Expert-Secrets full book

The leader points a gun at Magneto’s mother and has him try to move a
metal coin on the desk. He nervously tries to move the coin, but isn’t able, so the
leader pulls the trigger and kills his mother. And then you see a scene so
powerful that, without a single word being said, you actually feel the pain that
Magneto is going through.
You watch as his eyes shift from sadness to anger. He then uses his powers
to crush a bell on the Nazi leader’s desk. From there, he starts yelling and
moving everything metal inside the room. He crushes the guards’ helmets,
instantly killing them, and then completely destroys everything in the room. And
that’s when he found his power.
When you’re watching the film, you are able to see all of this happen
without any words, because we can see his face, we can experience the room, we
hear the music, and we actually feel, in some way, Magneto’s pain and suffering.
That is the power of films.
Now most of us aren’t producing films to sell our stuff, but we have to learn
how to tell stories in a way that help others feel the same.
Imagine if Magneto just came in and said something like, “Yeah, so when I
was a kid, I was in a Nazi concentration camp and they wanted me to move a
metal coin, but I wasn’t able to do it, so they killed my mom. I was really mad,
so I blew the whole place up.”
Did you feel anything there? No, you wouldn’t have had the same
emotional experience that you need to connect with that character. Yet that’s how
most people tell their stories. If you look at a good fiction author, they’ll have
the character come into a room, then spend several pages describing the room.
They talk about the lights, how things looked and felt, and everything they need
to set up the scene. Then they go deep into how the character is feeling. And that
is the key. You have to explain how you feel, and when you do that, people will
start to feel what you were feeling.
For example, what if I tell a story like this:
I was sitting at home, and I could hear my wife and kids in the other
room playing. They had no idea what had just happened. I was sitting
there freaked out because I knew the bills were due, but had no idea
how I was going to pay them. I started to get a shooting pain in my
stomach. It felt like a heart attack, but it was lower in my gut. I felt this
pressure coming down and I literally felt like someone was sitting on
my neck. It got so heavy that I couldn’t lift my head. The only thing I
could see were the palms of my hands, and they were sweating, yet I