Lesson 35: The “active ingredients” that do the real work of making stories engaging

All about archetypal features

I mentioned back in lesson #4 that most people think stories are interesting because of their plots.

Not so — stories are interesting primarily because of the emotional responses they evince; but we don’t get emotional about plots. We get emotional about people.

Plots simply organize events to happen to the characters in a way that produces an emotional payoff.

This should give us pause about the much-vaunted use of plot archetypes in sales copy. Especially in email copy. This is a controversial thing to say, since there are talented marketers who swear by plot archetypes. Daniel Levis, for instance, is a marketing psychology expert in my mastermind group and has created entire products based around using plot archetypes to sell. So I want to emphasize that I’m not saying plot archetypes are never effective for selling. They obviously are.

What I’m saying is that I think my way is better.

What are plot archetypes?

• An archetype is an idealized pattern or model, used repeatedly in stories because it resonates with readers.

• A plot is a sequence of events that unfold by causally following each other.

• A plot archetype is therefore a pattern for how the events in a selection of similar successful stories are arranged. You get character archetypes too, which are patterns for different kinds of people that crop up within these stories — the wise old man, plucky young hero, the beautiful princess, the clown, etc. I’ll touch on this later.

Why I don’t believe in using plot archetypes in copywriting

When you study archetypes you tend to look to sources like the Gilgamesh saga, epics like Beowulf, folk tales like Cinderella, and classic novels like Anna Karenina. But I actually think literature is a very unhelpful source if you want to learn copywriting. This is because copywriting is a pragmatic discipline aimed at “average” people, while studying epic poetry like the Aeneid is a very academic exercise; something generally done by what I can only call snobs who would sneer at the stuff Joe Average likes. Studying the “classic” archetypal sources tends to get you into abstruse theories of literature or psychology, which frankly are just intellectual wankery — polished turds with a sugar-coating of sageness.

These are of no use whatever if you just want simple, effective ways to engage an audience.

It’s not just climbing the ivory tower that’s a problem. There’s a very serious practical concern with applying plot archetypes to copy: epic tales and classic novels were written for people who didn’t have much else to do except listen to or read them. Modern sales copy is written to people who have everything else to do. So even when you distill these classics into the three or four or seven or twenty or however many plot archetypes you care to count, and just tick off stasis, trigger, quest, surprise, choice, climax, reversal, resolution, you generally end up with a lot of words on the page. More words than your average reader has the motivation to chow down.

The same is true of many more “realistic” sources for understanding plot and character — sources Sam finds engaging and enjoyable, and where we can discover transferable principles to make copy engaging and enjoyable too. I speak of movies and TV shows. I’ve found a lot of great ideas in these, but again, they are designed to unfold over hours or even days, weeks, or months. Even a single TV episode is 20-60 minutes.

Online copy does not work in these kinds of timeframes.

The plot and character concepts which have been most useful to me, and have the best crossover in terms of applying to copywriting, come not from literature, nor from visual entertainment. They come from the most condensed entertainment medium there is.

Music.

Music has to distill the stuff we care about into about 3 and a half minutes. It condenses the “stuff that matters” into a concentrated form, rather than diluting it across an entire movie or show.

But there’s another reason music is important to study, which gets to why I disagree with the method of using plot archetypes in the first place:

Short-form copy blows long-form copy away.

You know that I don’t mean you should give Sam less information rather than more. I mean that giving him that information in lots of little chunks is far more effective than one long piece of copy he has to read all at once. Email marketing has taken the traditional sales-page approach we inherited from the old-school direct-response letter-senders, and has pitilessly knelt it down in a back alley and chopped it into a few dozen bite-sized bits.

While the old-school medium of 20,000 word sales pages that take a half hour to scroll to the end of might be great for telling a “hero’s journey” story, the same cannot be said of email.

Mind you, even in sales pages I think telling this kind of story is often ineffective. That’s because more and more people are doing it — and when something in marketing becomes common, it easily becomes impotent. This is just the principle of contrast at work: when a technique designed to differentiate or excite fails to do so any more, there’s not much point using it. I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself if you’ve read many sales pages. If it starts off by telling you about how the author was broke and desperate, but accidentally stumbled upon a great secret and suddenly enjoyed huge success, only to make some terrible mistakes and lose everything again, before having to slowly build it back up through many trials and errors, then finally returning to bring this sacred knowledge to you...well, it’s just kinda hackneyed, right? Even if it’s true, it seems unbelievable because you’re thinking, this guy just copied another sales letter from another guy who just copied Great Expectations. So in fact the very thing that theoretically makes this technique so powerful ends up making it lackluster. Sure, the first or second time you see it, the power of that plot archetype works subconsciously, and your brain thinks, “I already feel like I know it, so it must be true.” But when you see it a third and a fourth and a fifth time, the technique moves into your conscious awareness. And at that point, the whole situation falls on its butt, because now you’re thinking, “I already know this story. It’s just Cinderella or Star Wars or whatever, in less interesting packaging.”

Again, I’m not saying using plot archetypes like this can never work. Maybe you’re in a market where email isn’t a good option and prospects aren’t seeing a lot of sales letters, or the sales letters don’t use any storytelling techniques. But I dare say that’s a rare situation. Suffice to say that what I do is different. I don’t use archetypes. Instead I pick out and use their “active ingredients.”

Archetypal features

Archetypal features are literally the moving parts that tend to make certain plot — and character — archetypes effective. Why use a whole plot archetype when you can just pick out one of the elements that makes it engaging?

That’s what an 80/20 approach would do, right?

I’ve already discussed Cinderella, which I’d call the rags to riches archetype (though Ronald Tobias identifies it as the underdog archetype, which in turn is a variant on the rivalry archetype — go figure). But whatever we want to call it, let’s list the major plot events, and then pull out some of the features that make them interesting.