📂 Nothing is boring: How to tell gripping stories about the seemingly mundane

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Today's newsletter is authored by my friend Jay Acunzo.

Jay helps B2B professionals become masterful storytellers. Formerly of Google, HubSpot, ESPN, and the VC firm NextView, Jay is an author and consultant and has developed and hosted original podcasts and docuseries for clients like Drift, Help Scout, Podia, and GoDaddy.

The following story appeared in his newsletter, Playing Favorites, where he shares ideas for resonating deeper with the created work to subscribers from a16z, Adobe, Shopify, Salesforce, the NY Times, and more. You can subscribe free here.

The Quaker Diner in West Hartford, Connecticut, serves the same food as every other diner.

It serves the same coffee too: endless amounts of mediocre light-brew generously poured into thick white mugs. Coffee like that tricks my mind into thinking it’s delicious simply because I’m sitting in a diner. The moment contains a little sadness, a little nostalgia, and of course, a lot of coffee.

The last time I sat in this particular diner and drank that particular coffee, I realized that despite the same-old, same-old menu, the place exists as something entirely unique to each individual who passes through it. Everyone who knows it knows a different version of the Quaker Diner.

This average diner with the same-old, same-old menu was the setting of a writing project for one of my favorite classes at Trinity College: creative nonfiction.

Each morning for what felt like a cruel number of mornings to a 21-year-old, I’d trudge down the street from my off-campus house, past broken beer bottles and discarded slices of pizza congealing in the morning sun. I’d swing open the door to the trolley car-turned-diner, grab myself a booth, and slump down with my notebook for some of that Grade-D coffee. Oh, the romantic life of a writer!

To me, the Quaker Diner was nondescript, but that semester, my task was to describe it. To bring it to life. To sit with it and poke and prod and think and feel enough to find something, anything to write about. In short, I had to find a story somewhere in the seemingly mundane details of life.

In our line of work, I can think of no greater skill. Whether you write or speak or podcast or shoot video, design apps or org charts or company cultures, you are in the business of finding something meaningful to say to others to resonate with them and spark action, all while feeling surrounded by a whole lot of mundane details.

Unfortunately, we lose our abilities to tell stories the more years we spend away from our schooling – or, really, the more years we spend feeling like adults, not children. My ability to tell legitimate stories started to erode the moment I entered the world of tech, startups, and content marketing. In my early jobs, for companies like Google and HubSpot, I picked up some Very Important Business Knowledge, it’s true. But I was a far better writer at 21 than, say, 25.

I don’t know if there’s a single thing to blame, but all the obsessing over SEO and headlines to drive clicks and immediate results, and all the overemphasis placed on efficiencies and optimization couldn’t have helped. Summed up another way: because the act of merely telling stories wasn’t important-sounding enough, everyone began to focus on the Very Important Business Reason why you’d do such a thing. The process stopped being the point. The results were everything. And while I understand it, I also think we should fight it. In my 20s, I stopped fighting it … and I became a worse storyteller as a result.

Like the sad-looking chef at the Quaker Diner slinging scrambled eggs every day, for years, I just kept shipping sloppy articles. Three-for-a-dollar! The breakfast special! Served with a side of pop-ups. Could I interest you in a chocolate-covered ebook after your meal?

Order up!

A Return to Stories

I only stopped my downward spiral towards mediocrity when a friend named Niko (appropriately enough for this story, a friend from college) asked what happened to my creative nonfiction writing. He used to enjoy reading it. He thought I should have become an investigative journalist. I appreciated the sentiment.

It also hurt to hear.

I like the business world, for all my complaints. I like content marketing. And I LOVE this exploration-style work I do through my newsletter, podcast, books, and more – all to serve YOU.

Inspired by Niko, and nursing a sore ego, I asked my dad to send me the backup files of my college writing that he had (thankfully) saved to his computer, and suddenly, I was back in that mundane diner with the same-old, same-old menu. I could practically smell their weak yet wonderful coffee as I read words written by what felt like a different person named Jay:

Overwritten? You bet. Tough to follow? Yes. Void of my current tone of voice in all its colloquial and vibrant – dare I say – glory? Absolutely.

But it was striving towards something. I didn’t want to desperately hold onto your attention lest you go visit a competitor’s site. I wasn’t focused on NOT getting fired. And I sure as hell had no concerns for stuffing the paragraphs full of redundant, gift-wrapped Key Takeaways. No – I was telling a story. That’s all.

I was merely telling a story.

In the past five years or so, I’ve rekindled my love of crafting stories. It all began with identifying the missing piece to most of my previous writing and, indeed, most of the stuff I see in B2B today. To tell better stories, we don’t need more vivid details (c’mon, College Jay). We don’t need more production polish (though who doesn’t love some slow-mo drone footage?). We don’t even need protagonists that Hollywood would cast. The missing piece is far simpler.

We need more tension.

Sometimes, the tension can feel grand. Who’s the killer? Who will sit on the Iron Throne? Will this new wave of tech innovation save the internet?

But most times, in the seemingly mundane, day-to-day world, the tension is small yet still somehow profound. The subtle sadness of a place. The yearning for something more. The appreciation of a loving moment met with a concern for what the future holds. A person just trying to do a good job despite daily demands pushing against that. Stories are about meaning and emotions, and at the core of anything meaningful is tension. Life itself gains meaning because life ends – and could end, at any time.

One Simple Story

Any story can be distilled into three basic parts: Status quo. Tension. Resolution.

Whether it’s a nursery rhyme or an epic novel, the first fundamental piece of a story is the status quo – something that’s unfolding that others recognize and perhaps even don’t find particularly gripping. Then, the big question, the moment of conflict, or even the tiniest shred of doubt. Something interrupts, threatens, or redirects the flow of the status quo. Now, in the minds of the audience, they have questions that deserve an answer. They want to continue. And so we, the storytellers, march them towards the resolution. We open the loop, then we close it.

1. Status quo.
2. Tension.
3. Resolution.

We’ve been learning this since we were children, but the working world tends to squeeze these kinds of lessons out of our minds and replace it with, well … Very Important Business Knowledge.

Just think about how simple this really is:

1. The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout. (Status quo. Statement of fact. Not a story. Not yet.)
2. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. (Uh oh! Tension. The poor bugger. I wonder what will happen to him?)
3. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain, and the itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout. (MY MAN! You did it! Proud of you. Tension resolved.)

Think about the standard innovation story told all across the business world:

1. The old way was THAT. (Status quo.)
2. But the world has changed. (Tension.)
3. So we need to do things a new, better way. We need to embrace THIS. (Resolution.)

(And, oh by the way, the company telling the story happens to offer a means to achieve that new, better way. Buy our tool. Take our course. Hire our consultants. Subscribe to our show. Join the newsletter.)

That’s the power of great stories. If you grip someone and hold their attention long enough, and if the way you communicate aligns with their own life experience (i.e., how resonance works), then they feel the sudden urge to act (i.e., why resonance matters). Moving people from conversation to some content, from this content to that content, or from content to a purchase – the next step becomes a logical one in their minds. (“Oh, by the way…”)

They take action that somehow benefit us because it feels more like a logical upsell at the end a story than a hard-sell out of the blue.

* * *

As I sat in the Quaker Diner all those years ago, I realized something that, especially in today’s world, we need to remember more often: Everybody is going through something.

I looked around, took it in, and discovered all kinds of tiny moments of tension. From my booth, I noticed one such moment by the bar. Suddenly, a story from the seemingly mundane details around me:

As I witness what some might call nothing unfolding in front of me, the waitress, Kathy, evolved into one of three different protagonists of my eventual six-page story, together with the diner’s owner, Harry, and another waitress, Marilyn.

Kathy had been working at the Quaker for just under a year when I met her. She claimed to be “between jobs,” but after 8 months at the diner, along with 30 minutes talking to me, I just assumed she’d stay put awhile.

All it takes to tell a meaningful story from the mundane details around us is some tension, however fleeting, however subtle. These tiny differences make all the difference in the world. Kathy becomes a character when we learn about the tension between supporting her kids and working this job, or the even more subtle tension between the way she flirts with older customers and her actual, not-so-much-younger age. Likewise, the man reading the Times stands out just a bit more when he never gets his slip, or mutters to himself (We wonder, “Why?”), or when he guesses the wrong price, or audibly curses before leaving the diner.

Tiny pockets of tension, packaged and delivered. Meaningful moments, hidden in the mundane.

Stories are everywhere – if we’re willing to look.

* * *

I’m guessing you and I share something in our efforts to tell more gripping stories. We work in industries or serve customers experiencing far more than just a little tension. In fact, those we serve likely feel enormous amounts of tension due to equally enormous amounts of change, confusion, stress, disruption, and personal conflict which, let’s face it, are far more pressing (and therefore gripping) than anything listed in a P&L. Whether we choose to find those details and use them in our communication is up to us … but it’s all there. And it’s all a lot more obvious than the quirks at the Quaker Diner.

We need only take a little bit of that tension, let it brew for awhile, and pour it generously into a thick white mug. We only need to use a tiny bit more emotion and grill up a few more piping hot questions for a dish worth serving.

The man never got his bill. The woman grappled with reconciling her job and her duty as a parent. The customers needed a smile as they shuffled slowly through life.

To this day, the Quaker Diner sits there, frozen in time. It seems the menu is far from the only thing that’s same-old, same-old. Every day seems mundane.

Unless you’re a storyteller.

* * *

—Jay

For more stories and ideas from Jay about creating work that resonates, subscribe for free to his newsletter, Playing Favorites, at jayacunzo.com/newsletter.

What did you think?

—Corey

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