Selling And Marketing By Creating Engaging And Compelling Plots

To be a great copywriter you must be able to write a great story. It’s arguable that to write compelling articles you must understand storytelling. And what makes a story engaging isn’t always obvious.

How does one construct engaging plots? It’s far from being a simple question.

Everyone knows when they enjoy a story — when they are emotionally affected and engaged. But they still don’t learn storytelling because they don’t analyze what makes those plots compelling, and therefore they don’t learn to distinguish what works from what doesn’t.

If you are enough of a pleb to spend over 20% of your life watching television and reading fiction — and let’s face it, most of us are — then you already have the opportunity to learn to create great plots. Since you are confronted with them constantly, you simply need to analyze them while you consume them.

But how do you analyze a plot? Without any structure to help you break plots down, you’ll never get started. Fortunately, Wikipedia comes to the rescue by explaining the three-act structure of all dramatic works. Here it is:

1. Setup (of the location and characters)
2. Confrontation (with an obstacle)
3. Resolution (culminating in a climax and a dénouement)

This is the most basic framework I could find by which all plots can be analyzed.

By simply analyzing all the plots you encounter, learning to discern the three acts in them, you will begin to understand the basics of how they’re formed. Then, over time, you shall begin to understand further complexities, and you shall develop your own personal method for analyzing plots.

People believe that being able to write an engaging plot does requires more  creativity than it actually does. The truth is that writing plots is, at it’s heart, just another subject like geography or history. And like any other subject, it’s something anyone can study and become proficient at.

The more you analyze great plots, the more you’ll understand how they work. The more plots you create, the more engaging and compelling your plots will become. I don’t think you will become a fantastic storyteller overnight, but step by step you shall improve.