We’ve passed the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. Things are getting brighter, so the writing challenge this month is simply this:

Lighten up.

What does it mean to lighten up your writing? Try to have fun with it.

Add a humorous aside to an email.

Slip in unexpected, playful words like nincompoop or hijinks.

If your subject is too serious for hijinks, try visually lightening up the text: break up long paragraphs and sentences. Add white space.

If you want to take this challenge seriously, try putting yourself in a positive, playful mood before writing. Research shows that positive emotions enhance creativity. Listen to fun music, do a little dance, make it a game, whatever works for you.

Try it all month. Everyday as you write anything — blog post, email, book chapter — remind yourself to lighten up.

Then, please let me know how it works for you by the end of the month!

How to Win Your Reader’s Attention

Join me in a quick thought experiment about reading and writing.

Imagine that you’re strolling through an old-fashioned arcade with a few tokens in your pocket. At this arcade, each game costs a token, but most dispense tokens as you play and meet goals.

Some games only cost one token to start but don’t pay out much. Others may cost a few tokens to play, but return more tokens if you continue.

Are you with me? 

Let’s say the person strolling through the arcade is your reader, and the games are the articles, books, reports, and other content clamoring for their reading attention. The tokens represent their mental capacity or attention available to spend on your writing.

Assume that you lure them over to your writing with a well-crafted headline or fantastic book cover. Here’s how the game works:

The player wins a token whenever any of these things happen:

• The work tickles their curiosity.
• The writing satisfies that curiosity.
• They discover learn something new.
• The work resonates with their own experience.
• They encounter a beautiful image or memorable passage.
• They smile or laugh.
• They get caught up in a story.

Sounds good, right? Your brilliant work will spew out tokens!

But wait. They will have to pay extra tokens to keep going when certain things happen, such as:

• They run into an unfamiliar word or acronym that they must decode based on the context (1 token) 
• They run into an unfamiliar word or acronym they cannot figure out by context (2 tokens)
• They wade through three consecutive sentences with multiple clauses or delayed verbs (1 token)
• They get lost in a sentence and have to read it twice to make sense of it (2 tokens)
• They read 300 words about abstract ideas without a single concrete detail (1 token)

Once they run out of tokens, they’re done.

Cognitive burden and reading

This thought experiment offers insight into the cognitive burden that our writing imposes on readers. The game tokens represent the reader’s attention, or the cognitive capacity they bring to the reading. When your writing resonates with people, they have more attention to give it.

Good writing creates a positive feedback loop that keeps the reader involved. And it explains so much.

For example, why do I keep reading some books with unfamiliar words and put down others? Because sometimes books are paying me back with beautiful writing or fascinating concepts.

Or, why am I perfectly happy to navigate through long sentences from some authors and situations, and not others? Again, if the writing makes me curious or entertains me, it’s like a game spitting out tokens. I’ll keep going.

How many tokens do your readers have?

Return to the arcade image once again. Two people approach your game. One has ten tokens in their pocket, the other has only two—and must pay one to read. 

The ten-token reader may slog through a long sentence to get to the payoff, but the other may run out of tokens and walk away.

As a writer, you don’t know how much attention readers will bring to your work. If you assume everyone will read deeply, you might make them work for your insights. You’ll lose those readers who simply don’t have the attention budget available.

How many tokens do your readers have? How much attention?

Rigging the game to favor the reader

How would your latest blog post/article/book chapter play as a game in this arcade? How does this change the way you think about your writing?

You can rig the game in their favor in many ways:

• Eliminating unnecessary costs, like long sentences or unfamiliar words
• Creating earlier payoffs. A well-crafted introduction might dispense a token of curiosity or resonance

What would you do differently in your writing when thinking of this analogy?

Want to dive deeper?

Read more about cognitive burden and ease in these posts:

Writing for overloaded readers: It’s not dumbing down

Revising for cognitive ease

Do you have problems finding the time to write? If so, you’re not alone.

A few years ago, I surveyed hundreds of current and aspiring nonfiction authors. The biggest barrier people reported was finding the time.

Why is that? If writing is important to us, why do we struggle to do it?

You might as well ask why we let weeds invade our gardens—they are very good at it.

Weeds are prolific and persistent

You plant and nurture a lot of seeds to harvest blooms and vegetables. As the seedlings grow, you must protect them from weeds that steal moisture and sunlight. If you ignore the intrusions of weeds, you end up with a garden of dandelions instead of dahlias.

Not all weeds are unwelcome or ugly. One person’s week is another’s cherished wildflower. My mother struggles with bindweed in her garden—and it has delicate, rosy white blossoms.

Left unchecked, the bindweed entangles the lilacs and strangles the flower and other plants.

What weeds grow in your writing garden?

Think of activities that steal time and attention from your creative projects. Like weeds, they sneak into your life and take root without you noticing. Some may be fun or rewarding. But they crowd out the work you want to do—writing that will bear fruit.

Common writing weeds include:

• Social media
• Binging Netflix
• Listening to every new podcast on our list (they all sound fascinating!)
• Constantly stopping everything to deal with the latest email or message

Some weeds look convincingly like other plants, and you keep caring for them until you realize they have fooled you. The same is true of writing.

You might go down a path that seems easier than the creative work you want to do. Someone may tell you that activity is important. (Oh, I’ll build a big social media following before I start writing my book.) That, my friend, is a weed that chokes out writing.

Even research, taken to extremes, can become weedy. (I have become “stuck in the weeds” of research.)

Where are you spreading the sunshine of your attention and time?

Making room for productive writing

Here’s the secret to clearing writing weeds: Stop feeding them.

Shut off the attention and time, and they should shrivel, at least for a while. (They’ll always be there, ready to pop up when you’re not paying attention.)

Perhaps this metaphor will help you figure out how to clear more time for writing.

Here are three questions to help you spot and thin your own writing weeds:

1. What activities occupy time that you might spend on writing or creating? List at least three.
2. How much time and attention can you remove from those activities and put toward your writing this week?
3. What would happen if you did this for a month? For two months?

Want to dig deeper?

This post is inspired by the March Writing Challenge: Sowing Seeds of Creativity

Check out my friend Stu Heinecke’s How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. Along with great business lessons, it features beautiful drawings and small profiles of how various successful weeds spread. It also helped inspired this post.

Peruse the results of the Nonfiction Author Survey.

Sowing Seeds

Have you ever planted flowers or vegetables from seeds? It takes a lot of time and patience, and you get fewer plants than the seeds than you started with. Some of them never come up. You thin other ones out. Some don’t thrive.

Eventually you end up with poppies or tomatoes or whatever, and it’s miraculous.

Creativity works like that. You’ve got to plant a lot of seeds. Put a lot of ideas out and see what blooms.

Here’s the March Challenge

Every day this month, sow a seed of an idea. Write it in a journal or a file where you collect thoughts and inspiration. It might be:

• An idea for a blog post
• A scene for a novel
• A clever story

Don’t make it a full-fledged piece—not yet. Don’t give it the weight of developing it. Just capture a germ of an idea.

We don’t get too attached to the individual seeds we plant—not until they’ve grown and show potential. So don’t get too attached to your ideas.

Go for quantity and let quality work itself out.

By the end of March, you will have developed a “topic-generating” muscle. You may have ideas you can turn into something wonderful.

If have heard me talk about the Muse and Scribe, this exercise is all about welcoming the Muse into your life.

Got plenty of ideas already?

If you’re have a strong and productive Muse and you’re already surrounded by ideas, your challenge is a little different.

Every day, tend to one of those ideas. Do the next step.

• Write one more thing.
• Talk with someone about your idea.
• Search for related ideas (or ask ChatGPT)

Think of this like providing a new seedling with water and sunlight.

Pick a few ideas and nurture them. See if you can make them grow into something bigger by the end of the month.

I’ll be back in April.

Related content

Take the Muse Quiz

February Writing Challenge

January Writing Challenge

Did you know that your brain has a “mute” button for your speaking voice? When you speak, it dampens the reception of sound waves through the air, prioritizing the sound generated from the vibrations inside your head.

That’s why our voices sound so strange to us on recordings. We grow accustomed to a more resonant voice in our heads. (It’s also why our own singing doesn’t hurt our ears, but the person belting next to us does.)

Is there a parallel in writing?

When we read what we’ve written, we remember the nuanced overtones of what we said, the richness of thought that led us to the words. We know the mood we planned to convey.

But the reader sees only what’s on the page or screen, and supplies their own context and overtones. Often, the prose seems flat.

Worse, the reader may misinterpret mood entirely.

How do others read you?

In a study titled Egocentrism Over Email, researchers found that most people completely overestimated how well others would interpret the tone of an email. On the flip side, readers felt great confidence that they had interpreted the tone correctly.

According to the study’s authors, “People routinely overestimate how well they can communicate over email, particularly when the meaning of the message is ambiguous.”

Yikes. We cannot really hear how we show up in writing.

What should we do?

Get an outside perspective

To get a sense of our writing voice, we need space or get an outside perspective. Editors, beta readers, and can function like tape recorders, letting us know how we really sound.

If that’s not available, try putting yourself into a different mood altogether.

Try on different perspectives

The authors of the email study found a cure for overconfidence about tone: read aloud the message you are writing in a different mood altogether. 

Test it yourself.

Write a short email that to colleague about a safe, but ambiguous topic. Like, “there’s cake in the break room.” (Don’t send it and get people’s hopes up, unless you’re willing to leave a cake.)

How might you feel about that topic?

• Are you trying to lose weight? Maybe it annoys you.
• Is there cake in the break room every day? Do you long for pie?
• Are you genuinely happy about it?

Pick one approach and write it: happy, upset, funny, sarcastic, whatever.

Then, print it and read it aloud in an entirely different mode.

If you think you’re being funny, read it as if it were deadly serious. If wrote sincerely, read it in a flippant voice.

Does it work with an alternate mood? If so, you might need to clarify your intentions.

This small act is usually enough to reset our expectations—and to make us take more care in writing.

Want to go deeper?

Read Can You Hear Me: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World by Nick Morgan

Read the study Egocentrism over Email (which I found cited in Nick Morgan’s book)

I never thought much about my writing voice until I started freelancing as a marketer in the tech industry. I spent years slipping in and out of distinct brand personas and ghost-writing for executives. This work taught me how to shape-shift my voice. Unexpectedly, I discovered it was fun.

Your writing voice is the way your words summon the impression of a human being. Readers sense someone behind nearly everything they encounter.

When we read fiction, we sense characters. We listen in our heads to a poetic voice when reading poems. We hear the sender of text messages. Even when reading marketing copy or interactive with chat bots, we cannot help creating a personality in our heads.

All writing implies a voice behind it.

How do you feel about your voice?

When I ask people about their writing voice, responses fall into three camps:

• Authentic, steady writers
• Intentional shifters
• Instinctive adapters

The difference lies in their approach.

Authentic writers

People who don’t identify as writers also don’t think much about voice. When asked, they report writing exactly as they think or speak. (Or, they try to.)

If you know someone like this, you can practically hear them in their words. Even so, these writers may need to clear verbal clutter to make space for their voices. Writing is an imperfect stand-in for thought and speech.

Voice shifters

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some people carefully control how they appear in print.

For ghostwriters and marketers, changing voice is a professional asset. Fiction writers bring their characters to life by writing in their voices.

Other people seem to do it for fun. Ask authors of fan fiction or people who write parodies of well-known authors and works. Writing in a different voice can be freeing.

Instinctive adapters

Most of us shift our writing voice automatically, based on audience and format.

We might have a default voice for professional writing, another for personal emails to friends and family, and a third for that novel we’re working on. The voice emerges from the way we approach the work.

Where do you fall on this spectrum?

How do you feel about your writing voice? Do you even think about it?

Paying attention pays off. If you’re clear about the voice you intend, you’re less likely to undercut it. With practice, you may discover the joy of shifting your voice.

I’m gathering research on how writers feel about their voice. You can help me research this overlooked writing topic.

Take this quick survey (6 questions) about how you feel about your writing voice.

Take the survey here.

I will share the results in this blog and send them if you request them.

Why voice matters, especially now

If you’re not overwhelmed with news of ChatGPT yet, then you’re doing an excellent job of staying off social media and blogs—congrats!

The writing community is bubbling with both excitement and anxiety about the capabilities of artificial intelligence to write for us. AI does a fairly good job of writing low-level, humdrum content that powers the world.

In a world of AI-based writing, human voice becomes a premium. There’s never been a better time to understand and fine tune the voice you’re projecting in your writing, because it sets you apart from the bots.

Related Content

Take the Voice survey

How to Talk About Tone, Style, and Voice in Writing