Mini-stories
It’s Sunday morning and I couldn’t be happier—I’ve got no plans and a good book. So I pour some coffee, join my pup on the couch, and crack open Bill McKibben’s most recent crusade, Here Comes The Sun. In it, McKibben makes the case for a world run on renewables.
As I’m working my way through—and as the sun pops over my neighbor’s roof—I come across a paragraph that stops me in my tracks.
It was neither controversial nor particularly exciting, no—but it was memorable.
See, I think nonfiction books serve the public not just through information, but through stories that help us remember.
But not every insight in a book deserves a full story, otherwise books would be bloated with stories so ubiquitous that they wouldn’t be nearly as impactful. The best communicators know this.
And so, they use the power of analogy.
Analogy, and its cousin metaphor, are what I like to call mini-stories. McKibben knows when, and how, to deploy them.
In the passage that stopped me, McKibben is talking about capitalism—the machine running on fossil fuels:
“Our task is to rip out the guts of that machine and replace them with sun and wind and batteries, and do it while the machine is still running. Over time, I think, that switch will make it easier to steer the machine in smarter directions, but that’s not the main job at the moment. Emergency room doctors don’t waste a lot of time worrying about their patients’ poor lifestyle choices—they do what they must to save their lives, perhaps with the hope that given a second chance their patients will choose more wisely.”
McKibben suggests that, in this critical moment for solar and wind, we should use capitalism to rapidly decarbonize our way out of climate crisis. He uses a mini-story to make that insight memorable. ER doctors clearly care about their patients but must treat the most urgent problem first. Save the life, then change the lifestyle. Decarbonize first, then change—or replace—capitalism.
This is what makes McKibben such an effective communicator. His analogies act as anchors, giving us something to hold onto in a complex arena.
The best communicators don’t overwhelm their audience with insights or facts. They know when a well-timed metaphor can replace an entire chapter of rambling.
As for me, I write for climate organizations for a living. And after studying McKibben’s style, I’ve been experimenting with mini-stories. Climate communication is often heavy with data and light on memory. But if people can picture the problem—like a doc saving a life—they can remember it.
I pause and look up through the window again. That same sun that crested my neighbor’s roof will power most of our planet in my lifetime.
The challenge isn’t explaining that future—it’s helping people grasp it.
If climate communication is going to work, it won’t be because we shared more data. It’ll be because we told better, smaller stories that made the big ones feel as hot as the sun.