My favorite book of writing advice is Nobody Wants To Read Your Shit by Steven Pressfield. It’s great, but you probably don’t want to read it. Here it is compressed into a post.
Pressfield started his writing career as an unsuccessful novelist. Then he had to get a job writing ad copy, and it fixed him. Now he’s a successful screenwriter.
As a novelist, it’s very easy to kid yourself into thinking that people want to read your shit. Your novel is your precious beloved baby that you worked so hard to gestate and birth—how could anyone not adore it as much as you do?
Very easily. People hate reading and would rather do practically anything else. I can feel your eyes sliding right off this sentence, longing to look at short-form video, or jerk off, or do any other possible thing with your precious time.
You cannot possibly maintain the delusion that anyone cares about your shit if you’re writing ads. Everybody hates ads. So you learn all sorts of dirty tricks to get them to read them anyway, and the dirtiest trick of all is to actually make the ad worth reading. Your novel is basically the same sort of thing as a billboard—an imposition on the reader’s attention that must justify its existence at every moment, or be cast into oblivion and ignored.
This is extra important if your shit is some kind of important idea and not minotaur milking erotica. If your idea is really that important, you had better make sure my eyeballs stay on your idea and not on the minotaurs I’d really much rather be reading about.
The reader does not want to be here. They could be doing anything else. It’s your job to convince them that actually, they do want to be here, reading this. And you do that by making each sentence worth their while. You have to make it interesting, or funny, or beautiful, or intriguing, or salacious, or insightful—it doesn’t matter exactly what makes each sentence worth reading, but it has to be something.
Remember, this isn’t a glory hole; the reader isn’t here to service you with their attention. You are supposed to be providing them value with your shit.
And the longer your shit is, the harder you have to work. An ad takes a second to read; a novel takes at least, like, several minutes.
Since I’ve been publishing every day this month, I’ve put out a few essays that are much shorter and sparer than I originally envisioned (such as yesterday’s). Am I disappointed? Do I feel a little robbed that I didn’t get to impose a 5000 word piece on you instead of a 1700 word one? I mean yes, a little. But honestly it’s mostly been good for me. I said what I had to say. When I’ve put out an essay that’s not quite as expansive as I wanted it to be, it’s an exception rather than a rule for it to actually need to be any longer to fully develop the argument, or beat the joke to death, or whatever. Usually it’s best for me to just shut up and end the post before you remember that you’d actually much rather be looking at tweets right now.
Anyway, it’s a good book full of good advice, and it only takes about an hour to read, so if you feel inclined to read his shit, check it out:
