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Writing Wednesdays: The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned

Nobody wants to read your shit.

There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.

They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your [writing], no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities.

I mostly agree with this, but we didnt put together Writing/Attention “transactions” until blogging hit the masses. Before you would just fucking write already knowing nobody gives a crap because nobody reads to begin with. Except, you know, those of us who wrote stuff on the internet.

Hell, I dont even pay attention to what I write; and I think I’m awesome!

So yes, to keep your fucking attention, which is such a big and important part of why I’m writing this, because tumblr makes it so awesome for us to maintain this fucking transactional relationship we are in right now (not), I should just cut to the chase and make a pithy little blog post to tell you that One Important Piece Of Information, because that is all writing is about, we are all trying to convey information like I work at techcrunch or boing boing, because this transaction better hurry the fuck up and bring the link to the pithy One Important Piece, which is displayed right under My One Important Piece Of Information.

Which is: This bottle of wine is awesome in the afternoon sun!