And how we've blown off writing maxims to be successful

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 both the major legacy weekly newspapers 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.

Hey! It’s a quick happy holiday greeting from us. We took a quick pause in our celebrations to make the shortest podcast episode ever.

We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. It snowed here yesterday and it’s still super cool out. <3 This photo is from outside our neighbor's house.

SHAUN IS SICK! Gasp! He is never sick. But he is, so I've made the executive decision to replay/republish one of our most popular episodes from three years ago.

Ready? Let's go!

A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.

To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'

But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part of most people's lives. But we're FOCUSING on the writing aspect.

Flirting is showing someone that you are attracted to them.

If you've listened to the random thought portion of the podcast, it's obvious that Carrie fails at flirting and in knowing when other people are flirting with her.

Side note from Carrie: This is because it's really extremely rare for me to be attracted to people in that way.

So, when it comes to writing about flirting, she has to do a lot of research about how people flirt, how people react to flirting, what the common aspects of flirting are.

All of us, as writers and humans, have blind spots or flaws. These places can be viewed as writing weaknesses or human weaknesses, but they honestly just make us real.

Second side note from Carrie: Not being attracted to people that way isn't a flaw, it's just something that's different than what our society considers the 'norm.'

When we're writing, we have to look for those places where we're not as strong. It could be setting. It could be showing our character's emotions. It could be plot. It could be making a character realistically flirt. It could be making dialogue real. The secret to becoming a better writer is to dive into those places where you're not as strong, and focus on them.

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Be courageous. Go right to where your weaknesses are and excavate them. If you can't write a fight scene. Go write fight scenes. Read them. Watch them. Go into the places where your weaknesses are.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Flirting is not the same as being friendly. It's about intent.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

IN THE WOODS, appeared in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books . There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

ART

You can buy some of my art. I paint to help inform my stories and some of the prints are available now. There will be more soon. You can check it out here.