Ann Wroe: Master-Level Storytelling

Newspaper connoisseurs will always tell you that the best writing in the newspaper is often the obituaries. Not the sponsored ones, but the ones that are news. I’m pretty sure that’s true. It’s certainly true of The Economist, my favorite magazine and in my view the greatest news publication in the English Language.

The Economist obituaries are famous. Many people say they turn to them first.

I was on a webinar recently with Ann Wroe, who is the woman who writes the obituaries for The Economist every week. Consider for a moment who we are dealing with: Ann Wroe has a degree in Medieval Literature from Oxford. Hilary Mantel has called her one of the most underrated contemporary writers. Wroe wrote a biography of Pontius Pilate.

I mention all this because we talk a lot about “storytelling” today and I think we are all understanding more and more about the impact stories have on people. To say the least, it is time-tested. If Ann Wroe is the best, I’ll wager there are some things we can learn from her to put into our own communication practices. Stories are stories and people are people.

Better is more

You’ll get a lot of CEOs and other people who don’t want to communicate or don’t feel like reviewing your work tell you that less is more. They look over their glasses and when they say it they make it clear they are tired of you. Here’s the thing I always say: less isn’t more…better is more. Of course, too much is too much. But putting out a smaller volume of crappy and unengaging content is not more. Good content, engaging storytelling, vibrant humanity—that is what makes “more.”

There is one obituary in The Economist each week.

Pick the right people

Ms. Wroe discussed how she picks her subject at length. She says that she wants people with interesting lives that say something about their times… ”not someone who just worked his way up the ladder.” This would make her job harder, without doubt, and she (to be fair) has the whole world to work with, but the ultimate point is unmistakable: part of the reason you’re writing boring profiles is you are picking boring people.

That means that your organization might choose to profile someone besides the C-suite. You might find an interesting person someone in the heart of the organization and build your company’s reputation by profiling them in a piece that people are glad they read.

A Portrait

Wroe says that her obituaries are “portraits” and not “catalogs.” You have been there. You are asked to profile someone and what you end up with is what amounts to their resume, listed out in chronological order. “After college, she moved to Philadelphia to work for The NewHip Agency, calling it “my first job after college.” You get the idea. That’s not a compelling story—imagine, if you will, if someone asked you, over a drink, to tell a person’s story. I doubt if it rolls like that.

Details make the story

The key thing she imparted, in my view, is that details make the story. That’s critical. We learned it in our English Comp class as a college freshman and then generally stopped doing it entirely. The details humanize the story, involve the reader and create portraits about people, not the holders of jobs. As an example, her obituary of Dr. Li Wenliang—the doctor who tried to warn the world of COVID before he died of it—opens with a paragraph about his interests in food blogging.

Busy though he was as an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central hospital, rushed off his feet, Li Wenliang never missed a chance to chat about his favourite things on Weibo. Food, in particular. Japanese food with lashings of wasabi, plates of steaming beef noodles, the Haidilao hotpot restaurants that had kept him going when he spent three years in Xiamen just after his medical training—and fried chicken. The drumsticks at the railway station were the best, and he never missed a chance to grab some when he was there; but then the chicken at Dicos fast-food was so delicious that he just had to compliment the chef. A big basket of that, washed down with a Coke, was the peak of his existence.

Or this opening to the obit of Nikolai Antoshkin, who was in charge of extinguishing the fire at Chernobyl.

Few people knew they were there until he sat joking and drinking with his friends in the steam bath, and then they were visible: the long livid scars across his upper body, where surgeons had cut into him to treat radiation sickness.

That’s how you use details to tell a story. They might be anything—clothes, habits, views, opinions…this week’s editorial starts with Chick Corea’s knee-jerk dislike of the electric piano.

Details make the story sing.

Make people want to read it

When people write corporate content—particularly non-sales content—they have a tendency to not worry about whether anyone wants to read it. Usually, we feel like we need to “inform” people, or need them “understand” a certain idea or development. The problem is that we need to engage them before those things happen.

Corporate content needs to be written in a way that encourages people to read and remember it.

Ann Wroe has a piece of specific advice here: start with the specific and move to the general. That’s interesting because it’s the opposite of our natural inclination, which is to flow like water from the general to the specific. But when you read these editorials. you can feel how it works. “Hook” the reader in with the specific and then move them to your larger point.

It takes work

Wroe says she “Googles like one possessed.” when doing research. Not one thing listed above is the path of least resistance or the most time-effective way to get a story done. You have to dig for the right person, dig for the story, dig for the details. Worse, these are the types of information that show up on the fifth draft, not the second. ‘

Master-level storytelling is much harder than average-level storytelling. But it’s a high leverage activity.