Almost every story that works depends on contrast. Lower lows, higher highs. Where we are versus where we want to be. The gap between reality and desire. This gap is where all the energy lives.
Think of those before-and-after weight-loss photos. The transformation isn’t impressive because of the final state — it’s impressive because of how far they’ve moved. The bigger the gap between the before and the after, the more compelling the story becomes.
This works because contrast creates tension, and tension creates attention. Without contrast, there’s no drama. You’re just describing a state. With contrast, you’re describing a journey, and journeys are what humans are wired to follow.
Here’s the beautiful part: it’s fractal. It works at every scale you can imagine.
At the word level, but is a three-letter contrast machine. The word itself says: you thought one thing, now you’re thinking another. I once wrote an email that used “but” 27 times — not because I was being clever, but because almost every meaningful idea requires a contrast. The ordinary expectation, but something else is true.
At the sentence level, it’s the long, languid description of a calm ocean stretching to the horizon, the sails barely filling, the crew half-asleep in the afternoon heat — followed by: “REEF!”
At the story level, it’s the entire arc. Who the character was, versus who they need to become. What they believed, versus what they learn.
At the strategic level, it’s the before-and-after of using your product or service. The struggle they’re in now, the freedom they’d have if things changed.
But there’s a deeper contrast underneath all of these, and it’s the one that makes stories feel necessary rather than just clever. It’s the contrast between the known and the unknown.
The known is safe. Familiar. Ordered. The unknown is where the danger lives — but it’s also where growth happens. Every story worth telling pushes someone out of what they know and into what they don’t. That’s what makes it scary, and that’s what makes it matter. The darkness in a story isn’t just atmosphere. It’s the unknown itself — the thing that might destroy you, but might also be the only place where you become something new.
This is why origin stories work. Why the hero’s journey works. Why every good business story has a moment where someone steps off the edge of what’s comfortable. The audience feels that contrast in their bones, because they live it too. The known world versus the thing they haven’t done yet. The safe career versus the leap. The script they’ve been following versus the story they actually want to live.
There’s a reason this runs so deep. We’re wired to detect change — because change can be threatening. Our nervous systems don’t register steady states; they register differences. Accelerating from 20mph to 40mph is thrilling. Cruising at 70mph is boring. The speed is higher, but there’s no contrast, so there’s nothing to feel. Stories work the same way. It’s not the state that grips people — it’s the shift.
And this connects to something fundamental: if stories are about change, then contrast is how we see it. It’s how we emphasise change, define it, quantify it. Without contrast, change is invisible — it happened, but nobody felt it. A character who grows but whose before and after look the same hasn’t really grown as far as the audience is concerned. Contrast is the evidence. At the macro level, it’s the whole arc. At the micro level, it’s a single word choice that flips the meaning of a sentence.
Good copywriters have always understood this instinctively. They agitate the pain. They don’t just show you the product — they show you how bad life is without it, then how good life could be with it. The bigger that gap, the more urgently you want to cross it. That’s not manipulation (or at least, it shouldn’t be). It’s honest contrast. If your service genuinely transforms someone’s situation, then showing both sides of that transformation — the struggle and the relief — is the most truthful thing you can do. The contrast is the value proposition. The wider you can make that gap without exaggerating, the more people are willing to pay to cross it.
The reason this matters is simple: if everything stays the same, there’s no reason to listen. Contrast says something changed here, and it matters.
Most weak writing has no contrast. It just describes. It doesn’t show the distance between states. The moment you introduce contrast — even a small one — the whole thing comes alive.