How to Bring Facts to Life (and Touch Your Readers’ Hearts)

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Just between you and me …

How often do you skim texts online?

And how often do you click away without learning anything, without feeling anything?

There’s so much ho-hum content online.

Information that may be useful but mostly leaves us indifferent.

Facts that lack context.

Tips and advice without encouragement, without inspiration, without a sense of human connection.

Can we do better?

Of course we can.

How the Word is Passed

I recently read the book How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith.

The book’s description on Amazon suggests it’s a tour of monuments and landmarks related to slavery.

But this book is so much more than that.

It’s a rich tapestry of human stories. The stories bring historical facts to life, so we gain a deeper, more emotional understanding.

No matter whether you write about history or science, marketing or business, self-help or health, stories help you connect with readers emotionally. They make your writing more engaging and more persuasive.

Facts engage our brains. Stories touch our hearts.

Shall I show you?

Write your own story

The first chapter of How the Word is Passed is dedicated to Monticello—Thomas Jefferson’s plantation.

The chapter starts with Clint Smith’s drive towards it:

Heading out from my home in Washington, DC, in the morning, I drove against traffic, moving from the new condos of an increasingly gentrifying DC, through the single-family-home suburban landscape of Northern Virginia, and into the vast green expanse surrounding I-95 South.

The description of the landscape gives us a sense of place. It’s almost like we’re sitting in the car with Smith. He arrives at Monticello:

One of the first things I noticed about Monticello was how the vast majority of its visitors seemed to be white. It’s not so much unexpected as it is markedly conspicuous, to see a plantation that has had its ratios reversed.

Smith takes us by the hand to show what he’s discovering. He shares what he learns, what he thinks, and what he feels.

If you’re like me, you may feel nervous about injecting yourself into your writing. When I started this blog, I just wanted to share writing advice. As writer, I wanted to stay in the background.

But people connect with people.

And if we want to write better content than A.I., then we’ll have to put ourselves into our writing.

So, do as Smith: Share what you learn, what you think, and how it makes you feel.

Good writing is personal.

Real stories are about real people

When I think back to history lessons at school, I don’t remember any stories.

Were they not told? Have I forgotten?

I have a sense that I never quite understood the reality of history, and how history has shaped who we are today. I thought history was about heroes and villains, not about ordinary people like me.

Smith understands that history is about real people.

He shares that some 50% of the interstate sales of enslaved people broke up nuclear families. That fact comes to life when I read the story about an enslaved adolescent boy named Cary, who worked in the plantation’s nail-making factory. The story makes me shiver:

One day Cary’s friend Brown Colbert hid one of Cary’s tools as a joke. Cary knew there was nothing funny about not being able to find his tools. Cary became so angry—an anger likely stemming from a profound sense of fear—that he hit his friend over the head with a hammer, temporarily putting him in a coma. Although Brown Colbert recovered, Jefferson found himself in a difficult position. What was Jefferson to do with someone who had almost killed another member of the Monticello community? Should he be whipped? (…) Ultimately, Jefferson gave orders to sell Cary, as David put it, “to a place so far away he’ll never be heard from again, so that it will appear to the other nail makers as though he had been put away by death.” Soon after, slave traders came to Monticello and paid three hundred dollars for Cary. No one at Monticello would ever see or hear from him again.

As I read Cary’s story, I feel my body tense. Cary’s story gives context to the concept of splitting up families; it makes the emotional connection. It touches me.

No matter what you write about, human stories show the reality of what facts mean.

Readers may be able to brush a fact aside but a story touches them.

Stories are everywhere

Smith introduces us to Donna who is visiting Monticello, too:

Donna folded her brochure and used it to fan the back of her neck. Her silver hair took on a yellowish hue under the midsummer sun and was tied in a ponytail that fell past her shoulders. She rocked from side to side as we spoke, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, her black flip-flops squeaking softly under the changing pressure. Her voice was imbued with a gentle Texas lilt that stretched out her i’s and melted her l’s into the breeze.

You can picture Donna, right? And you can almost hear her voice?

Throughout the book, Smith describes the landscape and the people he meets. It’s like we’re there with him as he asks Donna and her friend Grace what they knew about Jefferson prior their visit of the Monticello plantation:

“You know, we studied Jefferson,” Grace said. “The slavery part was not part of it.” “Well, it wasn’t detailed,” Donna shared. “It didn’t put any heart and thought into it. In high school and college, you didn’t think, These are families. These are moms and dads being separated from each other. So that wasn’t part of the education.”

It’s not the facts that change their perspectives, it’s stories like the one about Cary that makes them see Jefferson in a new light:

“You grow up and it’s basic American history from fourth grade … He’s a great man, and he did all this,” Donna said, gesticulating with her hands and almost retroactively mocking the things she had previously been taught about Jefferson. “And granted he achieved things. But we were just saying, this really took the shine off the guy.”

To me, that feels like an understatement.

Smith’s book is so much more than a series of visits to slavery monuments. It’s a rich tapestry of stories that help us make sense of the world, of how history shapes the present.

Smith shares not just the stories about the famous Jefferson. He reminds us of the hundreds of Black people who lived on Jefferson’s plantation. Their stories are worth telling. Their lives are worthy of remembrance.

Let’s be more human in our writing

A.I. invites us to produce a lot of content quickly.

But it takes our humanness out of our writing.

It disconnects us from who we are and what matters to us.

Let’s be more human in our writing.

Let’s share the stories that matter to us.

Facts engage our brains. Stories speak to our souls.

P.S.

Stories in Miniature is a self-paced course that teaches you step by step how to tell stories in social media posts, emails, blog posts, sales pages, books, and courses: