How Sticky is your Story?
by Philip Martin
Director, Great Lakes Literary, LLC

How sticky is your story?

The term “sticky” came to prominence as a business concept with a book called Made To Stick: Why Some ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, 2007), by Chip and Dan Heath, about wildly successful ideas.

The sticky idea was the one that stuck in the popular imagination and inspired others. The Heaths use the famous example of John Kennedy’s pitch for going to the moon, an idea that was simple, well communicated, instantly graspable, and appealing.

Stickiness, for the Heath brothers, was represented by the acronym SUCCESs. After studying a range of ideas that caught on and did well, they concluded that a good idea was likely to be “sticky” if it had these six qualities: Simple. Unexpected. Concrete. Credible. Emotional. Stories.

In a nutshell, here are the six aspects of sticky success, the secrets of good storytelling. Simple means easy to communicate and remember. Unexpected means it catches people’s interest and offers a nice bit of surprise and intrigue. Concrete means it has details that help people picture it. Credible means the message and messenger is convincing. Emotional means it tugs at the heartstrings. Stories means it contains that magical elixir (a core story), with narrative flow and engaging personality and drama and such.

Kennedy’s decision to inspire the U.S. to shoot for the moon had those qualities.

Your writing, similarly, should have “sticky” qualities. In my opinion, the Heathian SUCCESs checklist offers a quick way to evaluate your work. How does your story measure up on each of those criteria?

Ask yourself, is my story simple? Unexpected? Concrete? Credible? Emotional? Story-rich? (And . . . then . . . what could make it more so?)

I like to offer, as a brief example, an ultra-short poem that has thrived for more than 300 years, a famous haiku by Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō. After a long trip on foot through 17th-century medieval Japan, Bashō wrote poems inspired by his journey, including one of his best-remembered haiku, written in 1686:

an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water

Varied translations have been offered by others:

The old pond!
A frog jumps in—
Sound of the water.
– Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai

The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!
– Allen Ginsberg

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water—
A deep resonance.
– Nobuyuki Yuasa

Listen! A frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond!
– Dorothy Briton

pond
frog
plop!
– James Kirkup

Take a few moments to look more closely at this simple poem, and practice on it the SUCCESs test for stickiness. For instance, it is simple? It certainly is!

An unexpected quality? Consider how the contemplative nature of the pond, observed by the poet . . . is suddenly broken by the irreverent frog.

Concrete? This poem, like so much haiku, draws a tangible picture with just few quick brush-strokes, a few well-chosen words. The old pond can be imagined quickly in the mind, as can the arc of the frog, the resulting splash.

Credible? This is a hard element to put your finger on. But indeed, and I don’t know exactly why, I find myself believing in this pond, in this observation and experience. I feel that indeed the poet was “there.” (As Gertrude Stein would say, there’s a lot of “there” there.) Part of the trick is the confidence of the poem; as all good writing, the brevity and selection of precise detail makes you believe that the scene has been observed, not created out of thin air. And the poem draws from the poet’s actual journey . . . whether or not he experienced this exact scene.

Emotional? Again, this might depend on the reader. But the poem has endured for centuries because of the deep emotion it holds: the quietude, the contemplation, and then, the bold leap of the single frog, creating a sudden newness, an awareness of a tiny moment in time that is worth celebrating, as all of life is.

Story-rich? In just a few words, Bashō has told a story . . . one that, like the best of stories, has a dramatic arc that implants itself quickly. Can you remember this story? Pond, frog, plop! It is a story, with beginning, middle, end.

Stickiness is a simple test, but is worthwhile to consider in your own writing. Ask yourself how your story/article/poem measures up to those criteria. Do we see the “old pond,” the place where your story happens? Do we see “the frog” take action?

Are we impressed with the leap of your story’s characters across the fabric of the world? Do we realize the impact of that action? How are things changed? How does your story lead us to a fresh view of the world?

In the end, why would we like the story enough to savor it, to share it with others?

Find ways to boost those sticky elements. Simplify (the death of many a potentially good story is too much complexity, biting off more than you can chew). Look for the unexpected surprise you can offer (think about how to set up questions, suspense, surprises, reversals). Boost the selection of rich, “just right” concrete details, so we can swiftly imagine your “old pond.” Make us believe the event is real (even if only in a fictional sense) and that you are a credible observer, a confident tale-teller. Seek the emotional core, the deeper truth that means something to all of us, not just to you.

And make it into a story! Amidst all the information, options, and plot twists that distract, find the core story: the part that is most amazing, that you’ll never forget, that you yearn to share with readers. Learn to use the tools of “Once upon a time, there was . . .”

A pond. A frog. And then, a splash.

As the Heath brothers pointed out, that’s the way to leap into the pond of great success.