Hello!
Before you start, I should warn you, it’s a bit longer than usual.
A few days ago, someone asked me a question that got me thinking: “What makes one's writing interesting and authentic?” There are layers to this question. A tweet (280 characters) won’t do justice. The problem starts with understanding writing is not one thing; it’s a bunch of different things. Academic writing is different from Twitter threads, but in the end, both qualify as writing. Scriptwriting is different from an autobiography. While there are common threads, the nitty-gritty principles applicable to making one interesting won’t necessarily apply to the other.
In the past three months, I’ve been learning about the short story versus the novel as forms of creative writing fiction. The world of the short story is vast, but zooms in on a particular period. When you start and end a story, you’re left to imagine what happened before the story started and what happened after the story ended. Typically, there’s just one tension point (that element that evokes emotions on the part of both the reader and the characters) — and it gets solved in some way or the other at the end of the story — even if it’s not neatly done. These aren’t rules, they are patterns to the form. The novel on the other hand is a world on its own. Not much happens before you enter and not much happens after. There are several tension points of different sizes. There’s also the one huge tension (or stake that keeps you going).
One of my favorite novels is “American Marriage” by Tayari Jone’s. The elephant-in-the-room (forgive the cliché) tension point was love’s ability to survive injustice. What do you do after your husband is falsely accused of rape and incarcerated for the same? He has several years in jail time. Do you move on? Do you wait for him? And when he is released several years early, do you leave the man you’ve fallen in love with in your husband’s absence to go back to your husband?
I said (read rambled) all of that to say this: If my advice to you as you write your novel is to focus only on small tension points throughout the novel, I would be giving you bad advice because there are no big stakes for your reader to follow through to the end of the novel. And well, you would have written a “boring” novel.
A less confusing example might be advising a fiction writer who wants to make their work more interesting to be relatable. Literature can be relatable, but it doesn’t need to be. A content creator would benefit more from the advice to be relatable in their writing/other content.
So there are specific rules around different forms and genres of writing to make them interesting. However, there are general rules that I can share in answering the question.
One thing to ask yourself if you’re a writer or if you’re doing any kind of writing is: what do I want the person reading this to gain or take away from it? You might want them to feel an emotion — as I typically want my readers to feel when I share new fiction. I try to be specific with the emotion: anger, fear, loss, joy, despair, etc. It’s like a KPI. If my story doesn’t make them feel the emotion I want them to feel, I haven’t written that story successfully. Of course, it’s normal for readers to feel a range of emotions when reading anything.
When I wrote “After The Birds”, I wanted people to feel the chills that my character felt after she found out Isaac was dead and was being buried when he came to her and they had a moment in the kitchen. Every other thing was incidental and I’m glad my story could evoke such strong emotions.
You might want to pass across information about a subject. You might want to express yourself. You might want to convince older religious Nigerians through a WhatsApp broadcast that getting the vaccine is not the same thing as getting the mark of the beast. You might have different aims when writing different things, but I think generally, it’s important to have overarching aims. Once you have this, it’s easy to know where to focus your strengths in order to make your writing interesting and authentic.
Think of your writing as a story.
Whether you’re creating a pitch deck to be sent off to investors, you’re writing the minutes of a meeting, you’re writing an essay on the problems with linking your sim card to your national identity number or it’s a Twitter thread about all the mysterious things we should learn from 2020, the most effective way to communicate through your writing is to think of your writing within a narrative context. What does every story have? A beginning and an end. Well of course, a middle too, but the middle is the means to the end. What this does for me is that it gives me a structure. A way to think of how I want to present my story to the reader.
Stories also have characters and settings, and all of those other literary techniques you ignored in literature class or thought you were too big for when you decided to be a science student. Literary techniques and devices are great tools to use to make your writing interesting in and out of creative writing.
Read and then write.
I should probably have clarified that authenticity and “interesting” are different. Authenticity has to do with the originality of your craft, your voice, your ideas, your stories, and your execution. Interesting has to do with holding the attention of your reader from the beginning till the end.
When big-name writers tell people to read in order to become better writers, there’s a lot to unpack there. They’re telling you to read other people in order to find forms, ideas, styles that you can learn and borrow (or should I say, “steal”) from. I say steal because when we read, our subconscious takes in a lot and we find ourselves emulating the writers we read. When I was reading a lot of John Grisham and Sidney Sheldon, I was writing spy, crime, and thriller type stories that were just awful. And Chimamanda says it somewhere; when she started writing as a child, the names of the characters were typically English and they did things only English children would do. Why? She was reading Enid Blyton.
Read the kind of writing that you’d like to emulate.
One way to find your voice (aka hack authenticity) is by reading various writers, genres, and types of writing and emulating them when writing. It’s the consistent writing (and experimenting) that now allows you to shed the plagiarised bits of voice and style you’ve gotten from other writers and allows you to find your own voice. It might not necessarily be unique and it definitely won’t be new. Sorz.
Niche
I’m not sure where I stand when it comes to carving a niche, but I do know it helps. There’s so much to take from the world and to make your own. There are people who are into creating relatable content around travel and that’s what they’re known for. There are people whose writing will always accompany some kind of visual content and that’s it for them (think comics and illustrations). Having a niche helps you become identifiable and lends some credence to authenticity.
What does the audience want? What will the reader think?
In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
- John Steinbeck
During the first semester in school, whenever I read a story that was good in terms of the plot and idea but was just so unreadable, I’d give feedback along the lines of “I think you might want to consider that the reader might not understand this line or the way you’ve executed this story.” Some colleagues didn’t think this was important. I insist that it is. If our work is to exist in isolation, without readership, then there’s no point in perfecting it or putting it out there.
Readers are our version of consumers. While you can’t please everyone with your writing, if you want your writing to be interesting or readable, you have to think of the reader. If you’re a content creator, it’s worse because you’re constantly thinking of the needs and interests of the audience and how you can use your content to fill that.
Show don’t tell.
Your reader doesn’t want to be told that there’s a house on the hill if you can show them the house. You become a photographer in your attempt to take a picture of the house and show it to your reader. Note: don’t use excess language and details or be deliberately verbose and ambiguous in your attempt to show. There’s beauty in simplicity. Your reader is more likely to get distracted by unnecessary grammar (side-eyeing lawyers) and metaphors and descriptions.
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Welp. This has been fun. If you’d like to learn more, specifically within the context of fiction, you can register to attend my workshop. It’s this Saturday at 10 am. I’m sorry that I haven’t been consistent in the past few months. Work is exhausting. School is exhausting. I promise to do better in the next couple of weeks.
I’ll end it here! See you on Christmas Eve! This newsletter is listening to Frankie Valli’s “I Love You Baby”, including the other versions.