes you somewhere, for me, between one and three years to finish a book. And then you send it out into the world, and occasionally you hear what people think of it, long after the story’s done, and sometimes after you can’t remember parts of the story, because it’s been like a year and a half, and you’ve written two books since then. But at the Moth, or any time I speak publicly, I get instant feedback from the audience. I know within seconds if I’m winning or losing simply by the response of the audience. And that instant feedback appealed to me. I grew up on video games. Back when you used to have to actually put quarters in video games and there was like value on being good at a game. You could never sort of just start over. And I loved video games because I always knew where I stood. Like there was a score at the top and I knew if I was winning or losing and storytelling, public speaking, standup comedy, all of those opportunities to speak in front of human beings and get a auditory response immediately really appealed to me.
Rob Marsh: So let’s, let’s break that down then when we’re talking about stories, what is it that makes stories work? Because again, I think a lot of people feel like they may not be good storytellers or they don’t have good stories to tell. And I think sometimes you may even say this in your book. I can’t remember exactly, but maybe it’s just that we don’t know how to tell a story the right way in order to communicate what needs to be communicated.
Matthew Dicks: Yeah. Well, actually, I think the biggest problem is people don’t know what a story is. Okay. So let’s start there. Yeah. Oftentimes people assume that something happened to them. And so now I’m going to tell you what happened. And that’s not a story that’s reporting on your life. And it turns out no one wants you to report on your life except your spouse is required to listen and your mother might actually want to hear it, but no one else. So just because something happened, even if it’s something fascinating or unusual or unbelievable, that doesn’t make it a story. It just makes it an anecdote that occurred to you or happened to you at some point in your life. And then people report on it chronologically and They don’t get anywhere with it.
So a story is fundamentally about change over time. You know, every book you’ve ever read, any movie you’ve seen, any play you’ve seen, any story I’ve ever told is about. a character, you know, in my case, if I’m telling a story, it’s about me, if it’s a business, it might be a product, it might be a CEO, it might be the business itself, you’re in one place, and then something happens. And now you’re in a new place, it’s either transformation, meaning we’re going to fundamentally change as a person or as a an entity will say, or realization, which is more common, which is we used to think one thing, or I used to think one thing, and now I think a new thing. If you don’t have that change over time, you really just have a flat line of events that are occurring. They can often be connected by the word and which is how first graders tell stories and how 31 year olds sometimes tell stories, which is this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened. And so we don’t actually end up anywhere with meaning. We just end up relating events that took place in our lives, which are not entertaining. So what we’re looking for, if we want to be storytellers are moments of change where we. realize something new about the world, about ourselves, about the people around us, you know, about anything, really, if there’s change, even infinitesimal change, that is going to constitute a story. And that’s the kind of thing people are attracted to. They remember what they find entertaining.
Rob Marsh: So this is something I think a lot of copywriters, content writers are going to relate to because when we sit down to write about products, we’re thinking about a customer journey and that customer has to go through some transformation that the product creates for them. So this is immensely useful if we can actually get good at it. So can we talk through like, okay, so how do we find these stories? How do we identify something that’s going to stick like that, something where do we find the change? And how do we talk about that final result of that transformation?
Matthew Dicks: Well, when I work with people, the first thing I do is I say, let’s mine our own lives for the stories we have. I essentially say, let’s throw our stuff on the table because oftentimes that’s enough customer stories are fine. But the problem with the customer story is we’re telling someone else’s story at that point. And when you tell someone else’s story, that’s harder to be entertaining and engaging. If I say, Hey, I got a friend named Peter. Do you want to hear this crazy thing that happened to him? You’re like, no, actually I don’t. I don’t know, Peter. It’s meaningless to me. But if I said, Hey, something just happened five minutes ago to me, that was really foundational and. you know, instrumental to my life. Do you want to hear it? You probably do because it’s the person telling the story. So the more personal our stories can be, the more meaningful they’ll be. So I start by saying, well, you know, you made this product, right? What does it mean to you? You know, if you were the person who made it, tell me about the journey from soup to nuts. Like when did the idea occur to you? Tell me when the first step was taken. Tell me when the first obstacle took place. You know, tell me how you overcame that obstacle. Tell me about the journey to the creation of the product. That’s a great place to start because that’s a story.
Lots of people like, you know, people love the story of Spanx because they love the idea of a woman cutting off essentially the feet of her leggings and changing the way women dress. fraternity, or at least as long as Spanx are around, right? Because people can see that it’s tangible. They understand moments of inspiration. They love that. So we start with stories like that. And then if it’s not that, and you’re sort of, well, I didn’t invent it. I’m just here to sell it. Well, what does it mean to you as a person who is selling it? You know, is this something that’s going to matter to you? I bought my windows in my house. I had to replace all my windows, right? I wanted to. I didn’t buy the most expensive or the cheapest windows or even really the best windows. I bought Trevor Divine’s windows because he came in and he told me stories. We started with golf for 30 minutes. At that point, I was buying his windows anyway. He came into my house. He saw a nine iron leaning against the door and said, Oh, so you play golf. And 30 minutes later, we’re still talking about golf. And he says, well, maybe I should bring the window in so you can check it out. And I thought in my head, sure, but I’m buying it. I don’t care as long as it’s made of glass and it keeps the bugs out. I’m good because I like you. Right? Because that’s how people buy things, right? They buy them from people they believe in more than the thing itself. But Trevor had a story about the relationship of the windows to his life. He also had these windows in his house. You know, he said, this is the same window I have in my house. I also did exactly what you did. And oddly, I didn’t get much of a discount. So I understand the cost of putting in windows the way you’re going to do it. I did the very same thing. So he was able to sort of relate to me and tell me his journey through replacing windows. He had funny stories, he had interesting stories. So oftentimes we don’t even have to go to our customers if we are customers of a product or we understand the product in some meaningful way.
Rob Marsh: So I think this is a really important point that stories create relationships. In fact, it’s probably the primary way that we create relationships with other human beings. I think you talk about some of the science of this in your book and why that happens. I don’t necessarily want you to have to repeat everything that’s in the book. People should definitely go buy all of your books. But let’s talk about that for a minute. How does that happen, that this relationship is created?
Matthew Dicks: Sure. Well, when we tell someone a story, we actually change their brain chemistry in ways that they have no control over. And that’s because of evolution. For all but the last one quarter of 1% of human existence, we have not been able to write anything down. And so for almost all of humanity, the only way we transferred information from one generation to the next was through oral storytelling. So our brains have evolved to pay attention when someone’s telling a story. So back in the day, we’ll say the story might’ve been, hey, the berries on that bush, they killed uncle Joe. So don’t eat those berries, right?
Our brains have, have understood over time, they’ve been evolved to understand that story is equal survival. When someone’s telling us a story, it might keep us alive. And so our brain chemistry changes as we’re told a story to accommodate for that. So if I tell you a story. Oxytocin is released, for example, which is the empathy chemical, which means that you’re going to feel more connected to me even if you don’t like me, because I told you a story. And endorphins get released, which make you feel better about the world and about where we are, and you attribute those good feelings to me. ability to comprehend stories actually improves and your ability to retain information improve all by me just telling you a story.
Laughter produces the same thing as well. So a funny story is like a superpower, like a supercharged version of that story. But when we change brain chemistry like that, when we start telling stories, people just feel more connected to us. And when they feel connected to us, they trust us. And when they trust us, we can convince them to vote for the person we want them to vote for, buy the product we want to buy, you know, engage in the service we want them to engage in. It’s just more likely to be available to us if we prime their brains in that way. So telling stories makes a lot of sense, especially early on in a relationship.
Rob Marsh: And as I mentioned earlier, I think a lot of people struggle with this, oftentimes because we feel like we don’t have any stories to tell. And again, in your books, you talk about several different ways to find stories. My favorite is Homework for Life, although I have to admit, I struggle a little bit with Homework for Life. And we can talk about what it is, but let me tell you my struggle, because I’m sure you’ve heard this from a lot of people. Most of my life is sitting at the same desk, working on the same kind of project, doing the same kind of thing. And so if I sit down at the end of the day to write what interesting things happened to me today, as I think the requirement is, I find it really hard to find something new. And so what I have found is that when I do homework for life, I actually start remembering old stories. And so it actually ends up being less about today and more about, oh, that time that the exchange student from Norway was staying with us for a week and we stole the golf carts at the golf course and drove them into the lake. I’m gonna have to maybe edit that part out. But yeah, that’s what happens to me. And so let’s talk a little bit about Homework for Life and how we can find our stories.
Matthew Dicks: Sure. Well, that is part of Homework for Life is you resurrect stories for sure. And that happens to me all the time. I agree that I hear your excuse quite a bit. I think it’s weird that you work 24 hours a day and you have to sit at a desk for 24 hours. Most people work for six to eight hours a day, which means we have a solid eight to 10 hours a day where we’re not sitting at our desks. Even when we’re sitting at our desks, I think we have moments. Homework for life is the idea that every day should be held onto. It’s precious and it contains stories. I started it because I was starting to run out of stories to tell on stage. So I assigned myself this homework assignment every day. I’m going to sit down and at the end of the day, I’m gonna ask myself what happened that is story worthy. And I’m going to write it down. Not the whole story. Cause I think that’s crazy. Instead, I want you to write, uh, in an Excel spreadsheet is what I use. Essentially the length of a screen in one cell, five or six sentences at most. What happened over the course of the day, even if that thing is not incredibly story worthy, you must extract something from each day.
My goal was one new story per month, 12 new stories per year. I would have been thrilled. Instead, I discovered my life is filled with stories in ways I never imagined. And I’m not a unicorn. Tens of thousands of people have realized the same thing, doing homework for life. The problem is we don’t pay attention to our lives because we’re so focused on everything else. And when we do notice something of meaning, we don’t hold onto it. We let it go. And what happens is time becomes fleeting as a result. I hear people all the time say, time flies and it doesn’t fly. It just goes unaccounted for. So if I asked you. How many days can you remember from the year 2021? Even if I let you look at your calendar from that year, if you’re really good, you might get a hundred days, which means you’ve taken 365 days and reduced it to a hundred, which is why time feels like it’s flying because you’re throwing away, you know, 165 days or 265 days in a year. Suddenly time flies because you don’t have enough days to account for each year. Homework for life says every day is worth remembering and every day probably contains more stories than, you know, when I started doing it in 2014, 2015, I was finding a little more than one story per day. That was worth writing down today. I find more than seven and it’s not because my life is more interesting. It’s because the lens for storytelling has become. sharper and more refined. So I see things that I used to not see. And it’s not that everything that I say or everything that I write down is going to be said, you know, I did analysis on that as well. How many of the things in my homework for life do I actually speak out loud as a story or a part of a story or a joke and stand up or even a moment in one of my novels? It’s about 10%, which means 90% of the stuff that I write down never gets spoken out loud, but I’m still glad I’m holding onto it.
And I never judge anything. And so things as simple as when we think something for the first time that goes into my homework for life. So the other day I’m picking up the art table in our house and I’m pulling all the kids crayons together. I noticed the Brown crayon never gets used. It’s always like long it’s, you know, the blue crayon has nothing left and the Brown crayons always get everything. And I thought to myself, is the Brown crayon, the crayon least used because Brown is the color of poop. Now, I don’t know if that’s true, but that. thought amused me and it’s in my homework for life now. It’s never something I’m going to say on a stage. It’s not even a good joke really. It was just a thought I had and it was the first time I’d ever had that thought. And so it enters my homework for life. So it’s not necessarily what we did, although it could be, and it’s not what we said, although it could be. A lot of times it’s just like a thought that ran through my mind, an idea that I had, a realization that I’m dumb. My son said something I never want to forget. So often parents hear this where their kids say something unbelievable. They’re like, I got to write that down. And then they never do. And then their kid’s 18 and they can’t figure out how time flew. It didn’t fly. You never wrote anything down.
You know, my kids are 15 and 12 and thank God I started doing homework for life just about the time my daughter was born. So my daughter is 15 and she feels 15 because I’ve been accounting for her days without missing one and my son for the same reason. So homework for life is the acknowledgement that our days are filled with stories, but it takes some time to develop the skill. You know, remember I went from one per day to seven per day, but that took a long time. But even if you find one per day, that’s fantastic because now you’re going to hold on to your days and they’re worth remembering. And it gives you the content that you need to do the job that you’re doing.
Rob Marsh: Yeah. I love the exercise. And like I said, when I, when I sit down to do it, I, I resurrect a ton of stories from the, from the past. But as we were talking about at the beginning, you know, some of these incidents or thoughts aren’t really stories, right? Because they don’t have that point of transformation. So how do you take what you collect in your homework for life and actually turn it into a story? Let’s say that, you know, you want to go on the moth again in a couple of months and you start going through your homework for life to figure out, OK, what’s a new story I can tell? What does that process look like?
Matthew Dicks: Sure. Well, I’m going tonight. I’m going to be in Boston tonight performing at the moth. So there are moments that happen to me in my homework for life. that I know are not stories, but could be parts of stories someday. You know, my son says something weird and I know it’s not a story, but someday I might be telling a story about my son and he might be acting foolish and I’ll use that as an anecdote to support his foolishness. I’ll be like, Oh, well he said that weird thing. I’m going to include it. The other day he asked me, why do t-shirts have pockets when no one would ever put something in a t-shirt pocket? And I was like, that’s a good point. And it’s the way he sees the world, which is he questions everything. The apple has not fallen far from the tree. And so I might tell a story someday about how my son and I are alike because we constantly look at the world and basically look for something to complain about. Right. And I’ll use that moment, the question about the t-shirt as a moment and a much longer story. I don’t judge anything.
We often don’t know what is going to be a story until sort of later on when we reflect, but there are moments when we know it’s the, just, it’s the moment when you realize something has just happened. That’s transformational. I’ve suddenly made an important decision or realize something. So the other day. Charlie falls into my son, Charlie, he falls into the bedroom. I don’t know why he falls in, but he’s 12. He just falls. He falls into my bedroom. And when he falls, he ends up looking under the bed and he sees under the bed of baseball bat. It’s his little league baseball bat from his first year in little league. And he asks me, why is this bat under your bed? And it’s there because I’m exceptionally vigilant. I’m the victim of two violent crimes in my life. It is there because I am prepared in ways he can’t begin to understand. This is one of a thousand things I’ve done. And I’m sitting there trying to decide if I tell my 12 year old that it’s there in case our home is ever invaded. And at first I think I don’t want him to know that possibility exists. Then I think to myself, well, he’s 12. He probably does know that’s a possibility. So then I decided to tell him the truth. I say it’s there because if an animal or a person ever comes into the house and they’re not supposed to be here, I want to be able to brain them. I want to be able to bash their head in and protect our family. And he looks at me, I can tell the gears are going in his brain. And then he says to me, okay, good job, dad. And he puts it under the bed and he runs away. He’s still a boy. He doesn’t have to worry about things because he has a father who will worry for him. And in that moment I go, well, that’s a story because that was, I felt the weight of the decision that I had to make and I felt the tension in what he was going to say to me. And when he said it to me, I realized, oh good, he gets to still be a boy. I told him a scary thing, but I told him his father’s ready for it. And now he gets to let go of those fears. And I said, well, that’s a story. Right, because I felt the weight of the moment and that’s what we’re looking for. It’s the moment when the hair stands in the back of your neck. It’s the moment when you have to hold your breath waiting for someone to answer. It’s the moment when you learn something for the first time, good or bad, you know, it’s all of those moments. Those are the story moments. That bat moment, actually, I’m working with a cybersecurity company.
And when it happened, it occurred to me, oh, this will be a good story for the cybersecurity company because the cybersecurity company is essentially the bat under the bed. Right. They’re going to take care of you the same way I’m taking care of Charlie. Charlie doesn’t have to worry about home invaders because he knows his father’s ready. You don’t have to worry about someone coming in and, you know, ransom wearing your stuff because we have a bat under the bed for you. Right. It’s a good story to relate to. So that’s how that content becomes meaningful to us. We can use these things that happen to us. And even if it’s not the Charlie story, exactly, we can use that metaphor of a bat under the bed or some other way of preparing for emergencies. We can use that metaphor for the cybersecurity company. So I’m always thinking in those regards.
Rob Marsh: One thing I know you do for your community and your audience, and we’ll share the website where people can get on your list so they can do this, but you do a pretty regular call where you do examples of this, like how you take a product and create a story around it. And if you’re willing, I’d love to just kind of go through that process just a little bit, because I think taking personal stories is a little bit different from an actual business story or writing about a product.
Matthew Dicks: Yeah, we call it, I call it business time and essentially once a month I get on a call. It’s whoever wants to join me. It’s, you know, it’s public and free.
Rob Marsh: They’re fantastic by the way. If you’re listening, you should definitely jump on and listen to Matthew do this.
Matthew Dicks: Thank you. And they give me a random product and then I go through a very cursory version of what I do with companies. You know, with a company we would go for a lot longer and it would take a series of meetings and possibly weeks before we land on a final strategy. But I sort of give an overview or a, You know, a quick and dirty version of what I might do with a company. So essentially I get a product of any kind and it can be as simple as a, I did a thumbtack one day. Actually, thumbtack was a good example. Someone said thumbtack. And when I’m trying to think of a product story, how are we going to sell a thumbtack? I start to think of stories and I say, well, stories have protagonists and antagonists, right? Good guys and bad guys. Our good guy is the thumbtack. So what’s the bad guy? Like what’s the opponent to a thumbtack? And I started listing them. I like lists a lot. I wrote a novel based only on lists. And the one I landed on was gravity, the enemy of the thumbtack. The thing that thumbtack is defeating is gravity because we want to have our papers stick to a wall, but gravity will not allow it to happen. Enter the mighty thumbtack, the defeater of gravity, right? And so we’re looking for who our enemy is. Who our protagonist is we’re looking for in some cases, like who of our, who are our constituents, which are ultimately be our customers. And then we look for stories to tell.
And sometimes those stories come from me or someone else I’m working with at the table in the business. And sometimes they come from outside sources and sometimes we just generate a story. And in that case, it was the mighty thumb tack. It was this simple thing that you probably have never purchased in your life and yet somehow made its way into your drawer, into your desk drawer. You have thumbtacks and they could be plastic and tall or they could be metal and short, but they’re all brave and they’re all fantastic because they’re defeating the thing that none of us can defeat, which is gravity, right? We are trapped on this planet unless we get on a big rocket and escape gravity. But the thumbtack everyday defeats gravity in a noble and quiet way. And so we do that with every product. We look for antagonists and protagonists, and we look for stories and, uh, we play with what’s going to be most emotionally appealing. What’s going to be memorable. What’s relatable. All of those questions get answered too. And then ultimately we decide on a strategy, which might again, not be the best strategy, but it is a strategy we come up with in 45 minutes. That way I would first pitch to a client and say, okay, how about the mighty thumbtack? The defeater of gravity and the thumbtack guy might say, no, I don’t like that. Right. And I’ll be like, all right, fine. We’ll go find a new story. And I go back to that process again.
Rob Marsh: So this is actually an interesting opportunity, I think, for a lot of writers to engage more with companies. Oftentimes we get hired to, you know, write the blog post or write the sales page or write the email, but we’re not asked to help come up with the story strategy. I wonder if you have some thoughts around how somebody might start to approach their clients into engaging in that kind of work.
Matthew Dicks: Well, you know, let’s take like blog posts and email, for example, right? We have to acknowledge that no one has ever woken up in the morning hoping to read an email or a blog post. Right. And unfortunately though, businesses don’t seem to understand this. They think that if I landed something in your inbox, you are excited about reading it. When I think most people’s default is, do I have to read this? Right. They’re looking to delete. They’re looking to eliminate so when we write something that is gonna land in the inbox for a customer writing a blog post that we’re gonna give someone a link to we have to acknowledge that nobody wants to read it and when we have that as our fundamental truth. Then suddenly we recognize the importance of storytelling and genuinely being entertaining. It’s a meaningful way and it’s gotta be at the top of everything we do because. If you’re entertaining in the last paragraph, no one’s ever going to get to the last paragraph to see how funny you are or how engaging you are or how witty you are. It’s got to happen at the top.
So, you know, my company, we write emails and the way we write them is my business partner essentially uses AI to create sales copy. And then he sends it to me and he says, okay, here’s the version that basically everyone else sends some version of this. And then he says, do your stuff. Which means in the first paragraph or two, please tell a story that is somehow related to what we are selling or what we’re offering or what service we’re providing. And I have to find a way to relate something in my life to the content and tell a story through it. And it works very, very well. I was actually at a storytelling show recently and a woman came up to me and said, I get all your emails. And my thought was, Oh, she’s going to tell me I send too many emails. Cause I probably do. And she said, I can’t help but read them because that first opening paragraph always has such a good story to read. I know that I’m going to get something good. And then she said, and that just sucks me to the bottom. Right. Cause I, I drip it all the way through the email. We have to find a way to get people to want to read the stuff instead of just getting what most people produce. Content that is coherent and complete and grammatically correct, but what round white and flavorless is the phrase I use, right? It doesn’t mean anything ultimately, and it’s forgettable. So we have to find a way to make it more memorable. My open rates are terrific. Like they’re fantastic on my email and it’s because I’m engaging in storytelling and that can be, I’m telling a story about my life. That’s like engaging enough. It could be, I’m telling something funny. That’s going to make someone laugh and make them want to read it. Sometimes it’s just like, here’s a crazy thing that I learned. Right. One of those, you know, you learn a fact and you can’t wait to share it with everyone else on the planet. I wrote, I write those down all the time because I know that there’s a lot of ways to entertain.
When I use the word entertain, people always think funny, but it’s not entertaining is funny. Sure. That could be one, but it could be telling a story. It could be providing a actionable recommendation that can be used five minutes from now, like a life hack. That’s very entertaining. When someone told me. that one of the best ways to maintain your balance in your old age, because people tend to die because they fall down and then they go to the hospital and then they get a disease in the hospital. They die. That happens all the time. Right? So someone told me the best way to avoid that Matt is when you’re brushing your teeth every night for two minutes, stand on one foot for the first minute and stand on the other foot for the second minute and practice standing on one foot. That was super entertaining to me because I immediately began doing it and after a year of doing it, I can’t believe how better my balance is now. I can stand on one foot longer than you. I’m loving that. I’m loving this idea. And that’s entertaining, right? Yeah. So it’s not funny. It’s not a story, but it’s actionable content, right? So if we, if we provide our readers with something that they will perceive as entertaining, one of those things, right? The story, the funny, the actionable content, the insight into something you’ve never noticed before, right?
It’s Valentine’s Day. Here is an amazing gift if you’re stuck on Valentine’s Day, right? If it’s close to Valentine’s Day, you’re reading. If you don’t have anything, you’re definitely reading. So if you can find a way to relate that to the content, to the product, to the service, right now you’ve got someone reading your content. And that’s why I love AI, because AI is going to make everyone who can’t be entertaining sound stupid and boring, and it will allow only entertaining storytellers, funny people, people who understand that you have to grab people’s attention and engage them. It’s going to make those people so valuable, because AI just can’t do any of those things, and it’s never going to be able to do those things. It writes really great sentences, but those sentences sound like everybody else’s sentences. So, you know, the bottom of an email can sound really boring as long as I hook them at the top, I bring them to the bottom. So that’s how those personal stories are. Those interesting notes, those footnotes. Like if you’re in a company, one of the best things to do is just s