Skeleton

Four words put Donald Trump in the White House: Make America Great Again. Not a policy (he literally had none), and certainly not a plan (also none). Just four words that contained an entire story.

Protagonist, goal, antagonist, in four words. That story monster is what I call a Skeleton.

A Skeleton is a story stripped back to its bones: a protagonist, a goal, an antagonist, and nothing else. No flaw, no lesson, no journey. It’s the most compressed a story can get before it stops being a story at all. Skeletons are what you reach for when you have almost no room to work with: a slogan, a tagline, a headline, a hook, the line in your bio.

So how can four words do the work of a whole story? Because you don’t tell the story, you imply it, and the audience builds the rest themselves. Say ‘Make America Great Again’ and a listener’s mind supplies the fall, the villain, the struggle and the promised return, without you spelling out a word of it.

That’s also why it’s worth getting right before anything else: nail your Skeleton, and every longer piece of content you make can grow from the same seed.

Building one is simple to describe and hard to do: find your three bones and compress them until nothing else is left. Then test what survives. Can a stranger infer all three, the hero, the prize and the enemy? Is there a verb, an action, something actually happening? Is it soaked in emotion? Is it simple enough to be almost impossible to argue with? And can you make it shorter?

It’s also helpful to look at ones that fail. Hillary Clinton ran against Trump with ‘Stronger Together’. There’s no verb. There’s no enemy. There’s no story. It’s an observation, the kind of line you’d find on a motivational poster in a waiting room.

This works in reverse, too, and it’s one of the most useful ways to test any story. Take anything you’re making, however sprawling, and try to crush it down to its Skeleton. The Odyssey is ‘a warrior coming home, and bringing the war with him’. If you can compress your idea to its bones and it still stands, it’s clear. If you can’t, it isn’t ready yet.

And Skeletons don’t have to be controversial. ‘Make America Great Again’ runs on rage, but a Skeleton can carry any feeling you like. A remote escape in the Scottish Highlands called Wildland uses the line, ‘Stay where the world can’t find you.’ Seven soft words, and the same three bones are all there. The protagonist is you, worn down by a life that never switches off. The goal is peace, somewhere to finally disappear. And the antagonist sits right in the middle: the world, always demanding something of you, always pulling you back. A calm and powerful little story about escape.

Even ‘Because you’re worth it’ runs on it. The protagonist is you, the goal is to feel you’re worth it, and the antagonist is the voice that says you’re not.