Do Our Brains Hurt Too Much to Think & Read?
And how we've blown off writing maxims to be successful
Be warned: Carrie swears a lot in this podcast.
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So, there’s a feeling among many writers/bloggers/content creators that our brains are too overwhelmed by a high cognitive overload to want to read anything that isn’t super quick and fast.
I get this.
There is a lot of information out there in the world.
Short-form content is, they say, the key.
Tim Denning describes short-form content as “where you share big ideas, be a little contrarian, drop cliffhangers for your stories, and share who you are. It gives people a taste.”
“Many old-school writers want to take a stranger on the street and send them to their newly published book on Amazon. All the reader has to do is give up $15–20 and 15–20 hours of their life,” Denning writes. “None of this works anymore because the internet and all its information have burdened us with a high cognitive load.
“Our brains hurt.”
So, yeah, we say to hell with that. One size fits all doesn’t fit everyone and that comes to readers of everything—books, blogs, news sites, magazines. To say that it does? It’s a little depressing and fatalistic.
High cognitive load when it refers to writing usually refers to the principles of plain English.
What’s that?
It’s just concise sentences. It’s active voice. It’s anti-jargon.
KEEPING IT SHORT AND SIMPLE
Keeping it short and simple has often been a dictum of novel writing when it comes to length (make it only 50,000 words, God forbid it hits over 100,000). It’s also part of content creation (other kinds) keep the reels and videos to 1 minute or less, the picture books to less than 500 words, and so on.
But I’ve (Carrie, not Shaun) also been lucky enough to go on book tours and listen to readers complain that books are too stripped down, not long enough to get lost in any more. Those specific readers? They don’t want short and simple.
BLOWING THAT MAXIM OFF
We’ve built a hyper-local daily paper on the opposite of this thought. We aren’t simple. Our articles tend to not be short. Our word choice and sentence structure is though.
And we have no short-form content to lure people in. We rarely remember to share our posts on Facebook and Instagram. And when we do? It’s never pithy.
But despite this (and our complete lack of marketing and despite that there are some amazing and award winning papers in our area already), in two years we’ve grown to a digital subscription base larger than the major legacy weekly newspaper in our county with their very large (compared to us) staffs.
Our staff of two (the same goofballs you’re listening to right now) has written over a million words this year, just on that paper, and our open rate hovers over 60%.
We write long.
And people? They like it because they get to parse through the information and determine what matters to them when we cover something like a town meeting. We don’t decide what matters for them.
We trust our readers to be smart, to make their own decisions. So, no, we don’t write short. It’s something that Heather Cox Richardson (one of the most popular writers on Substack) and Andrew Revkin do, too.
Dumbing yourself and your content down? It’s not sexy.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE YOU
The other aspect of this is something Denning agrees with and that it’s okay to be you—your weird self, your personal self—in your writing. AI can do a lot of super amazing things, but it can’t do that—it can’t be personal. It can’t be you.
So, when you are writing—anything and everything—just be yourself. Think about who you are writing for, yes, but also be true to who you are, too. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where the communication and the connection happens, too.
RANDOM THOUGHT LINK
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Don’t be concise when it’s something you really want to get across for people.
COOL PLACE TO SUBMIT
The Paris Review Call for Poetry Submissions
The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers. The Paris Review accepts unsolicited submissions of poetry in January, April, July, and October. (Unsolicited submissions of prose are accepted in February, June, and October.)
All submissions must be in English and must be previously unpublished. Translations are welcome and should be accompanied by a copy of the original. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, as long as we are notified immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere.
lease submit no more than six poems or one piece of prose at a time and please do not submit more than once per submission period. We suggest to all who plan to submit that they read the most recent issues of The Paris Review to acquaint themselves with material the magazine has published.
Deadline January 31
You should subscribe to us. We’re weird. We’re not AI. And we trust you. Hopefully, you’ll trust us, too.
This really resonates with me! I feel that it’s more a matter of cost of producing longer works than consumer tastes, at least driving shorter in the book world. And since I like to write long stories… LOL