Tommy Walker is the founder of The Content Studio, a content marketing consultancy for Fortune 1,000 companies and fast growing B2B startups. The Studio Insider blends filmmaking principles with B2B marketing advice to help marketers create meaningful content that connects and converts.
🔸 Write Better Endings 🔸 Part 5 of 5
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Top of mind:This is it. For our purposes, the best way to think of the bitter end is as a cautionary tale.
These are all examples where the protagonists and the audience all learn difficult lessons.
Like the other endings we’ve discussed, the bitter end follows a basic framework that leads the characters to their ultimate downfall.
1. Introduction to Somerset and Mills William Somerset is a detective one case away from retirement. He’s jaded and weary of the city’s moral decline. 2. Setting the stakes with the Gluttony crime scene
They’re called to a crime scene where an overweight man is bound, face down in a bowl of spaghetti.
The autopsy reveals the victim was forced to eat themselves to death.
Throughout the film they discover 4 more murders, each resembling a seven deadly sin. They’re forced to question morality and the nature of man. 5. Moral compromise: Follow John Doe
Just as the case feels unsolvable, the murderer, John Doe, turns himself in, promising to lead the detectives to the final bodies if they go alone and without backup.
In the end, John Doe leads Detective Mills and Somerset into the desert, where a courier delivers a package. In Sev7en, the consequences are left to the reader’s imagination. Does Mills go to prison? Does Somerset retire? It’s left ambiguous so the viewer walks away uneasy about the future of these characters. We are left with a bitter end. How does this apply to B2BOn the surface, bitter endings in movies are the biggest departure from B2B writing we’ve had so far. This is what those same beats look like in an outline Topic: Should I switch to a cloud ecommerce solution? You’ve built a multi-million dollar business selling raw textiles to clothing manufacturers. You were one of the first to offer online ordering and built your entire operation using on-site hardware and custom coding. Ecommerce is in a constant state of flux. Customer demands are evolving rapidly, interfaces are easier to use, and there are news reports of legacy brands filing for bankruptcy every week. Likewise, the immediate cost of migration is high. There are mounting pressures from investors and agency partners to keep the existing systems as not to run the risk of losing data in the process. The site crashes during a critical high-traffic period. Spend time and money to repair the site, field customer support emails, and respond to any social media complaints. Contact agencies to diagnose issues, and try to get the site back online. Despite prior conversations with the head of IT about potentially moving to the cloud, the agency requires a 3-month renewal of the contract to make immediate fixes and diagnose long-term solutions. Desperate for a solution, you sign. Now that everything is fixed, you assess the immediate cost of repair and the long-term cost of switching and justify that it’s better to take 5 hours to solve the problem now than take 3 months to migrate to an entirely new platform. Time goes on, the cycle continues. Good money gets thrown away after bad and nothing changes.
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The old ways are dying.
Studio Insider Ronnie Higgins captures perfectly the angst our entire community has been feeling, and boy oh boy, did this discussion spark a nerve.
I highly recommend you jump in with your thoughts. Very great discussion happening here.
From "The Vault"
Dan Levy was one of my most impactful editors.
In this article, he questions the author's choice of metaphors, calls out redundant language, and discusses pacing which we don't talk about often enough.
Watch him edit
Read the article
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The Studio Insider
Tommy Walker is the founder of The Content Studio, a content marketing consultancy for Fortune 1,000 companies and fast growing B2B startups. The Studio Insider blends filmmaking principles with B2B marketing advice to help marketers create meaningful content that connects and converts.
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