Stories that Stick

How to Tell a Memorable Story

I met a world champion in memory, Chester Santos, several years ago. Chester taught me how he memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards, or all the Oscar winners since the Academy began handing out awards in 1929. He did it by giving lots of sensory details to each item. For example, if you want to remember your grocery list of asparagus, milk, cereal, and salmon, you might memorize this: 

Imagine you are walking in a forest of asparagus. It stinks like asparagus (you know what I mean). The forest is a swamp, the ground soggy with milk. Swimming in the milk is salmon. It is bright blue and has huge fins. To catch the salmon, you fish with big Lucky Charms cereal on a hook. The fish become blue from the marshmallows.

This is ridiculous for a reason. It’s memorable. Salmon isn’t blue, but you’re more likely to remember it if it is odd. The smell of the forest will trigger your memory of the asparagus. Cereal goes with milk – at least that makes sense. 

Years ago, I received a donation request from a food bank. I opened it up and inside it said, 

Imagine this refrigerator: It’s beige, that off-yellow color all appliances were in the 1970s. It has a brown wooden handle – or at least it is meant to look like wood. When you open it the foam insulation sticks a little, like something spilled and never got wiped up. Upon opening the fridge, you see a nearly empty jar of grape jelly, a package with one tortilla in it, some ketchup packets, and a spill of something on the second shelf. This is what some of our clients see when they go to make dinner for their kids.

What struck me about this story was that it wasn’t a story at all. It was simply an image. But this image told a full story and then some. It activated my mind, generating empathy. Had they simply said, Help fill our families’ refrigerators, it probably wouldn’t have stuck in my mind nor compelled me to act. 

I call these “sticky images” – images that stick in your brain because they are described so well. For a good story to come to life, it needs a few good sticky images. Too many and it’s frustrating – our brain is waiting for something to happen. In the fridge story above, the plot came alive in one sentence – about a parent looking into a fridge. 

Sticky images are critical to make a story meaningful. If you tell me, A parent looked into an empty fridge, that will not compel me, transport me, make me actually stop and be in the story. I don’t imagine any one particular person, nor do I really understand the dire situation they are in. This parent may feel hopeless, stressed, exhausted – and all that I can guess by seeing, smelling, hearing their fridge with them. I develop empathy because of a well-described appliance.

Sticky images have the power to slow down time and make the reader present. You don’t tell a linear story through to the conclusion: to make a sticky image you must forgo some of the details you feel are essential. Most writers I work with are fundraisers or marketers for their business, and this is hard because they want to tell the reader or listener EVERYTHING. But take a beat and describe one thing that is critical to your work thoroughly. Odds are that image will stick in the mind of your target audience more than the plot anyway. 

So, remember the asparagus swamp, the fridge, and that sticky images move people. Sticky images can help raise money for your nonprofit, get more clients for your coaching business, or activate your voting base. Sticky images make a story matter, and good stories engender empathy to create change.