“Savant” is the word that my ex, J, threw at me last night. Not to describe me (🙄), but to describe some other people we have known in our lives.

(J and I are great when we’re just friends… which is what we are now, and we’ve never had a better relationship. Who wouldda known 🙄.)

So… “savant.”

That’s his friend, my friend, our mentors, and people we look up to.

But not the two of us who have spent our lives “dicking around,” according to J.

Electrical engineer, photographer, web developer, ceramic artist, snowboarder, magazine publisher, layout designer, marketer, blogger, storyteller, hand-letterer… those are some of the things we have been between the two of us.

I can’t speak for J, but I think my own experiences and experiments have had a pretty profound effect on my current vocation as a content and email marketer.

I’ll give you an example… and maybe it can teach you something about writing your emails, blog posts, or social posts, too.

The copywriter Joseph Sugarman wrote in his book, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, that (and here I’m paraphrasing and combining a few different strands)…

… to be good at copywriting, you have to have, in your life, experienced general knowledge through your actions, circumstances, and personality, and then be able to relate those seemingly unrelated things to create a unique kind of insight into the problem at hand.

Now, what Sugarman said in his book may be a bit intimidating to some of you… it was to me when I first read that book… but I have since found various ways to connect seemingly different ideas to create a unique kind of insight.

I have several different frameworks for doing this, but I’ll give you one I use A LOT… Newton’s first law of motion: Inertia.

I love using inertia in story-driven emails to create analogies.

The concept of inertia is simply this: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion… unless an outside force acts on it.

So, for example, in a vacuum, if you roll a marble, it will keep rolling forever.

However, in our natural environment, if you roll a marble, it will eventually stop. Because of air (air causes friction, which is an outside force), friction with the ground, and maybe at some point the marble also runs into a piece of furniture.

You get the picture.

Now, how do you use inertia to describe any other situation in life?

For example, why did J and I fall out of love and break up? Why didn’t we just stay together, get married, and live happily ever after?

Because of inertia.

Something happened. Or rather, many things happened. Little points of friction that slowed down our feelings, until they left us altogether. The differences in our upbringing, our political ideologies, our faith, our morning routines, our sleep-time habits, our dietary restrictions… just to name a few.

Here’s another one: Why does an audience that was eager to buy from you a year ago stop buying from you a year later? Probably because the market moved on, but you didn’t, which caused friction.

I.e., inertia.

Or, how about losing weight? How do you lose weight if you do not change your diet and/or your lifestyle? The answer is that you don’t. Inertia! You need an outside force if you want your weight to change. You can deprive yourself of energy (food), and/or add a different kind of energy (physical movement). Or you can take GLP-1, which is yet another type of outside “force.”

Pretty cool, right?

And here’s how to make your writing pop through the framework of inertia:

I just gave you four distinct scenarios: that of a marble, my relationship with my ex, a marketing and sales problem, and a health and fitness problem.

All these problems can be understood through the lens of Newton’s first law of motion: Inertia.

Now, of course, when you’re writing an email, for example, you don’t want to keep repeating inertia over and over.

But if you yourself can understand this phenomenon of inertia, then you can analogize two (or more) entirely different scenarios and explain why they are the same (through the lens of inertia, but you don’t have to say it out loud).

Here’s a practical example:

===

The reason a quarter of my email list subscribers are not a good fit for my current business may be that up until a couple of years ago, I was mostly writing about how to make money with Canva. And these days I talk about content and email marketing. So, the thing that drew them to me — Canva — is now gone.

Our interests have gone in entirely different directions now.

It’s exactly the same as when J and I broke up. We stopped being engineers, and with that, the one thing that connected us — our common interest — was gone. I became a blogger and a marketer. He started his career as a snowboarding instructor and picked up pottery.

All we were left with were our vast differences.

===

See?

I didn’t bring up inertia in this example, but you could still feel the relevance because of how I worded the two different scenarios to sound like they were pretty much the same problems.

The inertia framework is basically powering the analogy under the hood. It’s there, but your readers don’t see it.

And the secret technique to applying the inertia framework to create powerful analogies is to ask yourself this: why did this story change? What was the point of friction or external force behind this change?

Anyway… It’s a little trick I came up with when I need to make a boring story interesting, or make my readers land on a new insight.

Try this technique next time you’re writing a story-based email.

— Maliha

PS: One of the reasons I added an extra week to my email writing workshop, Write Without AI, is that I wanted to devote an entire week to these kinds of little storytelling techniques that make your writing pop.

I still have a few spots left if you’re interested in joining.

https://go.thesideblogger.com/write-without-ai/