alt Hacker NewsFirst, make me care
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This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.
You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts.
This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple of them read it.
A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up!
I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that you know the punch line before you even pick up a copy. A boy is stuck with a bengal tiger in a boat. Now that the punch line is out of the way, the story has time to unfold and be interesting in its own merit. That's what I was trying to recreate with my own story.
Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question:
- They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult
- They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply
- Fish
- They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats
(note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)
Care is the most important trait of people who make great things; it's not money or time. Is not even skill.
I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine.
A few hours after the interview, the project was online.
The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering.
That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed.
It's all the same. Lack of care.
I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.
> When writing, first, make the reader care, one way or another. Because if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will probably not keep reading—no matter how good the rest of it is!
Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing. This artificial goal pollutes the connection between writer and reader. It makes them buyer and seller and rewards sales tactics. You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.
I think "Just… start with the interesting part first" is quite different, and actually much better advice than "make me care". I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what the point is of what will follow.
I have often thought that all good fiction is mystery. This is obviously an overstatement, but I think it’s not too far off. Humans are mystery solvers. If I don’t have a compelling mystery to solve—something like the “what’s going on beneath the surface in this town?” that David Lynch does so well—when I’m reading your book or watching your tv show or playing your game, I’m usually out unless I have a strong prior interest (which simply means that I brought my own mystery).
This article succeeded spectacularly in making me want to know all there is to know about medieval Venice, that's for sure.
Adrian Wooldridge (the Economist) in "Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World" argues, rather successfully IMO, that what made Venice the maritime super-power was meritocracy. Indeed, he argues, that the fall of the Venitian empire came swiftly when the Doge was forced to place only Venitians (birthright) to top positions, instead of the most "capable". Hence the available talent pool shrunk.
The book makes for a fine read IMO: https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern...
ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a best seller at the time.
"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
Careful with this advice. If you max it out you end up with
"You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to feed itself"
I'm beginning to think that origin stories are an underrated way to find these angles. Like why exactly did you start thinking about this topic. I guess the recipe bloggers were on to this with their long rambles about where they first tried this dish (albeit it may have been for SEO too...)
So how did Venice maintain its dominance?
Know your audience is right, and Gwern misses the most interesting thing about Venice- that it was a merchantile Republic with reasonable independance from the Catholic Church. Lots of the political ideas which influenced British and American democracy came from the Italian city states. Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Bowsma's "Venice and the defense of republican liberty" capture this well, as do parts of Quentin Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought."
This was quite a good article. It could have been excellent if it answered its own hook somewhere the piece though.
I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the articles second principle.
Counterpoint.
People our so tired of sensational intros and baiting questions which bury the actual lede up to the point where you discover it requires an annual subscription to find out the actual answer, that now it's actually counterproductive to start with an interesting "question".
It's facts first or gtfo. Prove to me that I'm not going to waste my time until you deliver what you promised, by delivering enough of that relevant background up front, otherwise I don't have time for your shenanigans.
Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or read in tl;dr comments in this thread).
It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?
A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.
Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.
"When writing, your first job is this: First, make me care."
It really depends on who the audience is...
Suppose you fed this article into an LLM, along with whatever other documents you had, and asked it to come up with some good candidates for opening sentences? And picked one, and let it take it from there?
I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.
The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article through to the end didn't improve things.
If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...
This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally).
If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.
Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead...
Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment.
Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...
This insight is what caused the rise of the clickbait headline and its predecessors in eras past. You need a hook or there's no point reading the tale.
10 reasons why clickbait is good for you:
1)
And thus "question-bait" was born.
I can’t click on any links on pages (the header works).
Using brave on iPhone.
Firefox and Safari works…
I disagree with the stated examples and literally quit reading there.
aaand, how to apply this technique to a CV?
prepending a one-liner-about-some-feat that might interest that particular company, before the usual cv afterthat?
hmm. made me think..
Chuunibyou-tier slop.
You know I’ve never read an article by Gwern that made me feel like he was sensitive to this idea, one that in my head essentially breaks down to the use of narrative and the leverage of “stakes” that inform the reader of kinds of conflict that make a narrative special.
I’m reminded of a remark made by David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader. Instead your writing has to evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue.
A lot of writers are tainted by the expectations set in grade school. Write for a grade and good writing is what yields a good grade according to the standards set by the subject which often is not ‘Composition’ but more like ‘Prove to me that you remember everything we mentioned in class about the French Revolution’.
I’ve never felt drawn into an article by Gwern at least not in the way that I have been by some writing by Maciej Cegłowski, for example. Reading Gwern I am both overwhelmed by the adornments to the text (hyperlinks, pop-ups, margin notes; other hypertext doodads and portals) and underwhelmed by the substance of the text itself. I don’t consider Paul Graham a literary griot either. But I find that his own prose is bolstered by a kind of clarity and asceticism that is informative and not entirely void of good style and form.
Lawrence McEnery of the University of the Chicago contributed a lot of good thinking to this kind of stuff though.
This wasn’t meant to be a criticism of the author of this post’s own work. But here that’s how it’s left. I haven’t come across any writing of his that’s as intriguing as "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” seems. If anyone has any recommendations, do share.