Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, the blog of Editors Canada
I was 14 years old when I found out what it feels like to hit a wall in a car that’s moving at 8 kilometers per hour. That might not sound very fast — it didn’t to me — but let me tell you, it felt plenty hard. If I hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt I would have catapulted right over the front of the demonstrator and into my onlooking classmates.
Yes, it wasn’t an accident. It was a thing called The Convincer that was being taken around to high schools. It cranked a car seat up a short ramp and let it go down again to an abrupt stop at the bottom. Sounds like a carnival ride, eh? You get in, buckle up, crank up, it lets go … and BAM. And when they tell you what a crash at higher speeds is like after that, you listen.
That was an early lesson for me in structural editing of general nonfiction. In fact, it taught me something about structure that my English teachers didn’t.
You remember how you’re taught in school to write an essay? Start with the thesis statement, expand the theory and reasoning, then add examples to illustrate. This is easy for teachers to grade. It’s also a generally boring way to write.
Sorry, but it is. There are times that you need to write that way, but that’s mainly when you have a captive audience who are reading impatiently to get the most information in the least time. If you’re trying to grab a reader’s attention, get them to keep reading and get them to care about and remember what you’re telling them, you need to follow the advice that I give every author I work with: Feelings first.
Facts follow feelings. People take an interest in facts when they have strong feelings associated with them. People also remember abstract ideas better when they have clear images and examples to associate them with.
This means start with stories, analogies and characters. If you start with the abstract and then play out examples, it’s better than not having examples at all, but the reader is having to keep a lot of abstract ideas in the air for a while until they have something concrete to attach them to. They may have forgotten some of the details by the time you give them reasons to feel things about them. If what you’re telling the reader is important, it needs to answer the questions “Why should I care about this?,” “Why should I keep reading?” and “How does this relate to my world?”
This is most important — and at the same time easiest to do — when you have a book-length manuscript. Then you can have stories that draw the reader in and give them suspense and resolution. You have enough room that you don’t have to just say “Do not put wine in your water carbonator,” you can tell the story about the guys who tried to make sparkling red wine: the moment they detached the bottle from the carbonator it fired a blood-coloured geyser that left a permanent stain on their ceiling and clothes.
But even when you don’t have a lot of space, you can still grab readers by the feelings. I’m put in mind of warnings on transformer boxes. Some just say “Danger.” I saw one that had a cartoon on it of a bird squawking “No!” at a kid who was about to open it. But then there was another that had the text “Do not touch. Not only will this kill you, it will hurt the whole time you are dying.” You tell me which sticks with you.
Sesquiotica 