Why does my writing get so few views?
Why is my writing boring?
If you’ve ever written anything, you’ve asked this at least once.
A blog, a newsletter, even an internal company notice: fewer people read it than you’d expect.
They don’t react much either.
It isn’t only a problem for people who write professionally. You post something short on Instagram or a blog, other people’s posts blow up, and yours is the one nobody looks at.
Social feeds are full of posts with huge view counts, and we want to write like that too.
So what’s the secret behind writing people like, writing people enjoy?
Before we get to it, a quick detour through cars.
What cars and writing have in common
Do you drive much? Even without a license you know how a car works. Put it simply: press the pedal and the car goes forward. Press harder and it goes faster.
Once it’s moving you can lift your foot off the pedal. It has speed now, so it keeps going without you pressing. But lift your foot on an uphill road and the speed drops slowly until the car stops. You have to press the pedal again before that happens.
A reader is a car on a hill. To keep them reading you have to press the pedal the way you would in a car. You have to keep adding momentum.
Without momentum the reader stops. Pack a piece with nothing but information and you get something useful that nobody reads. Textbooks are the classic case. The content is good for you, but it’s dull, so you don’t want to read it.
Writing with no momentum is pointless. As I covered in an earlier post, we write to change the reader. Short on momentum, a piece can never do that, because nobody reads it in the first place.
So what exactly is momentum, and how do you add it to your own writing?
Momentum is “the force that keeps a reader reading”. A person holds two feelings at once: the wish to read and the wish to stop. Call them interest and fatigue. When interest is stronger than fatigue, the reader keeps going. When fatigue is stronger, they quit.
So we lower the fatigue and raise the interest.
The lower the fatigue, the less bored people get. Good ad copy is low fatigue. You read it once and you know what the product is and why you’d buy it. No second or third pass, no hard thinking, it lands right away.
The higher the interest, the more attention people give. Gossip and propaganda leaflets are short and high in interest. Shocking stories and secrets pull people in.
So how do you write like ad copy, like gossip, the kind of thing a reader is itching to get through?
How do you cut the fatigue?
First, one thing every piece of writing has in common. All writing is tiring. Your brain works hard at reading and burns a lot of energy doing it, and instinct wants that energy saved, so reading feels like a chore. However slowly you stroll, ten hours of strolling wears you out. Slow steps still pile up in the body. Writing is the same. Writing is tiring, and that can’t be changed.
But you can make it as light as possible. Fatigue builds when the brain spends a lot of energy. Writing that saves energy looks like this.
Sentences: keep them short, use the active voice
Wording: use easy everyday words that appeal to the senses
Structure: make each sentence follow from the one before
Writing that’s vague, disorganized, long-winded, or too hard is tiring writing. I’ll cover how to write with less fatigue in more detail in another post. For now, all you need is that a piece should tire the reader as little as possible.
So how do you add momentum to your own writing?
How do you write something interesting?
There are plenty of techniques for making writing interesting. Three of them work best.
Make a reason, shake up an emotion, space the hooks closely
I’ll go through each one in the next post.
P.S. I publish every Sunday.
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