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Content Marketers Need to Study Sportswriters

Sportswriters are some of the best writers around.

Period, end of sentence.

Especially the sports columnists.

Go into any newsroom anywhere, and read samples of the best work from each writer, and the sports columnists will have some of the best writing in the entire room.

That’s because they’re some of the best storytellers around. They can tell a story about any person, pulling on a tiny thread in a person’s life, and discover some of the most interesting, little-known revelations about a person that lives such a public-but-unknown life.

They’re the ones who ask an NFL running back about his mom and write about how she worked three jobs but never missed a game. They write about a pitcher’s relationship with his dad, and how they still talk on the phone after every game. They tell you about how a basketball player missed her senior year of high school with a knee injury and spent nine months in painful rehab just to be able to walk again, let alone get drafted in the first round.

Anyone who’s a fan of sports, a fan of good writing, or both, knows the sports columnists who have a mastery of the language, can tell a great story, and pull something interesting out of tiny details. These are a few of my favorites:

Grantland Rice, one of the best sportswriters in history
Grantland Rice, considered by many to be the father of long-form journalism.
  • Tom Junod, the guy who wrote the Mr. Rogers story, Can You Say Hero?, that made me cry three times as I read it. (It’s the story that got turned into the Tom Hanks movie.)
  • Tom Verducci, baseball writer extraordinaire. When Hank Aaron died this past January, there was only one person Sports Illustrated could ask to write his obituary. If you only like baseball a little bit, read Tom Verducci; he’ll make you love it.
  • Pat Jordan. I’m reading his Tom Seaver And Me book right now. I picked it up with the intention of reading two pages on a quick break from work today and ended up reading for 30 minutes.
  • Roger Angell, the centenarian baseball writer for the New Yorker, and the guy who made me believe in long sentences again. I have five of Roger’s books and am always on the lookout for more. His story, “Three for the Tigers is my favorite Angell story, and his line “Everything you do in life, you do so that your son will go to ball games with you, and then he doesn’t want to,” broke my heart.
  • Jemele Hill takes shit from no one. She called Donald Trump a white supremacist in 2017 and would not apologize. She even worked here in Orlando as a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel for two years. She writes about social justice issues in sports and makes me understand how the two are related.
  • Sally Jenkins’ stories on the NCAA, tennis, golf, and women’s sports has earned her numerous Sports Columnist of the Year awards. Her February 5th column on Patrick Mahomes made me question whether he could outthink Peyton Manning, and whether I wanted to become a Patrick Mahomes fan.
  • You can hear interviews with many of these writers on Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast. If you want to be any kind of writer, every episode of this podcast has a nugget of great writing advice. And his book on the USFL (Football For A Buck is the definitive history on the renegade league of the early 1980s.

There are dozens — hundreds, even — of writers I could name, but I don’t have the room. These are just a few of my favorites, but I’ve got a few dozen sports books from a variety of writers, some on topics I know nothing about. Even if I’m not a fan of the sport or the athlete, I’m a fan of the writer.

(My one non-sportswriter recommendation would be Dave Thompson’s book, Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.)

Why Should Content Marketers Study Sportswriters?

I’ve often said that content marketers need to read daily

I’ve also said they need to stop reading blogs.

Bad writing breeds bad writing, and reading bad writing will infect you with bad habits and sloppy tendencies. Most blogs tend to be poorly written — read my post “Half of All Written Content Online is Sh*t” — and you’re not going to improve by reading someone worse than you.

Instead, I usually recommend that content marketing writers read fiction books by established writers. Find your favorite writers and genres and devour several of them. Pay attention to their writing style and voice, and figure out how you can steal emulate parts of their style.

But you can also find some of the best creative non-fiction writing among the sportswriters and sports columnists. Pick a few and learn their style, then expand to their colleagues and see what it is that they do so well. Pick up one of The Best American Sportswriting annual books (or get The Best American Sportswriting of the Century) and read what some of the finest sportswriters in the country have done.

Then, once you have your favorites, find out who their idols and favorite writers were, and read their work. And if you can, find out those writers’ idols and inspirations, and read their stuff. I’m now reading works by Ring Lardner from the 1910s and 1920s, and Red Smith from the 1930s – 1970s, as I follow the sportswriting family tree to its roots.

Who are your favorite sportswriters? What’s one sportswriter you want to read more of or learn more about? Do you have a favorite or one you don’t like at all? Share your comments.

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Half of All Written Content Online Is Sh*t

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, half of all written content is shit.

While he actually said “the first draft of anything is shit,” I would maintain that this applies to all online content in general for a couple of reasons:

  1. If we look at a normal bell curve of distribution, you know there’s a halfway mark where everything above it is average, above average, and excellent. That means that the other half is average, below average, and terrible.
  2. Most content marketers publish their first draft.

Illustration of a Bell Curve by Abhijit Bhadur. It's a great representation for the quality of written content available to us.That doesn’t seem like so much until you realize that there are 70 million blog posts being produced on WordPress.com alone.

In other words, of that 70 million, exactly 35 million of them are above average, and 35 million are below average.

This does not include all the articles appearing on Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and all the other self-hosted blogs and websites. Let’s be generous and say there are 200 million articles posted every month.

I’ve lost count of the number of so-called content marketers and personal branding experts who publish sub-par blog articles on a daily basis. They issue a warning statement boast about how they wrote their entire week’s worth of blog articles on a Sunday afternoon, taking only two hours to complete the entire week’s work.

That works out to roughly 24 minutes to write a single blog article.

It shows, guys! It shows!

If what Ernest says is true, and the first draft of anything is shit, and half of anything is worse than average, there’s a very good chance that your 24-minute article is hot garbage.

So if you think you can get away with writing a single blog article in less than 30 minutes and expect it to be any good, you’ve got another think coming.

5 Quick and Dirty Tips to Improve Your Writing

Ernest Hemingway at the typewriter. He would agree that half of all online content is shit.There are entire books that will help you improve your writing, but let me give you these five quick tips to improve what you’ve already written. Even if it’s something you wrote a few weeks ago, you owe it to yourself and your readers to practice these five steps.

  1. Adopt a process of Write, Rewrite Twice, Polish Once. (Trust me, this one tip alone will make all the difference in the world.)
  2. Use Grammarly.com to find and correct any issues. Download it for Mac or Windows, and install the plugin on your web browser(s). Grammarly will check your writing anywhere and everywhere, which means it can help you identify problems in your email, tweets, and Facebook updates, which can help you correct some bad habits.
  3. Read your work out loud. If necessary, change the point size so the text lays out differently on the page. This forces you to look more closely as you read. You’ll catch double words like “the the” or sentences that you forgot to.
  4. Use Hemingwayapp.com. This works much in the same way that Grammarly does, but it forces you to look at sentence complexity, adverb usage, and reading level. (Remember, you want a lower reading level, not higher.)
  5. Edit paragraphs so there are no orphans. “Widows and orphans” is a typography term. (Read about it here.) In this case, orphans are single words on their own line at the end of a paragraph. As you’re writing your piece, edit each paragraph so there are no orphans. This will force you to tighten up the entire paragraph until you can pull that orphan up to the previous line.

    6. Excellent Work Is Being Buried Under Mountains of Shit

    There’s enough content online that the good stuff is getting buried. Remember, we estimated 200 million blog articles per month?

    Even if we created 5 million “excellent” pieces of work — something that’s two standard deviations from the dead-center average — it’s being buried by 195 million pieces of everything else.

    While you probably won’t write THE ABSOLUTE BESTEST NUMERO UNO BLOG ARTICLE OF ALL TIME!! this month (you have a 1-in-200-million chance), you can at least write a very interesting and memorable article that your readers will remember, love, and be inspired by. And you can get more of them if you can share it through social media and some clever SEO.

    If you can do these five things — especially #s 1 and 2 — you’ll greatly improve your written content online. At the very least, you can get it above that halfway mark in the distribution curve. It’s not that hard, you just have to spend a little more than 24 minutes on a single blog article.

    Photo credit: Bell Curve by Abhijit Bhaduri (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)
    Photo credit: GPA Photo Archive (Flickr, Creative Commons 0)

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The Secret of B2B and B2C Copywriting

I’m going to tell you a secret about copywriting.

It’s a secret that the copywriters don’t want you to know. It’s a secret the marketers and the people who hire copywriters haven’t figured out. It’s a secret the business owners and managers don’t even know exists. That secret is this:

There is no difference between B2B copywriting and B2C copywriting.

None at all. It’s complete bullshit. They’re exactly the same, because they use the same thing in both camps:

  • Words.
  • Emotions.
  • The ability to use one to tap into the other.

Oh, and a decent grasp of the English language.

If you understand and can use those things, you can write for both B2B and B2C clients. Even on the same day.

Your Target Audiences Are People

A woman using a typewriter. Good copywriting means writing for both B2B and B2C audiences.One of the irritating things about content marketers, besides their insatiable greed for data and analytics, is that they forget their users/visitors/hits/views are all people.

Their users are people. Their visitors are people. The page views? Made by people.

And people have thoughts, emotions, and complex inner lives. They want things and they’re afraid of other things. And they’re reading your copy because they either want something or they’re afraid of losing something else.

People are stirred by the same emotions whether they’re at work or at home, trying to decide whether to buy your SaaS software or large-screen TV. They’re motivated with the same methods, follow the same sales funnel, and can be persuaded with the same formulas. They respond to good stories, persuasive arguments, and important ideas, whether they’re at work or at home.

No one is a completely different person between work and home. Oh sure, they don’t do the same things. They may have a work personality and a home personality, but fundamentally, they’re the same people. High-energy Type A people are always high-energy Type A people. Laid-back Type B introverts are always laid-back Type B introverts.

And that means a copywriter who is adept at telling stories or is able to simplify complex information can do that for a B2B buyer or a B2C buyer, even when those buyers are the same individual.

Whether your customer is trying to decide whether to buy a gas or charcoal grill or trying to decide which cloud-computing service to use, they’re going to use the same critical thinking and decision-making skills to solve the problem.

That means your copy needs to be concise, coherent, and complete. It needs to be well-written and informative. It needs to fire up their emotions.

Good copywriters can do that for B2B copy, trying to convince a purchasing agent or a department head to make a decision on their particular product or service. They can turn around and do that for B2C copy, trying to convince a consumer to make a decision for that product or service.

To the copywriter, there’s no difference in how they do their job, how the copy is structured, and which kinds of copywriting formulas they use.

Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

There’s Not Much Difference Between Industries Either

Years ago, I used to work in the poultry industry — we sold poultry feeding equipment and watering equipment to farmers and poultry companies.

Over the years, several of the growers told me, “Poultry farmers are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and we do things our own way.”

At the same time, our company sold hog feeding equipment and watering equipment to farmers.

Over those same years, several of those farmers told me, “Pork farmers are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and we do things our own way.”

A few years later, I worked for a software company that sold software to state governments.

The people I called on told me, “Government purchasing agents are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and we do things our own way.”

Over the last 12 years, I’ve written for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and every size of company in between. I’ve written for techies, marketers, fintech developers, small business owners, lawyers, and software companies, and you’ll never guess what they all — ALL! — have said to me:

“__________ are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and do things our own way.”

At no point did anyone ever say to me, “We’re just like everyone else and we’re damn stupid with our money.” If they had, that one would be the different one, the only one not like all the others.

“But every industry is different by its very nature!”

Well, of course, every industry is different, Financial technology is nothing like hog farming. Women’s skincare is nothing like cloud computing. And marketing software is nothing like construction equipment. I know, because I’ve written for all these industries.

(But I was successful in all of them, despite being a newbie at one point.)

Industry knowledge is important to a writer because it makes their job easier. But it does not make them better. I’ve known veteran industry writers who regularly produce some of the most mediocre, boring garbage, and I’ve seen people who just earned their creative writing MFAs writing write circles around the veterans.

I’ve also seen the reverse to be true.

Industry knowledge does not make the writer, writing skills do. The ability to use language to tap into a person’s emotion and compel them to buy? That’s the real skill.

You can teach industry knowledge. The writer can interview a subject matter expert and craft a compelling story in 10 minutes. But the industry expert can’t learn heart and style — at least not in a 10-minute conversation.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for a good copywriter, focus less on their industry expertise. All that means is they know the industry terminology, but anyone can figure that out with a quick Google search.

Instead, hire a copywriter who knows how to write so they can make your blog articles and webpages interesting, compelling, and fun to read. Hire fiction writers, poets, screenwriters, journalists, and storytellers. Get the people who know how to make boring things interesting and how to make complex ideas easy to understand.

If you’re focused on the length of time a person has spent in an industry, you’re looking at the wrong thing.

Because everyone’s industry is just like all the others, and your customers are just like everyone else’s. The good writer knows that, and they know that tapping into a buyer’s buying motivation is the key to success.

Photo credit: Voltamax (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Writing the Old Fashioned Way (GUEST POST)

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. Irene Roth is a professional writer and writing coach, which means she really knows her stuff. When she offered an article on how to improve your writing with an unusual technique, I happily took her up on it.

The vast majority of writers seem to have a keyboard of some kind close by. Whether it is a tiny keyboard on our phone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop keyboard, we are quite comfortable with typing our thoughts out quickly and efficiently for later on. Typing on screens have become the new norm. Neither do we have to spend many hours retyping our material from longhand later on. We believe we can save time if we simply type our work right onto the computer screen.

So, let’s look at four ways that writing our manuscripts in longhand can actually boost our creative energies just by picking up a pen instead of typing on a screen.

1. We Will Remember What We Wrote

The act of writing longhand will help us remember more of what we’re taking notes on. This is crucially important when we’re doing research for our manuscripts. Typing is a far less neurologically complex process than writing. This is because typing is simply a mechanical movement. We don’t really seem to be engaged with our material as much when we are writing things down. Further, when we write, large parts of our brains light up, making the activity much more complex.

2. It Beats Writer’s Block

Most writers struggle with writer’s block some time in their careers. We all have different ways of dealing with this difficulty. However, one of the best ways to consistently overcome writer’s block is to change the way we write. So, for instance, if we typically write on the computer screen, we should switch to writing longhand. And from my years of coaching, I have discovered that writers believe that writing in longhand is the solution to the problem.

This is probably because writing activates different parts of the brain. Therefore, it can short-circuit a case of writer’s block quite quickly. After all, we are using different muscles in our brain to write longhand. This can potentially trigger a positive array of interconnected thoughts, ideas and memories which can reduce or eliminate writer’s block.

3. We Will Write More Clearly

Irene S. Roth, author of Writing the Old-Fashioned WayBecause writing by hand is slower than typing, it also feels more labor-intensive. Because of this, writing by hand is actually a great tool to learn how to write more concisely and effectively. We will be more aware of extra words that we use or if we used a wrong word. In addition, the amount of focus that it takes to put pen to paper also helps us create more complete sentences with better and more vivid scenes. When we’re typing on the computer, we will be much more distracted than when we write by hand.

We Will Revise Better

Revising is by far the hardest part of writing. Just because we completed a first draft of our manuscript doesn’t mean that we’re done. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. The editing process has only just begun. We are usually way too close to our writing, so it may be hard to be objective about our writing, making editing difficult. Because we’ll need to transcribe our handwritten pages to a typed manuscript, we get the opportunity to review every word we’ve written as we type it. This can also help us detach from our work. By the time we finish typing up our manuscript, we can rework passages of our work so that they are smoother and more precise.

Given all of these benefits, it is important for writers to try to write in longhand as often as possible. Not only will they enjoy the overall creative process, think more clearly, and write better quality manuscripts, they will enjoy writing and will look forward to coming back to their writing the next day. Who knows, we may just fall in love with it too.

Irene S. Roth has a Master’s Degree in Philosophy and Psychology from York University and is currently using her expertise to write for kids about empowerment and self-esteem. She has published ten nonfiction books for kids and teens and sixty-five books for adults as well as 2,000 articles and book reviews both online and in print. She has been running workshops at Savvy Authors on many different topics for writers. She also leads a very successful mentoring program for writers on Savvy Authors that is in its fourth year.

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How to Work With a Ghostwriter

I’ve been a ghostwriter for over 10 years, working on blog articles and even books with people who have a story to tell. I’ve worked with dozens of clients and have written over 3,500 articles in that time, as well as eight books, including my new novel, Mackinac Island Nation.

My clients have ranged from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs running one-person operations, both in the United States and overseas, in a staggering variety of industries. I’ve been able to learn from all of them, and — I hope — they’ve been able to learn from me.

For those of you who are thinking about working with a ghostwriter, whether it’s for corporate blog articles or even your own memoirs, there are a few things you need to realize before you start.

It’s going to cost money.

A photo of hands over an old Compaq keyboard, like a ghostwriter.
You can tell this is an old photo (from 2004) just by the Compaq logo in the bottom corner.
Writers need to eat. We have to pay our mortgages. We have to take care of our families. We don’t write for the promise of royalties or the exposure. This is not a hobby, this is our job. And just like any skilled position, the better the writer is, the more it’s going to cost. Things will get done faster and they’ll be done better than if you go with the less expensive option.

So while many people who want to write a book have a fascinating story to tell, a good writer is not going to want to spend 3 – 6 months working on your book in the hopes that they’ll get something from your efforts. It’s impolite to even ask, so if this is your plan for paying them, either save up your money or start writing it yourself.

Typically, a ghostwriter will ask for half up front and half at the end, but my practice has been to ask for half of the fee up front, one-fourth when we reach the halfway mark, and the remaining fourth when the final chapter is delivered and/or the manuscript has gone through one or two rounds of edits. For corporate ghost blogging clients, I typically work on a retainer basis where there will be a set number of articles written each month, and the client is invoiced on the 1st.

Be prepared for some give and take.

This is a collaborative process, and the manuscript will be evolving and changing. When the ghostwriter gives you the first draft, that’s so you can make the big changes, like rearranging sections, clarifying details, and rewriting problem sentences. This isn’t the finished product, so don’t get upset that your writer just handed you a pile of garbage. Your job now is to go back and read it and make sure everything is correct and you’re satisfied with the direction this is going.

That first stage is also not the time for fixing typos and punctuation or spelling errors. That will come later. Like I tell my clients, there’s no point in polishing a turd, let’s make it a not-turd first. Make all the major revisions and changes before you start fixing the tiny errors.

Similarly, you will have to call it done at some point. Yes, you want this to be perfect, and you want it to be polished to a high sheen, but that’s not always going to be your ghostwriter’s strong suit. Their job is to write the manuscript, make some revisions, and get it to a reasonable state where a copyeditor could take it over.

So be sure to work out in advance how many revisions and changes you can ask for. No writer wants to spend 12 months polishing and changing your manuscript, so save your revisions for one major passthrough rather than trickling them in. Typically, you should be able to get to the copyediting stage with no more than two revisions. If you’re not getting there, then one or both of you are the problem.

Leave the mechanics to your writer

There’s a very good chance that you’re good at punctuation and grammar, but there’s a very good chance that your ghostwriter is a nerd about it. That means that they know whether the grammar rules we learned in school are totally bogus..

For example, I was working with a client who tried — rather smugly, I thought — to correct me on a preposition I had used at the end of a sentence. So I explained to him:

This is a rule that should never have been in existence in the first place, but it had been created by an 18th-century Latin scholar named Robert Lowth in his book, A Short Guide to English Grammar. Lowth had read a similar admonition in a commentary by a 17th-century poet and scholar named John Dryden.

The problem was Dryden and Lowth were applying Latin rules to English, even though English didn’t actually need a few of those particular rules. It has been unnecessary for centuries, and most grammar nerds will never expect someone to contort their sentences just to follow that rule.

I could tell by the reaction from the client that he hadn’t expected any of that.

“Oh,” was all he said, and he never brought up grammar issues again.

The moral of the story: When someone starts spouting 400-year-old grammar history knowledge, he probably knows when you can break the rules.

So let him.

Don’t feel guilty that you’re working with a ghostwriter

Look, if you could write, you’d be a writer. If you had the time, you could do this yourself. But chances are, you’re working with a ghostwriter because either writing is not your forte or you just don’t have the hours and hours to put in the work.

This is the same reason you don’t change your own oil, fix your own leaky plumbing, re-roof your own house, or do your own taxes. You want a professional who’s good at what they do so you can look great at what you do.

Once, when I was ghostwriting a speech for a client, they felt embarrassed to have someone writing for them, like they weren’t important enough to need a speechwriter. I told them it wasn’t a question of being important, it was a question not having the time.

“Do you have four hours to devote to this project?” I asked.

“No, I barely have four hours to do anything,” said the client.

“Well, I do,” I said. “This doesn’t make you too big for your britches, it keeps you from looking unprepared when you give this speech.”

This is true whether you need a speechwriter, blog writer, or book writer. It’s not a question of whether you’re too important or have more money than sense. It’s a matter of helping you present your best story, whether it’s in a book, your company blog, or even a speech.

You need a professional who understands the subtleties and nuances of language, can tell your story in a clear and compelling way, and can do it in a timely manner.

So if you ever need to work with a ghostwriter, be clear and upfront with your expectations, and ask your ghostwriter to do the same with you. Don’t get bogged down in the process and let them do their job, while you do yours.

Photo credit: hobvias sudoneighm (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Understanding Freytag’s Pyramid for Content Marketing

Fiction writers and playwrights use storytelling structures to build their story arcs. As someone who has feet planted in both the fiction writing world and the content marketing world, I try to bring these two worlds together. So for the next few months, I’m going to examine the different storytelling structures and determine how they can be used in a content marketing setting.

Among storytelling structures, Freytag’s Pyramid is one of the most common and easiest to understand. If you took any literature classes in school, you may have even heard of this one.

Based on the work of German playwright Gustav Freytag, Freytag’s Pyramid is applied to a typical 5-act play. (Sort of the Romans’ “new and improved” followup to Aristotle’s original 3-act story.)
Freytag's Pyramid
The idea, said Gustav, is the traditional 5-act structure can be broken down like this:

  • Exposition: Important background information is laid out: characters, setting, previous events. It can be conveyed through dialogue, flashbacks, and narrative exposition. In Macbeth, the titular protagonist and his friends are visited by the Three Witches, who prophesy that Macbeth shall be king, and Banquo shall father a line of kings.
  • Rising action: A series of events that build to the climax. This is where the instigating event happens, which drives the protagonist to pursue his or her course of action. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth kill the king, frame the servants, murder the guards, and drive off King Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, all in their mad pursuit of power.
  • Climax: Not necessarily the final battle, but this is the point on which the play/story pivots. This is the turning point that changes the protagonist’s fate. If the play is a comedy, things were going badly for the protagonist, but now they turn around. If it’s a tragedy, then it’s the reverse. In Macbeth — a tragedy if there ever was one — things were going swimmingly for Macbeth: he and his wife were killing people willy-nilly, becoming the King and Queen of Scotland until, in Act III, Macbeth had Banquo murdered, and Banquo’s ghost showed up and went all Tell-Tale Heart on Macbeth. (You can see a great animated video of The Tell-Tale Heart here.)
  • Falling action: In a tragedy, the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist increases and this becomes the focus of the play. In a comedy, the protagonist wins, in a tragedy, they lose. In Macbeth, things start going downhill for our king. He feels uneasy and starts to think maybe he shouldn’t have been such a murdering bastard after all. But, in for a penny, in for a pound; after Macduff flees, Macbeth orders his castle seized and his household murdered, including Mrs. Macduff and Macduff Junior.
  • Dénouement: Pronounced DAY-noo-mohn (from the French dénouer, or “to untie”), this is the resolution of the story. Conflicts are resolved, there’s a release of tension, and everything goes back to normal/a new normal is established. In a comedy, the plan comes together, the hero gets the girl/guy, and everyone is happy. In the tragedy, the protagonist often dies, and everyone says “Whew! I’m glad that’s over!” But, there’s always some glimpse of the new order or a new hope. For Macbeth, things went increasingly poorly for him. His wife yelled at the dog (“Out, out, damn Spot!”) and committed suicide, and Macbeth was beheaded by Macduff. Malcolm, son of King Duncan, is crowned king, and he promises to be less killy than the last guy.

      • See how it all fits together? Nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays fit within this structure, although it’s important to note that stories will fit into more than one storytelling structure. There’s no right or wrong one.

      For example, The Hobbit is often considered a Hero’s Journey story, it can also be mapped out in a five act structure:

      1. Bilbo meets Gandalf and the dwarves.
      2. They have adventures on the way to the Lonely Mountain.
      3. They fight Smaug; Smaug dies. But this is not the end of the story!
      4. The Battle of the Five Armies, and the eagles save the day again.
      5. Relationships are mended, Thorin is buried, Bilbo returns home.

      (And if you start hollering about spoilers, the book is 80 years old. You should have read it by now.)

      It’s important to note that Freytag’s Pyamid is not ideally suited for modern stories, which can have 8 acts or even just a strung-together series of scenes. Can you imagine how terrible Avengers 2 would be if the Avengers defeated Ultron at the 1-hour mark? Then we’ve got 1:22 of the Avengers rebuilding stuff and talking about their feelings and shit. Plus, most modern stories have a few climactic scenes, like any Marvel movie. (That structure is called The Fichtean Curve, and I’ll cover it in a week or so.)

      However, Herr Freytag’s construct is a little more forgiving in a content marketing setting, because it doesn’t always have to focus on two characters, like the Hero’s Journey. There, you’re either the Hero or the Mentor.

      Freytag’s Pyramid still follows the exploits of a protagonist and an antagonist, but there are a couple of important differences. First of all, victory is not always guaranteed. Second, we can learn from these failures and use them as a cautionary tale. Third, we can learn about any follow-up and fallout from the climactic pivot point.

      In my next post, I’ll discuss how you can actually use Freytag’s Pyramid for content marketing.

      Photo credit: BrokenSegue (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)