By Etelka Lehoczky
There’s a secret to crafting inspiring, exciting Rotary stories, one that will help you overcome the main challenge facing storytellers today. What challenge is that? Limited attention span. In the era of ever-present screens and information overload, the average person’s attention span is estimated at about 47 seconds. Fortunately, there’s a way to grab people’s attention and hold it until you can get your message across.
Can you guess what it is? For a clue, look back at the paragraph above and ask yourself why you kept reading it. No one was compelling you to read those words. You were simply curious about what would come next.
Curiosity is a powerful force; one you can learn to exploit. With a few simple tools, you can excite your audience’s curiosity and keep them reading long enough to get your message across. First, though, brace yourself for a (rather pessimistic) reality check. The sad fact is, no matter how interesting your story or how valuable your message, a portion of your audience won’t stick around past the introduction. You need to recognize this and be prepared for it. Put a call to action somewhere in your first few paragraphs, and then use your most important tool, curiosity, to pull your audience forward.
That tool is your ability to make your reader or listener ask questions. Don’t give away your whole story in the first few sentences. Tease your audience with quirky details to keep them wondering what will come next. For example, here’s the headline and subhead of a 2023 story on the website Curbed.com:
The Battle of Fishkill
When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war.
These two short lines inspire a huge number of questions. What or where is Fishkill? Who is Domenic Broccoli, and why does he have an IHOP empire? For readers outside the U.S.: What is IHOP? Why did he find a grave site? What kind of war did he start? The ensuing story continues to tease the reader, doling out answers as slowly as possible and inspiring many more questions along the way.
You can see the same technique in the work of celebrated novelists. Here’s the opening sentence from Oscar & Lucinda, a book by Peter Carey:
There would have been no church at Gleniffer if it had not been for a Christmas pudding.
Where is Gleniffer? Why didn’t it have a church? How does a Christmas pudding affect things? (And for readers outside the United Kingdom: What is a Christmas pudding?)
You don’t have to be quite as elusive as these examples, but you can still transform your Rotary experiences into curiosity-inspiring tales. Take this story from the December 2024 issue of Rotary magazine:
A Rotarian astronaut lives her out-of-this-world dreams
Samantha Cristoforetti longed for space travel since she was a kid. Now, she’s sharing the cosmic awe with her fellow earthlings.
In some ways it’s just like any other Rotary meeting. Dozens of members of the Rotary Club of Köln am Rhein gather on a pleasant Monday evening at one of the famous Kranhäus office buildings, architectural gems shaped like upside down L’s over the Rhine River with the towers of Cologne Cathedral visible in the distance. The night’s speaker, an out-of-this-world member of the club, is scheduled to give the Rotarians a virtual tour of her workplace. The Wi-Fi connection on her end is finicky, and they wait eagerly.
The reader’s curiosity is teased again and again, beginning with the headline (Who is this Rotarian astronaut?) and the subhead (How is she sharing “cosmic awe”?), in the opening paragraph (How is Cristoforetti an “out of this world” club member? Where is her workplace?) and on through the rest of the article. As Cristoforetti’s story unfolds, each new section leaves some questions unanswered, pulling the reader onward.
You don’t need tales of space travel to inspire curiosity. Find the unique details in your own story and dole them out carefully, never revealing everything until you must. Your audience may have many claims on their attention, but curiosity always wins out. That’s why the secret to great storytelling is … secrets.
https://blog.rotary.org/2024/12/17/the-secret-to-great-storytelling-revealed/