The Storytelling Edge summary

Jack and Jill were next-door neighbors and childhood friends. Later, they fell in love. There were no romantic rivals to come between them, and both were happy to stay in their hometown. Eventually, they married – it just made sense. Their families thought it was a perfect match. They lived happily ever after. 

Is this a cute story? Sure. Is it a great read? Not really – in fact, it’s downright dull. 

If you run Ernest Hemingway’s work through a reading-level calculator, you’ll quickly make an odd discovery – he writes at the same level as fourth-graders. That’s right, the great Nobel Prize-winning American writer’s language is no more complicated than that of the average ten-year-old! Repeat the same exercise with books by J.K. Rowling or Cormac McCarthy, and you’ll see similar results. So what’s going on here?  

The key message here is: Great storytellers value fluency above complexity.  

A few years ago, scientists asked a bunch of people to watch a James Bond movie while wearing a medley of gadgets tracking their brain activity, heart rate, and perspiration levels. When the film’s hero found himself in a jam, their hearts began racing and their hands became clammy. That was expected. But the scientists also noticed something else. Whenever Bond was in danger, viewers’ brains began synthesizing a neurochemical called oxytocin – a kind of “empathy drug.”

Oxytocin tells us that we should care about someone. This is an old evolutionary reflex. In prehistoric times, this neurochemical helped our ancestors work out if a figure in the distance was a friend, or a foe who might just steal their mammoth steaks. In other words, oxytocin allowed humans to identify members of their tribe.  

Sixteenth-century Italy was a turbulent place. Wealthy families vied for power and plotted against one another. Gossip was a useful weapon in these struggles, and it was around this time that the world’s first mass media business was born – avvisi, or gossip rags. Each day, writers fanned out across cities like Milan to gather rumors, which they then wrote up on fancy new printing presses and posted around town. Avvisi were popular, but there was a problem: writing by hand was quicker. 

The key message here is: How you publish is just as important as what you publish.  

America was awash with stories in the late nineteenth century. Big cities like New York were home to dozens of nearly identical newspapers. People’s attention, however, was limited, and so publishers resorted to yesteryear’s version of clickbait – sensational headlines literally shouted at passers-by on busy street corners. The tactic sold papers, but it didn’t win readers’ loyalty. It was time for a different approach. 

The key message here is: When content is everywhere, it pays to go deep.