The Rage To Engage

Tip Of The Day — Day 17– Keep it relatable

This is part of a series of daily tips for writers which is published to share ideas and suggestions on our craft. Everyone will have different advice on how to write, so the tip below is just a personal selection which I hope you will find useful, and do share any of your own in the comments.

This tip is about engaging your reader. Writing style is clearly personal, and does depend on the topic you are writing about, the purpose, and where you plan to publish.

However when appropriate it pays to have a friendly, conversational writing style, as though you are talking to a friend. This is part of what makes some writers so successful.

For example in Bill Bryson’s many books such as “Notes From A Small Island”, you feel as though a friendly uncle is talking to you. He adopts a conversational style, as if you are sitting in a café hearing his stories, laughing along with his observations over a pot of tea, dunking a Rich Tea biscuit, while the café windows begin to run with condensation, empathising over shared human experiences and frailties. He invites us to listen in while he makes the ordinary, extraordinary, little events of life a shared, comical experiences, in the way only a good story-teller can do. We laugh along to the silly things we all do, thinking:

“Yes, that’s just like me”,

in the way that the best comedians also do.

Likewise in Raynor Winn’s books, such as her best-selling “The Salt Path”, the reader feel as though you are going on a walking trip with her and her husband along the South West Coastal Path. You share their highs and lows, you enjoy the views and the natural world as though you are there, you can almost smell the salt in the breeze, taste the dried noodles they eke out, feel the blistered feet and the rocky ground when they wild camp, or enjoy the kindness of strangers that they encounter along the way, their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Similarly in JD. Salinger’s “The Catcher in The Rye”, Laurie Lee’s “Cider With Rosie”, or Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird” you feel as though the protagonist is confiding in you, letting you in on a great story, or sharing their pranks, larks and exploits, coming-of-age stories that can make us feel young again.

In other books with perhaps less literary merit, such as Andy McNab’s “Bravo Two Zero”, you feel you are there with his SAS patrol behind enemy lines in Iraq, hard pounding with adrenaline, fearing capture or death, bullets flying, the smell of cordite, until you endure capture, torture and eventual release, experiences few of us would ever share, or want to. Similarly with Chris Ryan’s “The One That Got Away”, about another member of the same patrol.

In “Danziger’s Travels” you feel you are experiencing the extraordinary places Nick visited in Afghanistan and Iran, before many of them became too dangerous for Westerners to venture. Or there is the story of Nick Leeson in “Rogue Trader”, a young man who brought down the centuries old Barings bank: you feel the world closing in on him, the slippery slope of deception he slid down, the temptation of an addicted gambler, trying to double down to cover his losses, only to slip further down the alluring alley that led to direct to jail.

In the spy novels of Alan Furst, you smell the smoke of Gauloises, feel the cold chill of snow swirling in the cobbled streets of wartime Paris, taste the bitter ersatz coffee, experience the constant heart-pounding fear of capture, touch the metal of a gun concealed in a pocket, share the discovery of true nobility among some of the poorest and most humble people, experience the plotting and intrigue in a network of Balkan spies, never sure who is a friend or a double agent. Furst draws you into a world none of us are likely to share.

Or in Joe Simpson’s “Touching The Void” ,he leads the reader through his extraordinary account of a mountaineer high in the snowy peaks, left for dead at the end of a cut rope at the bottom of a crevasse by a fellow mountaineer, dragged himself back from the brink of death, and crawled down for miles through icy moguls with broken limbs to confront the person who left him behind.

It’s good to talk — engagement is king

However you do it, it is important to engage our readers, especially now that Medium’s new earnings formula rewards such engagement. The best writers share their content in a way that draws us in, take us to places we may never go, experience things few people ever will.

There are many ways to accomplish this. Sometimes writers address the reader directly, asking a direct question, such as:

“What would you do?”

Other authors may write something deliberately provocative and controversial, just to provoke a response. Sometimes the best authors engage us simply by painting pictures with words. However you do it, engagement with our reader is the hallmark of good writing. How do you do it?!

I hope you found this article useful, and do share any tips of your own in the comments.

Previous tips:

Day 15 — Keep it snappy — headlines —

Day 14- Subject selection —

Day 13 — Making time —

Day 12 — Deadlines —

Day 11 — Layout —

Day 10 — Niches for Riches —

Day 9 — Do your own research —

Day 8 — Choosing your subject —

Day 7 — Reverse engineering success —

Day 6 — Planning —

Day 5 — Location —

Day 4 — Dictionary and thesaurus —

Day 3 –Quotations

Day 2 — Mind your language — learning new words

Day 1- The Notebook