Awhile ago I heard a report on NPR about how to make your dinner party stories engaging.

The takeaway was surprising and, for a business storyteller, pretty comforting: Don't talk about things your audience hasn't experienced.

"Speakers tend to think that listeners will most enjoy hearing novel stories - that is, stories about experiences the listeners haven't had. And that makes perfectly good sense. “We think of communication as an attempt to tell people things they don't already know," says NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. "But what our experiments revealed was that listeners actually far preferred to hear stories about experiences they had already had."

This week I'm thinking about the part of your email, newsletter, or blog post that doesn't get so much attention.

The end.

Business owners are often stressed out about how to get started on an email, presentation, or other written content.

But once you get going, a bigger problem is knowing when to stop. You might find you have so much to say—such funny anecdotes, so much enthusiasm and knowledge—that you don't want to wrap it up.

You want your reader to feel the way you do, to love your topic with bravado and goofy fascination. If you pack in some more examples or statistics, they'll get it, right? They'll see that you love your work AND that you're really good at it. Right?

The folks at The Moth encourage their storytellers to choose subjects that matter to the author.

Why? Because if the storyteller has a stake in the outcome, the listener will care. If the listener cares, they'll keep listening. It's the same with the people on your email list.

This doesn't mean you need to tell gut-wrenching stories. The really deep stuff is better for the stage. But bringing more vulnerability—more internal fire—into your marketing will help your subscribers see something beyond your product and your desire to sell it.