Last time I explained that momentum is the most important force in writing.
Momentum is the force that makes a reader care about a piece, and when there isn’t enough of it, they don’t read.
You can work as hard as you like and pack in good material, but if nobody reads it, it’s a bust.
1. Make a reason
Find the quiz hidden in this post and I’ll give you 10 million won.
So, how did that sentence land?
Eyes wide open? Wondering where the quiz is?
You’re reading closely now, because you have a reason to care about this post (10 million won). Pulling in a reader takes bait of that size. Bait works when it touches something a person wants.
YouTube videos now open with about ten seconds of highlights before the video starts. They show you fast how good the thing is going to be. Give the viewer a reason to watch like that and they choose to keep watching.
The best place to make that reason is the title. Readers look at a title and decide from it whether to read at all. They have to find their reason in the title alone before they get interested enough to start the body.
So the title and the first line have to promise a desire, meaning “here is how to get the thing you want”. Show, in a way the reader can feel, which of their problems this post solves and how their life gets better. A lot of writing deals with the writer’s own worries and problems instead of the reader’s, and people simply aren’t interested in someone else’s business. They care about it only when it connects to them. (For the details, see the post on writing titles.)
As I covered in ‘how to write titles’, the subjects everyone cares about are health, money, and relationships. Promise a way to keep or gain health, money, or relationships and attention comes easily.
But sometimes you’re writing something the reader has no reason to read. How do you get them interested then? There’s another way, and it works on anyone.
2. Shake up an emotion
Anyone can be shaken by what they read. Nothing moves a person like emotion. So if you want a piece with momentum, you can open by setting off a strong one. Curiosity or surprise work best. Anger works too, but if it gets too strong the reader can’t focus on the writing.
Online news gets its views from shocking incidents, accidents, awful events. The headlines are sensational to match.
Even when it’s nothing much, the headline has to make a fuss to get attention. That’s the same reason news mostly covers negative, shocking events. Ordinary, hopeful news draws less.
Uncomfortable using negative emotion? Then set off curiosity with a question, the way this paragraph did. Get asked something and you reflexively start thinking of an answer. A long, hard question just tires people, so keep it simple and interesting enough to be worth chewing on. Questions are the easiest tool of the lot. This series opened with two of them: ‘Why does my writing get so few views?’ and ‘Why is my writing boring?’
For an interesting question, use a worry people already have (why does my writing get so few views?), something odd they never noticed (why do reporters write so many negative stories?), or just a strange fact (how many people ride an ambulance in Korea in a day? Five thousand). If the reader reads it and thinks “wait, what?”, it worked. The question is a pretext for bringing out the main subject in an interesting way.
Last, a story can make emotion too. Stories are addictive. Newspaper pieces often open with a short one. Then the reader finishes the article even when it’s dull, because they want to see how the story ends. That’s why an experienced reporter puts the ending at the bottom.
That tendency, once a story has started, to need to see the ending is called ‘narrative pull’. A drama or a webtoon cuts to an ad or ends the episode at the decisive moment, and what makes the viewer want the next one is narrative pull. Build a story that opens with interest, turns just as the reader gets comfortable, and lands its conclusion while they’re still surprised. I introduced ki-seung-jeon-gyeol, the four-part structure for building one, in an earlier post.
Strong emotion and story are the car’s fuel and the reader’s momentum. And the momentum you build this way drains away as the piece goes on. So how do you top it up along the way?
We’ll get into that in the next post.
Follow along and I’ll let you know!