How Long and How Truthful Should an Anecdote Be?
Professionals sell by telling stories about clients they have worked with. Through these stories they make more tangible the value of their services. In earlier entries I have discussed some specific kinds of anecdotes (Sadder-but-Wiser and Watch-Your-Step anecdotes). This entry will address two closely related issues of their composition, their length and their truthfulness.
They are related because when you shorten an anecdote you inevitably have to leave out important facts, resulting in a distortion of the truth. By definition, anecdotes are short, meaning that if one gets too long, it ceases to be an anecdote. I have worked with hundreds of professionals, helping them construct anecdotes from the experiences of their clients and have always been able to bring them down to a tight six sentences. Sometimes, they should be preceded by a statement that highlights their significance (“Confidentiality is critical in matters of this kind. An owner of a florist shop didn’t realize this and . . .) in which case they might stretch to seven.
Of course, I am not the final arbiter of anecdote length. (That, I think, is done by the Anecdote Certification Board in Brussels.) And it doesn’t much matter if one runs on into an eighth sentence. But surely there is no such thing as a twenty-sentence anecdote.
Let’s assume for the moment that the ACB in Brussels officially draws the line at seven sentences. Now we must face the dilemma: We must distill a problem that took a client five years of mismanagement to get into and eighteen months of our work to extricate them from down to a mere seven sentences. And we must be truthful. The ACB insists on the truth. It is absolutely nuts about the truth. What are we to do?
My solution to this problem is to do my best to meet this standard: If the client were sitting there with me when I told the anecdote and were asked if it were true, she would say yes, that it is essentially true, though it’s a simplification.
Of course, I am not the arbiter for standards of truth in anecdotes, either. And the ACB, while good at counting sentences, is notoriously ineffective at discerning the truth. So, you can probably put as much hokum into your anecdote as you like and no one will know. But this is the standard I use, and I sleep well at night.
Coincidently, this week blogger Skellie also posted an article on anecdote length. In his case they are for use in blog postings. It’s well worth a look at http://www.skelliewag.org/mastering-the-anecdote-39.htm#comment-3324
November 25th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Good storytelling is perhaps the most memorable and effective ways of communicating. An anecdote is a very short story - even shorter than a parable - and should therefore limit itself to illustrating a single concise point.
I don’t think you need to “distill a problem that took a client five years of mismanagement to get into and eighteen months of our work to extricate them from down to a mere seven sentences”. All you have to do is to find one searing aspect of their mismanagement that you are choosing to illuminate to the listener.