The front door lurks in a recess. Its ancient black paintwork is spattered with road splash, and the shallow pane of glass above its jamb betrays no light within. An empty milk bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it to the pavement. There is no doorbell, and the letterbox has healed like a childhood wound…
So begins Mick Herron’s first description of Slough House in his excellent series by the same name. Each book of the series begins and ends with a lengthy, loving description of the house and its inhabitants (a motley crew of flunked-out Mi5 agents); and the details Herron includes are honestly a story in and of themselves.
(Go read Chapter 1 in the preview on Amazon if you’re curious.)
Mick Herron—like many noir/crime authors—has a killer way of choosing the perfect detail to paint an extremely vivid scene.
The details are what pull you under the surface of the story—they’re the difference between reading a story and fully experiencing it.
This is true in both fiction and marketing stories. Sure, you’re not going to spend page after page describing the setting in exquisite detail (seriously, go check out that house description!), but understanding how to choose perfectly placed details will help you tell stories that are even more sticky.
It’s another one of those fantastic tools from a fiction-writer’s toolkit that nonfiction writers can use, like the curiosity gap I talked about in my last post.
Generic labels—busy, overwhelmed, excited—ask the reader to imagine for you. Specifics do the imagining on their behalf, dropping them into a moment they can see, hear, and feel.
As James Joyce wrote, “In the particular is contained the universal.”
The more precise you are, the more your story resonates. That might sound counterintuitive—wouldn’t a broad, general story apply to more people? In practice, the opposite is true. It’s the specificity of a chipped coffee mug, a knot in the stomach, or a throwaway line of dialogue that makes a reader nod and think, “That’s me.”
We connect through shared human moments we recognize in our own lives. And details are what allow us to imagine those moments.
In a novel, a scene without tangible detail feels like it could take place anywhere—or nowhere. And so we drift away from it. In a marketing story, a case study without detail feels vague, slippery, or exaggerated.
One chipped mug on a desk says more about a character’s mental state than a dozen adjectives. A timestamp on an email in a case study feels more persuasive than a claim about “fast turnaround.”
When choosing details for marketing stories and nonfiction writing, think in categories—different layers of specificity that bring your characters, settings, and voices to life.
Characters
A well-drawn character in fiction is never just a list of traits. They’re revealed through action, choices under pressure, and the tiny, telling details that show how they move through the world.
The same principle works in marketing stories. Your customer shouldn’t be a generic “small business owner” or “working mom.” They should be someone your reader can picture: specific, memorable, maybe even a little messy.
- A single mother whose desk is littered with sticky notes in three different colors, who takes three laps around her room before hitting “publish” on her next post.
- A founder who always has a half-drunk cold brew sweating on the corner of their keyboard, and a habit of rearranging pens before a hard conversation.
- A course creator jotting notes about her offer on her phone with chipped green fingernail polish, during a stolen moment in the bathroom at work between endless meetings.
These kinds of details do more than paint a picture—they give your audience a person to root for, recognize, or relate to.
Further reading: How to Write Customer Stories
Setting
Setting isn’t just backdrop—it’s a tool for tone, mood, and context. In fiction, the same conversation feels different if it happens in a noisy coffee shop, a hospital waiting room, or on a park bench in the rain.
In marketing stories, setting works the same way. A testimonial that opens with “We met in a quiet conference room at 8 a.m. over paper cups of burnt coffee” feels different than “We met over lattes at a sunny café.” The details tell you something about the relationship, the stakes, and the mood before a single word of dialogue is spoken.
Sensory detail is the quickest way to make a setting come alive.
Let the reader hear the hum of a refrigerator in a late-night kitchen, smell the ink of fresh-printed marketing brochures, or feel the grit of gravel underfoot in a construction site walkthrough. Even one well-chosen sensory cue can pull a reader directly into the scene.
Voice and dialogue
Dialogue is one of the fastest ways to reveal personality. It carries rhythm, word choice, attitude, and shows emotion in a way paraphrasing can’t.
Consider the difference:
- Paraphrase: She told me she was nervous about raising her prices.
- Dialogue: She cracked her ring finger before taking a sip of her cold latte. “Who’s going to pay me that much?” she finally said. “If I ask that rate, I’ll never get a client.”
The second version is not only more vivid—it’s more intimate. We hear her exact fear in her own words.
In marketing stories, dialogue is especially powerful in:
- Customer success stories (“I almost dropped my phone when I saw that first payment hit my bank account!”)
- Personal brand stories (“The doctor looked me in the eye and said, ‘If you don’t slow down, you won’t make it to 50.’”)
- Sales pages, where you can quote “voice of the customer” language directly from discovery calls or surveys.
When using dialogue, avoid the temptation to clean it up too much. Natural speech isn’t perfectly polished—it has pauses, fillers, and quirks. Those imperfections are often what make it believable.
Further reading: The Key Ingredients of Stories that Sell
Choosing the right detail
More detail isn’t always better—especially in marketing stories, where you don’t have much real estate (or attention span) to work with.
Some quick guidelines:
- Relevance beats abundance. One perfect, telling detail is more powerful than a list of unrelated ones.
- Nouns and verbs do more heavy lifting than adjectives. “The blinking cursor” conveys frustration without the word “frustrated.”
- Keep the camera close. Focus on one scene, one moment, one object or gesture at a time.
- Edit ruthlessly. If a detail doesn’t add meaning, mood, or credibility, cut it.
Details make your content stand out in a sea of generalities. They humanize statistics, give dimension to claims, and help your audience see themselves in your examples. The right detail turns “someone like me” into “that could be me.”
And when your audience lives in your story, even for a moment, you’ve created something unforgettable—and far more likely to connect with your target customer.
Want more?
In a few weeks, I’m teaching a webinar for Indie Author Training called Unputdownable: Captivate Nonfiction Readers with Fiction Storytelling Techniques.
We’re live August 26th at 9am Pacific, and you can register for the webinar here.
If you catch this blog post after the fact, no worries. The replay will be available at that link for free.