“It’s a Real Sad Day …”
By: Mike Martens
Tags: Copywriting, Copy, Writing Tips, Writing, Copywriting Tips

When we tell stories for informational purposes, nothing is more important than structure. Great structure peaks engagement, while bad structure craters it. It’s not just a matter of your ability to convey emotion — your command determines the end quality of the story. Here’s something I ran into a few weeks ago that, I think, demonstrates both edges of the sword we wield as storytellers.

“What’s going on with all the road closures?” I ask a police officer guiding traffic on a quiet street in my downtown Los Angeles neighborhood. The surrounding area was snarled with abnormal Sunday traffic as a bunch of streets around the city center had been abruptly barricaded off by police. He looks at me, pauses, frowns, shakes his head, “It’s a real, real sad day …” And then holds. Things going through my head in these next five seconds: Mass shooting, truck plowed through a crowd, a building collapse … The whole gamut of terrorist and natural disasters. “Well,” he begins again, presumably seeing our eyes wide in horror, “There was a protest expecting over 300 people … and only 13 people showed up.” After chatting details, we walk away, and my wife turns to me, “That is not where I thought that story was going.”

By leading with the emotional response to the essential information, the officer heightened the drama of his answer. We absolutely hung in shock on his initial answer. Effective at soliciting an emotional response? Yes, yes, a thousand times!

Especially in an introduction, each line we write sets expectation of the gravity of what will follow. Leading with the emotional response to information rather than the information itself forcefully cuts ahead to personal investment, and that’s attention grabbing. It’s also a classic storytelling technique.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Andy Weir opens The Martian with “I’m pretty much fucked.” We immediately want to know why this is the case for the narrator. Established information heightens that sense: We likely know the book is about a venture to Mars before we even begin reading. We have expectations from the context.

The probable fucked-ness: “Mark Watney is the only human to have died on Mars.” Payoff! And a big enough payoff that Weir can flirt around it, building additional suspense for a few extra lines after the opening tease. Ultimately, the payoff lands with satisfaction and fuels our continued engagement.

While this is a tried-and-true technique, there’s some rhetorical math to calculate in determining if it’s executed properly — especially when we’re writing on top of an informational framework.

Let’s put the variables on the table:

Context — What does the audience already know or believe when you open your story? Is something about it abnormal? How abnormal? What could that abnormality map to?

— What does the audience already know or believe when you open your story? Is something about it abnormal? How abnormal? What could that abnormality map to? Drama — How much juice are we putting into our rhetorical approach? How strong and/or absolute is the language?

— How much juice are we putting into our rhetorical approach? How strong and/or absolute is the language? Expectation — Context plus Drama. This is how strong — if not what — the audience expects the payoff to be.

— Context plus Drama. This is how strong — if not what — the audience expects the payoff to be. Payoff — How much impact does the information hold? To what degree does it affect the audience or their worldview? How much will it affect the narrator?

Whenever we withhold information for suspense, we typically want payoff to be equal or greater than expectation.

Not too much greater, though! A greater-than-expectation payoff can add power to engagement, but it’s a diminishing result. And besides, copywriting is about efficiency: unspent rhetorical energy is wasted opportunity. If our payoff allows us to boost our drama, we should be doing that.

Now let’s put some examples on paper. I’ve got my anecdote, The Martian’s opening, and we’ll add a typical marketing email to show the practical application.

In our new example, we can see how — if we’re set on that particular copy line — everything hinges on what our sale is going to actually be. Our low-burn context gives us some room to have fun and push the drama of our headline, but we still have to be conscious of the reality of our payoff.

A 10% discount might be a nice Tuesday bonus, but we do that discount a disservice by overplaying the drama and building too much expectation. It’s entirely possible, though, that an unprecedented 50% off on a frequently out-of-stock item gives us just enough payoff to adequately balance the structure. And that results in an engaging and rewarding experience for the audience.

Photo by Nonsap Visuals on Unsplash

Subjectivity reigns here, and it’s not an exact science. So, if you’re making this kind of assessment, you’ve got to be honest with yourself on all fronts. As always, the better we can see through the eyes of our readers, the better copywriters we are.

Now, one final note. Subversion can be a powerful tool, especially where it heightens the sense of voice and tone. A sardonic brand could enhance engagement with an email of “Your life’s about to change … But we’re not going to have anything to do with it.” Or an author might deconstruct expectation with something like: “It was just another lazy Sunday … I was about to become the first human to die on Mars.”

However, lines like these don’t so much break the formula as they leverage an added layer of complexity. In the first example, the act of subversion is the payoff. The copywriter banks on the joke landing, with the resulting delight providing the payoff. In the latter, the structural formula has not yet resolved itself … The actual payoff will answer why being the first human to die on Mars is only a mundane event. In some ways, the subverted balance exists as the Drama of a bigger execution of this structure.

The core still holds: When we build expectation, we want to resolve it with a matching payoff.

And if we can’t, we should just start our story with the fact that there was a protest expecting 300-plus people … and only 13 showed up.