‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, said Keats. If only. As a writer of non-fiction you might think proving you had truth on your side would win readers over. But in accepting ideas, and particularly new ideas, it turns out readers care less about whether your message is true – and more about whether it is interesting.
Obviously as a writer catching and keeping your readers’ interest is vital. If you can’t catch their interest, they won’t begin reading; if you don’t hold it, they won’t finish. It’s a fortunate writer who doesn’t suffer plenty of competition for readers’ attention. But making your narrative interesting is more important than you may realise. Because being interesting – in the right way – doesn’t just keep your readers from moving on: it actually makes them more likely to accept your ideas.
This may still seem obvious to some. After all, the Internet is awash with shared, re-posted or re-tweeted urban legends and bogus news stories that take only a few minutes research to prove untrue. These factoids spread because they appeal in some way to readers’ interest – and bypass their critical faculties. That they continue to propagate shows one way in which interest outweighs truth. But this is not the same thing as selling an idea or message to your reader. People don’t share things on social media because they are converted to a new idea. They share because what they share defines their online persona – in which case they will treat as true anything that bolsters that persona. Or they share because sharing helps maintain their social network‚ in which case they will spread information with no personal investment in whether it is true or not.
But interest outweighs truth on a deeper level. In 1971 sociologist Murray Davis wrote a paper called That’s Interesting, about the power of intrigue in getting readers to accept new ideas. Citing the work of thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Davis argued the impact of new ideas owes less to being true than to being interesting. They are interesting because instead of affirming readers’ assumptions, they challenge – or at least appeared to challenge – those assumptions. And readers will find ideas most interesting if they challenge both their beliefs (otherwise the response will be ‘Everybody knows that’) and their practice (otherwise the response will be ‘So what?’).
In his paper Davis provided a rhetorical analysis of how messages are constructed to appear interesting. The basic structure starts with the writer articulating the assumptions of his audience; proceeds by proving how these assumptions reflect appearances rather than reality; and concludes by drawing out the practical consequences of the new truths he or she has exposed. Davis went as far as creating an ‘Index of the Interesting’, listing a dozen or so types of propositions under which interesting ideas can be categorised. These included forms such as: what seems to be complex is actually simple (or vice versa); what seems to be good is in fact bad (or vice versa); things that appear independent are really correlated (or vice versa), and so on.
The power of the interesting is illustrated by the flourishing market for non-fiction books with titles emphasising incongruous juxtapositions: Cod: The Fish that Changed the World, or How the Irish Saved Civilization, for example. The marketing strategy behind these titles relies on presenting the ideas within as novel, even counter-intuitive. The same rhetorical tactic can work in less frivolous writing. Policy papers, political speeches, project proposals – all can draw on the power of the interesting to distract from whether they are actually founded on truths.
Does this mean every writer is doomed to fail unless they have revolutionary new ideas to sell? No – but it does mean you may be able to sell your message more successfully if you frame it as a counter-narrative. And this takes surprisingly little effort to achieve.
- Try to align your approach with one of Davis’s categories. This will help you frame the controversy in your own mind and guide how you define the assumptions and your claims that they are wrong.
- Target a particular audience and write to their assumptions. Davis noted the difficulty of being controversial to both laymen and experts – so don’t waste time seeking universal assumptions to challenge. A book like 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America may be met with derision by experts, but that didn’t stop it becoming a bestseller, and probably spreading acceptance of its ideas among the general reading public.
- Articulate the readers’ assumptions for them. By doing this you frame the controversy on your own terms, and use the readers’ anchoring bias to influence what they will find startling and novel later on.
- Stuck with selling a commonplace? Don’t despair: since you are the one articulating the assumptions, you can create a straw man to tilt at. If you’ve been tasked with writing a piece on avoiding clichés, for example – something widely accepted as good practice – start by talking up clichés: how useful they can be, their long history, how commonly used they are. Then and only then hit the readers with a but or however to begin your attack. And to manage those who don’t buy your straw man, appeal implicitly to intellectual vanity – describe the assumptions as common beliefs, implying that if they know better they are among the cognoscenti. There’s no down side.
To convince your reader, you must first interest them. And to interest them, you must describe the way things appear to be – and then pull the rug out from under them. Saying the counter-intuitive makes you seem original; being original makes you seem interesting; and being interesting makes you seem credible, regardless of your message.
