by: Helen Carrie

A flash of lightning lit up the sheets of rain as they crashed into the banana leaves of the lower canopy. The sound of water on the metal roof drowned out the thunder.

Women and children from the murderers’ village had been arriving all day. We’d sheltered them in the church, trying to push down the thought that we were putting ourselves at risk by offering sanctuary.

It had started as a dispute during a game of football between neighbouring villages. The argument had turned violent when old rivalries had surfaced explosively. Two men had been killed in the fight that followed. The dead men’s village had vowed revenge: tomorrow at dawn they would burn the perpetrators’ village to the ground. The women and children had fled, leaving everything behind, while the men prepared for battle. 

As producer of the documentary series ‘Islands of the Pacific’, I was responsible for the safety of a film crew and British actor, Martin Clunes. I’d decided to evacuate us from the Trobriand Islands where we’d been filming. But the plane company had limited availability. Their fleet was grounded due to an earthquake so we had to wait until the next day for a flight.

We made it to the airfield early the following morning, passing a number of men carrying spears en route. I later learned that the violence had escalated into the worst outbreak in decades, with 32 people dead and 15 missing. Global news almost never reports on Papua New Guinea, let alone the Trobriands. But I still think of the kindness and generosity we were shown by the islanders every single week.

This was back in 2022 when I was still working as a TV producer. In 2024, I wrapped on ‘Cunk on Life’ and went all-in on the copywriting business I’d been building since 2020. Initially, my patchwork career history felt incoherent. I struggled to see what TV had in common with marketing. But in the past couple of years, I’ve started making connections.

Today, all my most successful writing directly applies storytelling techniques from documentary making.

In this piece I’ll be sharing five of my favourites, with practical examples of how you can use them to make your writing unignorably original. Stay (or skip) to the end for the Mildly Philosophical Bit™ about why I think any of this actually matters.

1. The Cold Open

Even if you don’t know what a cold open is, you’ve probably still watched a few without realising:

• The first sketch in every episode of Saturday Night Live
• The beginning of a James Bond film up until he shoots the camera and the opening titles roll
• The opening of The Matrix where Trinity takes down the police and then jumps across buildings to escape from the agents

If a film or episode of TV starts in the middle of a story, throwing us right into the action without any prior context or setup, it’s a cold open.

Cold opens create atmosphere and build excitement from the very first frame. They’re intentionally disorienting, forcing us to stick around for the details that will help us find our way. By the time we have those details, we’re hooked. Dastardly.

It works exactly the same in writing. Chuck your reader right into the most viscous part of the drama and slowly reveal the context they need to know what’s going on.

Want an example? Scroll up. I started this piece with one 😉 

2. Switch the lens 

The visual structure of a traditional scene goes like this:

• Open with an establishing shot captured on a wide angle lens to show the surroundings
• Punch in to a medium or medium-wide shot to introduce your characters in context
• Use close ups for moments of emotional intensity or to focus on small details

That’s the shooting-by-numbers version. But it’s not unusual for filmmakers to zoom in and out in a different order—or to throw this playbook out of the window entirely.

The same can apply to writing. You could “direct” your scene in the traditional way. Or you could:

• Keep the field of view wide throughout to avoid steering your audience’s attention or emotional response.
• Present claustrophobic details but never show the whole. The famous shower scene in Psycho contains 40+ fragments. A hand. A showerhead. The plug hole. An eye. Hitchcock leaves the full extent of the horror to our imaginations.
• Create vignettes without showing how they relate to each other. In the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West, director Sergio Leone introduces three gunmen. But there’s no establishing wide shot to explain how they are connected.

I ghostwrote a B2B blog about leadership in which the author climbed a mountain. When describing the punishing final ascent, I zoomed in on minute details like an ice axe, crampons, and the climbers’ feet. Only when they reached the summit did I change to a wide angle lens so that the reader could enjoy the entire landscape – just as the author did – and see the sun rising over the ridge.

3. Use direct speech 

In most films, the audience is an outsider. We don’t have access to the characters’ interior life. We can only tell what they’re thinking from their words, intonation, facial expressions, and body language, which means that speech is one of the main ways we receive information.

Whereas in writing, the audience is an insider. We have direct access to the narrator’s point of view. Speech becomes less important because we’re getting a download of thoughts. Most B2B writing contains no dialogue at all.

But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t. 

Here are three ways you can use direct speech in B2B writing:

• To create immediacy. This blog about agentic AI opens with three lines of news reportage from bulletins by CNBC and Bloomberg on February’s software market crash. We feel like we are in the room with this author and instantly know the date, topic and angle.
  
• To build trust. The first line of a piece I ghostwrote for a client was a quote from an industry keynote by a global leader at IBM. Using direct speech rather than recounting creates trust because you’re not filtering someone else’s words through your own.
  
• To reveal character. One of my best-performing LinkedIn posts included a quote from a former boss who refused to give me a pay raise. I don’t need to tell you that he was a k**bhead. I let him do that all by himself.

Direct speech is the ultimate example of show-don’t-tell. It makes writing feel urgent and immersive. Just don’t let all that power go to your head.

4. The reveal 

In film, the reveal is the moment where the audience is finally given the missing piece of information that makes sense of everything that came before. It’s the thing that makes the whole cinema gasp involuntarily.

A few of the most devastating reveals in cinematic history include: 

• Luke’s parentage in The Empire Strikes Back
• That plot twist in The Sixth Sense
• What’s in the box in Se7en
• What makes John Nash’s mind beautiful in A Beautiful Mind

Because most B2B writing is explicatory, you might not want to withhold factual information for dramatic effect. But you can still conceal and reveal other types of details.

This works particularly well when using personal anecdotes to frame industry analysis. Take this B2B newsletter. It starts with a story about a difficult time in the author’s life. The body of the piece is about how SaaS companies can find opportunities within AI disruption. And, right at the end, we discover a positive impact of the distressing events from the introduction, underscoring the opportunity-in-upheaval message.

Reveals are memorable, satisfying, and delightfully dramatic. And whoever said that B2B couldn’t be all those things too?

5. Play with time

**Proceed with caution: spoilers for Arrival, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Cloud Atlas in this section**

I remember very few things from my time at university. A couple of words in Middle English. One of the seven types of ambiguity. And this important distinction:

The story is the chronological sequence in which events took place. But the plot is the order in which you tell them. And the two do not have to be the same.

Film plays fast and loose with time. 

• In sci-fi tear-jerker Arrival, we see flashbacks from our main character’s lives, which we later find out are “flashforwards” from a potential future.
  
• In The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind we experience a couple’s relationship unspooling in reverse as their shared memories get permanently erased.
  
• Cloud Atlas weaves six stories from across centuries together as a single braided narrative, cutting between them rather than telling them one at a time.

Messing with time is also a literary device (two of these films were based on novels or short stories), however in B2B we tend to stick to the safety of chronological logic.

But what if we…didn’t?

Earlier this year, I wrote a B2B piece that opened with a recent event from the news and then jumped back in time to a year previously. It revealed the backstory paragraph by paragraph, ending in the present. Each paragraph heading was simply the date and time, just like a title card in a film (inspired by the time jumps in last year’s breakout hockey romance Heated Rivalry, but, sadly, much less steamy.)

So don’t wait until you learn an alien language that lets you see the future before you pause as you’re outlining and ask yourself ‘what is the best way to plot out this story?’

Feed the weird 

B2B writing has a fight on its hands. A fight against the generic, the dull, and the derivative. And the enemy is tireless. Cheap. Fast. Infinite. But humans have the advantage because people are craving originality. The appetite for the weird, playful, and personality-full has never been stronger.

To satisfy it, we need to start treating our work as multi-disciplinary. Borrowing tools and techniques from other modes of storytelling, and applying them to our own. Blending ideas from other art forms to create new ways of seeing the world. TV is just one example. Don’t stop there. Take inspiration from visual art, photography, architecture, animation, podcasting, poetry, dance, music, or theatre.

Because you can only be “left behind” if you accept that race is linear. Let’s collectively reject that premise and set off in an entirely new direction. 

That way we’ll always be a thick daub of oil paint, a pirouette, and a half-formed haiku away from anyone – or anything – else. ■

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Helen is freelance writer and full-time weirdo on a quest to banish the BS from B2B copy. She runs a group programme to help small business owners stand out and get booked up by discovering their ✨Singularity✨.