I was walking briskly to the railway station this morning, as you do, and started thinking about the absolute essentials of communication, as you do.
Random thoughts of an idle fellow
And why?
Because I must have tried (with very mixed success) to write just about everything, and I have decided that pretty much the same principles apply no matter what the medium or what the purpose.
My first book was a disaster. It cannot have sold more than 4 or 5,000 copies, nor deserved to. Yet I understand you can buy a “collector’s copy” on the internet for £82, which seems to me sheer folly.
The reason it failed was simple: however well-written it may have been, no reader really wanted to know what happened next, which was just as well, because hardly anything did. They must have felt cheated, persevering as they muttered to themselves, “I’ve paid for the damn thing. Surely something will happen now.” Then flinging it on the floor in justified disgust.”
The plain fact is that unless you can gain attention in some striking way, with an explosion, a striking series of chords, a joke, a bizarre outfit, something controversial, you cannot gain people’s attention.
But if doing that is hard, the next part is harder still unless you make sure that it follows your opening logically.