How to Make Your Writing Delicious, and Thus Make Prospects Crave More and More

Anatole France

“The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.” – Anatole France, Born Apr. 16, 1844.

Who are you writing to? Robots? No, we communicate with people. Human beings.

So why bother to write to live, breathing, ambulatory meat bags full of emotion – about boring old “stuff”?

People don't care about STUFF. Not things, or junk, or crap.

They care about the chemical rushes and reactions that having stuff and doing stuff makes them experience.

They care about the endorphins and other good fuzzy brain chemicals that buying and acquiring and owning triggers in them.

They don't buy THINGS. They buy FEELINGS.

So therefore descriptions of *things* will not trigger the desire we want to implant in the meat bags with fat wallets that read the offers we write.

What does?

Stories. Sensual ones – meaning ones that engage the senses. Emotional ones – that engage things like joy and despair and pants-shitting fear. Full range.

You know, life stuff.

Even if it's not stuff they personally know first hand, people go nuts for that vicarious living that a good story can give them. Either they have experienced this feeling and can directly relate, or else you trigger their natural empathy via their involuntary sympathetic response system.

Good stories can stir memories. Of first loves. Best orgasms. Worst fights. Deepest depressions.

And to remember a feeling is to experience it afresh. Your brain can't tell the difference between real and fake when it comes to emotions. A sad story can make you cry even when you know it isn't true, right? An incredibly happy story can equally move you to tears, whether it's fiction or real.

That's why depending on the emotion, people will pay whatever price for a promise of either the return – or for the avoidance of that feeling you dragged out to the surface.

That's absolutely everything.

1 thought on “How to Make Your Writing Delicious, and Thus Make Prospects Crave More and More”

  1. Excellent Devotional today, Colin. "They don't buy THINGS. They buy FEELINGS." Absolutely true and not often expressed in such straightforward terms. Great reminder of what we're really doing. Thank you.

    Bill

    P.S. Hope you are feeling better after your second vaccination. I felt a bit punk for a day after my second shot, too.

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