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You're a wizard, Harry
The structure behind the #2 best selling book of the last 25 years
Nathan Baugh
June 25, 2022
What's up everyone – Nathan here.
I'm somewhat obsessed with the idea of taking frameworks from authors and applying them to business. There's so much more overlap than we realize.
Today's newsletter gets into that and will take you about 4.5 minutes to read.
One Quote
Stories are alive. The ones that last outcompete other stories by changing over time. They make it from medium to medium—from oral to written to film and beyond. They lose uninteresting elements but hold on to the most compelling bits or even add some.
The best stories move medium to medium and continue to crush.
Stories like:
Harry Potter
Star Wars
They started as books, crushed as movies, and then became billion-dollar businesses with merch, video games, and even theme parks.
And if we’re looking at those examples, we also have to look at the other side. A few stories that, after incredible starts, fizzled out:
Game of Thrones – looking at you, season 8
Hunger Games – the 3rd book failed to live up to expectations
To me, the big question is WHY. What did JK Rowling and George Lucas do that the others didn’t?
The answer is storytelling structure. The GoT series got worse the further the show progressed away from the books. The acting was fantastic, but they missed the genius of George RR Martin when it came to the actual story. For the Hunger Games, the third book didn’t include… the Games, which is what made the first two so popular.
I found a gem from JK Rowling showing how she structured the Harry Potter series. Let’s take a look…
Two Tactics
1/ Structure your stories
JK Rowling shared this outline from chapters 13-24 of the 5th Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix. It’s incredible in its simplicity.
Broadly, we can sort the 10 columns into two buckets:
1/ Progress & Progression
2/ Subplots & Characters
Each row is a chapter. And each chapter includes at least 3 subplots. They’re all interconnected and they all drive the main plot forward. There is zero wasted space
Whether you’re writing fiction or building a brand strategy, imagine your story as a building. It needs a strong foundation, otherwise it’ll fall over at the earliest sign of trouble.
2/ Think long-term
It’s not enough to simply structure one chapter or one marketing campaign. Each needs to fit into a broader vision of the whole.
I embraced my inner Harry Potter superfan to expand on the above idea. Here’s what I’d imagine the outline for the entire series looked like.
When designing a story across 7 books spread apart 11 years or for a fast-growing startup, you gotta think long-term.
The most famous recent example is Tesla.
Produce a high-priced luxury car
Use profits for R&D to develop less expensive car but still high-quality car
Repeat 1 & 2 for 15 years
You may be wondering, “but what story does this tell?”
Well, we still see Tesla as a luxury brand even though its prices have fallen drastically. It doesn’t hurt its first four cars manufactured spell ‘S3XY.’
Take a look at “The Secret Tesla Motor Master Plan” essay Elon released in 2005. Uncanny how accurate his predictions were.
Three Resources
One Newsletter
Harry Dry writes a marketing newsletter called Marketing Examples. It’s one of the best, most tactical newsletters out there.
A recent piece hit on the concept of “writing with your eraser.”
It got me thinking about how this applies to stories. A couple of things I want to point out here:
Action-oriented – each short sentence starts with a verb
Consumer-centric – the better version does not mention the brand; it only talks to the consumer
Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.
One Podcast
Where It Happens with Greg Isenberg & Sahil Bloom
I’ve been looking into the concept of a storytelling engine recently. Basically, it’s a repeatable sequence of events that creatives or brands can use over and over again without consumers getting tired of it. In fact, consumers actually eat it up.
Think Pokemon. It’s the same storyline everytime, but each generation sells millions of copies. Niantic and Nintendo didn’t just stumble upon this formula – they built it from scratch.
On a recent episode of Where It Happens, Danny Trinh, who runs new platforms at Snap and has tons of experience across different social platforms, dipped into how companies use storytelling engines both across brand and product.
You can take a listen on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
One Rabbit Hole
My favorite aspect of both Rowling's and Musk's visions outlined above is the sheer simplicity. On the flip side, complex systems collapse faster.
The more complex, the easier to get something wrong. There is brilliance in simplicity.
Tablet has more in this great article.
I hope you enjoyed that. The biggest compliment you can give me is replying to share your thoughts.
See you next week,
Nathan
A message from... Me!
The interest in this tweet blew me away...
One way to become a better storyteller:
Take your two favorite authors. I recommend one non-fiction and one fiction.
Copy, word for word, their best work. Do it by hand.
I chose Paul Kalanithi and Neil Gaiman.
It’s the single exercise that improved my writing the most.
— Nathan Baugh 🗺️ (@nathanbaugh27)
Jan 5, 2023
In my experience, there are two ways to get good at storytelling:
Study the greats (what this newsletter is for)
Practice, practice, practice
I do a lot of practice through StoryWork.
And so many of you liked, commented, and sent me DMs about the practice I decided to turn it into a guided course for you.
Check it out:
What'd you think of today's newsletter?