It’s Halloween. A time for ghouls, vampires, witches, pumpkins and pedants gnawing their own tongues off whenever someone mentions Frankenstein. You see, Frankenstein is the name of Mary Shelley’s doctor, not their green bolted creation. If you Google “Frankenstein” and search under images, you get a huge array of green monsters with receding hairlines and bolted necks.
Go on, Google “Frankenstein”
And amidst that array is a single poster trying like Cnute the Great to stem the tide of inaccuracy by declaring “Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the monster”. But who is listening? And that’s the problem with common knowledge. It’s not always right.
Seven Years!
How many of us were told (in an era when we didn’t have the internet to check our ‘facts’) that chewing gum would stay in our stomach for seven years? I remember the gasps ripple across the playground as that common knowledge was spread in my youth. Seven Years? It was delivered with a certainty that never had us question if it was true or not. Our faces screwed up as we worked out how ancient we would be when it finally came out the other end. It was infinitely more interesting than the truth. “Chewing Gum? Indigestible. Comes out in your poo.”
It’s not true, it’s an urban myth. And the trouble with myths is that they can be more interesting, more succinct, more surprising, more shareable, more viral, than the truth.
Yet we can learn a great deal about what makes a story viral from the Chewing Gum Inaccuracy.
- It is simple. You only need to remember two words to tell the story and its awesome punchline – seven years! Funnily enough, if the myth has been 4 years, it might have disappeared without a trace, because even numbers aren’t as interesting as odd ones.
- It is surprising. We can barely believe it, and it makes us wonder what is going on in those seven long years. Who knew this seemingly innocuous peppermint elastic band was so strange? It makes us look at that slice of gum in a whole new and slightly scary light.
- It is memorable. It creates an emotional reaction in our bodies (what really? eek!) which hones our senses, pulling us into this moment and simultaneously transferring that experience into long-term memory.
We all tell stories. We all share stories. Some of those stories are even true.
If you want the stories you tell to be as viral as the urban myths, make them simple, surprising and memorable.
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