NP: Nobody Wants To Read Your Shit

[Michael Bailey]

a worthwhile principle...
something I've been especially trying to apply this year in all my endeavors,
especially my p-list posts.
a) I don't want to share it if it isn't - for one reason or another -
something I hope at least some potential readers would consider to be good stuff
b) I want to present it as well as I can.
Hope it shows, at least a little.

Having said that, I must add that
a) I personally think his statements unnecessarily bald and rude.
b) If followed literally, the reductionist formula he puts forth would
eliminate nuance and subtlety,
c) The assumption that there is one monolithic market ignores the
diversity of people and variety of tastes that experience proves time
and again does in fact exist



Nonetheless, he makes a valid point...


On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 11:51 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Some good advice from Steven Pressfield. Found it over at Andrew Sullivan's
> blog of blogs:
>
> Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit
> Steven Pressfield shares his #1 lesson for anybody in the working world:
>
> Nobody wants to read your shit.
>
> He explains:
>
> 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 product/work of art/business, 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. In return, you the writer, must give him
> something worthy of his gift to you.
>
> In school anything you write or do will be read and graded by a teacher paid
> to do so. In the real world nobody wants to read your shit, and you have to
> earn their attention every single day.
>
> Last year in a post titled You Have to Make People Give a Shit, I extolled
> blogging as a way to learn this value.
>
> One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for
> your readers' attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close
> the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.
>
> This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for
> granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you'll likely lose
> the reader's attention. They click to a new page.
>
> It's brutal. It makes you better.
>
> http://ben.casnocha.com/2009/11/nobody-wants-to-read-your-shit.html



-- 
- "The whole point of life is to have a story" - Jeremy Cioara