What I’m Learning from Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand 2.0
I’ve started reading Donald Miller’s Building a Storybrand 2.0 and it’s excellent. Here are insights from the first chapter.
Most businesses tell confusing stories and that’s not what customers want. They want clarity. Your story needs to be very clear.
Eliminate the noise.
Highlight what you offer that will help them “survive and thrive.” The human brain is wired to survive and if you want to make customers pay attention, then you need to tap into that impulse.
When building (or re-building) your business, you need to focus on these three questions:
What are you providing that the customer wants?
What problem are you solving?
What will life be like after engaging with your product/service?
I also liked his notes at the end in the “Stop Saying That” section:
All experienced writers know the key to great writing isn’t in what they say; it’s in what they don’t say. For professional writers there is a general rule: the more we cut out, the better the screenplay or book. Great communicators know the power of keeping it simple—that is, if they want people to pay attention and remember anything they say. But clarifying our message isn’t easy. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is often credited with sending a long letter stating he simply didn’t have time send a short one.
The bolded section here is exactly the approach I’ve been taking with the Circuit & Scribe novels I’ve developed (e.g. The Summoners’ Ring). A major part of making the novel work is in how the writing is paired down.
That advice to take a scalpel to your writing is also shared by William Zinsser in On Writing Well, particularly Chaper 2: Simplicity.
