The One-Sentence Attention-Magnet Story

Published by: David Garfinkel on 02-09-2026

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We’re really at a crisis point for a lot of marketers.

It’s not just that ads keep getting more expensive.

It’s that it just gets harder and harder to get and keep prospects’ attention.

And with everything being engineered and optimized by AI and CRO, stuff ends up looking more and more the same. And that only works against you.

You know you need to stand out–but how?

Well, the best way to get and keep attention is, and always has been, a story.

But how long is a story?

I mean, a Hero’s Journey story can take hours.

And even the type of compact tales I introduced in my book The Persuasion Story Code can take two to three minutes. That’s not very long, but at a time of shrinking attention spans, it’s still too long.

Now, you can try using outrageous hooks. But in addition to shrinking attention spans, you’re also fighting against rising levels of skepticism and outright distrust.

If you say something that gets attention but just isn’t believable, you’re still sunk.

So, what would be ideal to solve this problem?

It would be a persuasion story you could tell in 15 or 20 words.

Impossible, you say?

That’s what I thought until I really started working on it.

One of my clients, Ari Nirsissian, helped me quite a lot in the development of my thinking and writing of these new kind of attention magnets, the one-sentence microstory.

It really is a story. It really is persuasive.

And it really is short!

Just the right size for today’s attention spans.

Today I’m going to show you, step by step, how I developed three of them… and how I combined them into one electric three-sentence paragraph, which takes less than a minute to read out loud.

Resources:

To find out more about my book The Persuasion Story Code, check out this link to the Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFD2KXNQ

And to find out more about my coaching for experienced copywriters and business owners, go to:

https://garfinkelcoaching.com


Keywords: copywriting attention hooks

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