Stories That Stick: Six Rules for a Narrative Nobody Forgets
A good story and a story that sticks are two different things, and most of us only build the first. A good story does its work while it is being read: it makes the reader smile, worry or relax, and then they turn away. A story that sticks does something else. A week later, when someone asks them where to buy, that story comes out of their mouth with the same details and the same tone.
That difference is not luck. Narratives that survive share six features, and the six features have a name. Chip and Dan Heath collected them in Made to Stick (2007) and built the word SUCCESs out of the first letters: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and stories. This article walks through all six with a plain definition, an example and a quick test for each.
One warning first. These six rules are not a headline trick. All six do the same job: they shrink the distance between the text and the experience of the reader. If the text has no experience to attach to, none of the rules will rescue it. If the whole idea is new to you, read Story is everything first; that piece draws the line between narrative and report, and this one goes into construction.
The six SUCCESs rules at a glance
Start with the table. The third column is the useful part: each rule comes with a question you can ask your own text in a few seconds, without any theory.
| Rule | Plain meaning | Test question |
|---|---|---|
| Simple | One promise | Can you state the core promise in one sentence? |
| Unexpected | Breaks an expectation | Where does the text contradict what the reader assumes? |
| Concrete | Can be seen or counted | Which details could the reader picture or count? |
| Credible | Can be checked | Where can the reader verify the claim? |
| Emotional | About one person | Is this written for one person or for everyone? |
| Stories | Someone wants something | Is there a person who wants something and hits an obstacle? |
The order is alphabetical, not a ranking. In practice simple does the most work, because the other rules ride on it: an unexpected story carrying three promises delivers none of them.
Simple: one promise in one sentence
Simple does not mean short. It means single. A short text can carry three promises and leave nothing behind; a long text can carry one promise and last for years. An advert that promises low price, high quality, huge variety and fast delivery is, in effect, promising nothing.
The practical test is easy. Hand the text to one person and ask what it says. If they answer with two different sentences, it is not simple, however short it is. If they repeat your sentence in their own words, it is.
Three cuts that get you to one promise
- Cut the audience. Drop "all customers" and keep one group. A text written for everyone is written for nobody.
- Cut the promise. List everything you deliver, then ask which one you would sacrifice the rest for. That is the core promise.
- Cut the proof. Anything not needed to establish the core promise leaves the opening paragraph. Proof belongs further down, not before the reader knows the subject.
A language school ran four course lines: children, teenagers, adults and exam preparation. It promoted all four together and none of them registered. Then it wrote a single promise: "We only teach adults who need to speak up in a work meeting in English." The other courses were not removed, only dropped from the first line. That sentence is where recognition started.
Unexpected: break an expectation, not the reader
The mind predicts constantly, and prediction is the enemy of attention. When the first sentence is exactly what the reader expects, they can finish the rest in their head and skip it. Breaking an expectation means saying something that does not fit their prior experience but can be explained immediately.
Three kinds of gap work reliably, and all three differ from shock:
- A knowledge gap. The reader thinks they know something and does not. "Dry cleaners do not remove the stain, they move it" attacks a common belief rather than the reader's feelings.
- A scale gap. Something that looked small is large, or the reverse. "A two-dollar screw stopped three machines."
- A direction gap. The result runs against the path. "The more we advertised, the less we sold" — followed by the real explanation.
The line between a gap and a shock is return. A broken expectation always comes back to the promise of the text and makes it clearer. A shock only jolts. If you can delete your surprising sentence and the text still does its job, the sentence was a shock and should go.
Concrete: details that fit in the hand
Concrete means the reader can picture, count or almost touch something. Adjectives are abstract and do not stay in memory; nouns, numbers and verbs do. "High quality" is an adjective that fits a thousand products. "If the fridge door does not close properly within a year, a technician comes the next day" is a condition someone can check.
A home appliance shop replaced "gold warranty" with exactly that sentence on the product page. Sales did not move because the sentence was magic; they moved because the buyer now knew what they were and were not buying. Concreteness lowers the risk of the purchase, and that risk is what keeps a decision pending.
Translate every adjective into something countable
Each adjective can be turned into an observable fact. "Fast" becomes "order registered before noon ships the same day". "Easy" becomes "three clicks to issue an invoice". "Experienced" becomes "we have done this work, in these cities, for this long". If you cannot translate it, delete the adjective; you lose nothing.
Credible: a source the reader can check
Credibility is not built by enlarging the claim. It is built by shrinking the gap between claim and evidence. Three sources of credibility need no impressive statistics at all.
- Verifiable detail. A city name, a part number, a delivery hour. Details the reader can roughly check build more trust than any round number.
- A named witness. A quotation from someone who can be found beats any description of yourself. If there is no named witness, tell the event itself instead of inventing a quotation.
- A small admission. State a real limit: "This tool is built for small teams; if more than a handful of people share a project, look elsewhere." An admission makes lying expensive for you, and that cost is the credibility.
An appointment app put this on its about page: "Built for practices with one receptionist. If you have two, use the team plan." That sentence turned part of the market away and told the rest that the tool was meant for them. Explicitly rejecting one group is a reliable way to earn the trust of another.
Emotional: write for one person, not for everyone
Emotion is not produced by emotional words. "We care about your home" creates no feeling, because it is about nobody. Feeling arrives when the reader sees themselves in the text, and that requires the text to be about one person rather than an audience.
A heating and plumbing company replaced its list of "available, expert, guaranteed" with a scene: "It is eleven at night, the children are asleep, you are standing under the shower and the water goes cold. What matters at that hour is not the price. What matters is that someone answers." The price list came after. It came second because the reader has to be standing in the scene first.
A working rule: before writing any section, put one specific person in your head — with a job, an hour of the day and a problem in that moment. If you cannot see that person, the text will not be seen either. This is the same idea that the brand story turns into a full template: the customer is the hero and the brand is only the guide.
Stories: the rule that carries the other five
The first five rules are properties of a message. The sixth is the container. A story is what holds simplicity, surprise, detail, evidence and feeling together in one connected parcel, because the mind stores that parcel as a single unit.
A short example. A phone repair shop stopped saying "expert and fast" and wrote: "A woman came in on her way to the airport. Her phone would not turn on and the only photos of her mother birthday were on it. It was working by that evening and the photos were intact. Since then the first thing we do is back the phone up, not repair it." Those lines carry all five other rules at once: one promise, a broken expectation, concrete detail, checkable evidence and a person.
Building that parcel in very little space is its own skill, laid out in the anatomy of a short story: a want, an obstacle, a decision and an ending that explains nothing. If your text has to be shorter still, the compression route is in the micro-fiction piece.
Diagnostic table: symptom to missing rule
In daily work you do not need to hold six rules in your head. You need to recognise the symptom. This table starts from the symptom, not from the theory.
| Symptom in the text | Rule that is missing | First move |
|---|---|---|
| The reader leaves in the first line | Unexpected | Rewrite line one around a knowledge gap |
| It gets read but nobody retells it | Simple | Compress the promise to one sentence and move the rest down |
| The reader says everyone says the same thing | Concrete | Translate each adjective into a countable detail |
| The question "how do you know?" goes unanswered | Credible | Add a witness or a small admission |
| It is correct but nobody cares | Emotional | Put one specific person inside the scene |
| It ends on a sales line | Stories | Let the decision itself show the result |
One rule for using this: pick a single row per edit. Trying to fix all six at once usually produces a text that has none of them.
The ten-minute exercise
Take a piece of your own published writing — a product page, a post, an email — and spend six steps with it, timing yourself.
- Minutes 1 and 2 — the promise. Underline the one sentence the reader must remember. If you cannot find it, or you underline several, there is no promise yet.
- Minutes 3 and 4 — the expectation. Rewrite the first line so it contradicts what the reader assumes. One version is not enough; write three.
- Minutes 5 and 6 — detail. Mark every adjective. Beside each one write an observable fact; delete any adjective you cannot translate.
- Minute 7 — evidence. Add one witness or one honest limit. If you have neither, reduce the claim instead of inventing support.
- Minute 8 — a person. Bring in one specific person with one everyday detail, not a general description.
- Minutes 9 and 10 — retelling. Read the text aloud, then retell it to yourself without looking. Whatever disappears in the retelling is what needs cutting.
The exercise is not meant to produce a flawless text. It is meant to show which of the six rules is missing from your everyday work. After a few rounds you will recognise that symptom without the table.
