The porridge in the big bowl was too hot. The porridge in the middle-sized bowl was too cold. The porridge in the wee little bowl was just right – so she ate it all up.

'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', Anon.

We've been talking about how long to write. Okay, I have. It depends on your audience. Welcome to the 21st Century: your audience is using a computer.

1972: Yours Truly was making up for a poor chemistry grade by commuting to the university for a summer makeup course. This meant riding the bus down the ludicrously-named Mount Royal Boulevard into downtown Pittsburgh, then changing busses to go out again on Forbes Avenue. Mount Royal Boulevard dates from colonial times, but fortunately, it was no longer a corduroy road in 1972. Forbes Avenue is named for some Brit general in the Seven Years' War, and is still full of potholes, because it's Pittsburgh. Anyway, the trip took an hour or so.

That summer, I got to reconnect with some schoolmates from high school, who had now joined what is called 'the work force' and commuted to their office jobs downtown. We chatted at the bus stop. One young woman always carried a paperback book – the fatter, the better. Doorstop novels, she explained, were value for money. 'Anything less than 300 pages is a waste,' she informed me. She held up Herman Wouk's The Winds of War: 896 pages in paperback. 'This one's going to last me for a couple of months,' she said with satisfaction.

I got a B in the chemistry course. (I also decided to switch to Humanities.) But I learned a valuable lesson about writing that summer: you've got to pay attention to your audience's reading habits. Wouk was a smart writer. He started out to write about the Second World War. When he realised that it was taking him almost 1000 pages to get to Pearl Harbor, he split the book in two – the second volume is War and Remembrance. Full disclosure: I've never read either book. I'd had enough of Herman Wouk with The Caine Mutiny, thank you very much. And I had other fish to fry in 1972. But Wouk knew his audience: people who buy their fiction by the pound.

Fast forward to the 21st Century. (Where did the time go?) People read ebooks, so some of them are still probably wading through The Winds of War. As long as they don't have to lug the book around. They sneak a chapter in while waiting at the doctor's office. They might finish the tome in a year or two. But for regular reading? They want it in blog-size bytes. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Online writing needs to seize – and hold – attention. It needs to be concise, focussed. It needs to get in and out with the message in the time it takes to, say, microwave a bowl of soup, and then eat it. Yes, attention spans are shorter now. And yes, that means your job is harder. Get over it. If you want people to understand something complex and nuanced, you've got to be clever about it. You've got to pick a highly-specific topic and write the heck out of it. You've got to use 'hooks', just like the pop song people. You've got to keep the wit coming. And it's work.

But I know a sneaky trick I can share with you. Let's learn from the pandering experts.

Suddenly, you find yourself at your destination, so riveted to a piece that you sit in your idling car to hear it all the way through. That's a Driveway Moment.

National Public Radio (NPR)

NPR is a free public radio channel, the bargain-basement equivalent of the BBC in the US. I say 'bargain basement' not because of quality – some of it is amazingly good – but because of its budget, only part of which is donated by a begrudging government. The government and general public suspect the broadcasters of being Closet Commies. Five minutes' listening would convince you that America's notion of the Far Left is ever-so-slightly right of centre in the UK. Be that as it may, NPR, like its television sister, PBS, regularly holds bake sales. Instead of cookies, they hand out coffee mugs and tote bags in return for donations. Which is why the content is so often of the middle-brow and 'feel good' variety. They have to pander to get the dollars from the suburbs.

So what is a Driveway Moment? It's when people in cars waste petrol idling their vehicles in driveways to catch the ending of a particularly interesting news or feature item on the radio. The NPR people are inordinately proud of these Driveway Moments: no matter how busy people are, they want to hear 'the rest of the story'. This is an accomplishment in these days of scattered attentions.

Do NPR contribute to global warming? I'd say yes, no matter how much airtime they give to Al Gore. But they're onto something – and we don't even have to ruin the environment to make use of it. Just write in a way that grabs the reader, and they'll stick around to hear the ending.

Encyclopaedias are so three-centuries-ago. Which is why the Edited Guide is a guide, not an encyclopaedia, as Robbie often points out. Our Guide Entries offer good information, clever entertainment, astounding insight – for free, no less. Our aim is to be so compulsively readable that people stick around, looking up Entry after Entry, the way you know we do on those gold-standard sites like Snopes, The Straight Dope, or even TV Tropes. We can do this: we can create Driveway Moments on computers everywhere.

Just write items like the porridge in the wee little bowl: just right.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

21.08.17 Front Page

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