The human brain: 20 billion neurons, many firing at the same time. It constantly takes in visual, audio and other sensory input while also pulling up memories from throughout the brain’s entire life. It is constantly active, unpredictable, and chaotic. And as a writer, it is your enemy. Because you have to constrain this monster and keep it focused on you.

My subject today is holding the reader’s interest, and hopefully you’re still with me. You have this great idea for an article or a story, but how do you make sure you can grab a reader by his fidgety little brain and make him stay with you for the entire journey? For that, every paragraph needs to be carefully constructed.

Now, this sentence is not a particularly strong opening for a paragraph. This sentence following it doesn’t particularly add anything. And we’re three sentences in and still haven’t gotten to the point, while this is also somewhat of a long, rambling sentence, much longer than it needs to be. At this point we’re just meandering. This final sentence is anticlimactic and does nothing to interest anyone in reading the next paragraph.

See, that was a bad paragraph. That’s how you don’t want to write. You have to remember you are fighting a war of attrition; each sentence, readers could be dropping like incriminating hard drives at the IRS. So I’m going to give you some tips to help keep your writing from being boring. This is a rather broad subject — it’s a bit different writing an article like this versus writing a whole book or a novel.

Still, I have a few general tips, and I think I know what I’m talking about. I’m from the MTV generation; I grew up watching those music videos and saying, “Come on. How long are these stupid songs? What else is on?” So I don’t have much of an attention span. I just stopped to chase a squirrel between the previous sentence and this one. And I have turned this power of having a low attention span into making my writing more interesting.

TIPS FOR HOLDING YOUR READER’S ATTENTION:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW7hm5AKjJ4

1. Write a list.

See what I’m doing here? I’m breaking this article into nice little bite-sized chunks. A lot of people these days — me included — will see a big block of text, and their eyes will glaze over. But now you’re looking at this list with the bold headings not too far apart, and it all seems manageable. You can’t really break up a whole novel that way (well, you can go ahead and try, it’s a free country), but the equivalent is having a lot of short chapters so the reader feels constant forward progress. It’s like leading a donkey with a carrot on a stick; you don’t want that carrot to seem too unattainably far.

So, in summary, readers are asses.

2. Start strong.

Let me tell you a story. One day I was talking to Bill Whittle, and he said a good way to start an article and hook the reader is with a personal story that relates to the theme of the article. Now, I never usually have any good personal stories, so I just make stuff up. The important thing is to start with something that convinces the reader to keep reading.

Look at how I started this article. Did I begin this by saying, “I’m going to talk about holding the reader’s interest”? No. Instead I wrote a bunch of nonsense about the brain I got off Wikipedia. And you were like, “Why is he talking about this? I must read on, for I am intrigued!”

You need to get your hooks into the reader in the first paragraph — preferably the first sentence. It doesn’t matter if it’s a thousand-word article or a novel. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Great opener; you want an explanation of that right away. You are hooked.

Actually, I never did read that novel. What’s it about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yaKqTCOJ08

3. End with a hook.

You got the reader reading, and just as the interest starts to fade, you get another hook in them and keep pulling them along. This is more applicable to novels, but even in a short article you can end a paragraph or section with a question or something that begs to be answered in the continued reading.

For novels, though, never just let a chapter quietly end. Someone unexpected shows up, a character gets shot, the moon gets nuked — something exciting happens that makes the reader want to continue. He’ll be like, “I’ll go to sleep when I finish this chapter,” and you’ll say to him, “No, you bastard, you’re staying right here, because you have to know what happens next.” One of my favorite reviews of Superego was by someone who said she read the whole novel in one night.

That’s what a good writer does: ruin people and their sleep. To do that, you need to keep the reader’s attention from fading with the use of constant hooks. And you won’t believe what I tell you to do in the next section.

4. Use humor.

This one is a particular favorite of mine. If you want to keep the reader entertained and develop a rapport, use humor. I feel like I should put a joke in here to illustrate that, but now I suddenly feel all this pressure to be funny, and I can’t think of anything.

5. Cut.

You want to keep someone’s attention? Demand as little of it as possible. So if you have some sentences in your writing that you don’t absolutely need, get rid of them.

This is hard. I am not good at this. Look at this piece — it’s already way too long. I’m always saying, “Yeah, that part isn’t really necessary, but it has a joke in it that I like.” I can never tell if I’m making a piece more focused or just reducing the humor/entertainment value of it. But if you get good at cutting, you’ll be great. If you can have a story that moves quickly without a lot of fat, many other sins can be forgiven. It’s just that when you approach your piece of writing with knife in hand and it looks at you with its puppy dog eyes, you just don’t want to cut the poor thing. But you have to. For its own good.

[Editor’s Note: OK, Frank, I’ll start helping you out with this more… You usually could be more focused if you wanted to but your jokes are so consistently funny that it would be criminal to chop them. And we all know you don’t know anything about lawbreaking…]

****

So that’s my little bit of advice on holding a reader’s attention. Are you still with me? If you are, go out there and write something really gripping. I won’t necessarily read it, though — getting someone to try reading your stuff in the first place is a completely different challenge. If I figure that one out, I’ll pass that knowledge along.

****

Image illustration via shutterstock / Johan Swanepoel