I love when movies get sequels after 10, 20, 30 years — like Blade Runner, Wall Street, or Tron. Because by the time they come out, as the soundtrack of the latter suggests, “the game has changed.”
Not just whatever game is played inside the movie, but the way movies are made, how society looks at them, and what’s needed for a story to break through and touch people’s hearts. How will the creators deal with all this?
If they handle it gracefully, they add to their legacy. If not, they run the danger of staining a beautiful tombstone. But while movie-making has sure transformed a lot in the last three decades, I think there’s one game that’s changed even more in the past ten years: writing.
When it comes to words, nothing’s the way it used to be. Newspapers are printed on screens, not paper. Writers don’t write books. Reading is simpler than ever but was never harder to do. So how can we, the creators, keep up?
It’s a hard question and I don’t have even half the answers, but after sitting with it, I noticed I pay close attention to three things in particular when it comes to modern writing.
As a result, here are three rules for writing in the 21st century.
1. Format for curiosity
In a time when humanity creates more data in one year than it has in the 5,000 that came before, people aren’t willing to stare at walls of text anymore. Since information overload has taken over not just one, but every aspect of our lives, this unwillingness is not limited to reading blogs. It’s universal.
We don’t want to comb through cluttered letters in an expensive, long-awaited scientific paper any more than we do in a book we pocketed for $5 at a yard sale. We want the facts. and we want them on a silver platter. We also want you to wow us every time we raise the fancy lid that covers them. We want to feel like Tarzan, swinging from vine to vine in an exhilarating, fast-paced experience that feels like flying. With just enough room to breathe.
Our job as writers is to make it as easy as possible for our readers to grab the next line and hold on to it for dear life.
Thankfully, modern writing tools make it easy for you to encourage our spirit of inquiry. You can not just use images, videos, voice, sound, and other media to spice up your writing, but you can greatly enhance the visual appeal of the words themselves.
Learn to use bolding, italics, underlining, and separators. Develop your own style of using them. Master the art of the paragraph as a breathing guide. Too much white space and the reader feels treated like a six-year-old. Too little and the same thing happens. When does it make sense to use embeds, lists, links, and stand-out quotes? Don’t just use them. Think about these things.
But the most important part of this formatting work must happen long before you ever put a stroke to the keyboard. It’s this: How will you structure your story?
Open any New York Times bestseller on a random page and there’s a high chance you’ll find one, sometimes even two subheads. In non-fiction writing, the chapter is a dying unit. At the very least, it’s getting ever shorter.
That’s why the books of Seth Godin, Ryan Holiday, Mark Manson, and [insert popular contemporary writer here] are neatly tied collections of blog posts. They weave together in a coherent way. They tell a story. They make sense. But they’re blog posts nonetheless. Because it’s the format of modern reading.
If you want to tell the story of Jason Bourne to make a point about identity, don’t tell the story, then make the point. Make the point as you tell the story. Switch back and forth. Let the subsections build on one another. But take us by the hand and switch perspective. Use subheads to pique our interest, not stifle it by giving us the punchline. This brings me to my second point:
When’s the last time you used pique and stifle in one sentence?
2. Use synonyms
A second theme I pay a lot of attention to is keeping people curious by not using the same words over and over again. We do that in everyday life already; there’s no need to continue it on the page. There are 171,476 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, yet 3,000 words cover 95% of all common texts.
I don’t get it. Aren’t synonyms half the fun?
Why would you call a tree a tree three times in a row? Make it ‘a towering figure,’ ‘the king of plants,’ or ‘the silent observer across the street.’ Tell me if it’s an oak, birch, willow, pine, chestnut, or maple. Call it a ‘sapling’ if it’s newborn and a ‘shrub’ if it’s still growing. Or don’t use the word ‘tree’ at all. Describe it using the words ‘roots,’ ‘bark,’ ‘branches,’ and ‘leaves.’
Besides making reading more enjoyable, synonyms are also a powerful tool to change what happens in your reader’s mind. When I use the triplet of facts, data, and information — which creates an entirely different image than ‘data, data, data.’ The former is like a triangle, the concept inside of which might be different for each reader. The latter is a useful way of driving a point home.
Speaking of coming full circle…
3. Condense the hero’s journey
Humans are emotional beings. Our job as writers is to manage the emotions of others to cause change. It’s a strange job, for sure, but also a beautiful one, because it only works if we can tap into the reader’s unconscious expectations and push the right buttons. These expectations have always shifted dramatically from decade to decade and will forever continue to do.
They might not know it and they could not tell us if we asked, but nowadays, people often want to feel multiple things in a single section, maybe even a paragraph. Whether you enjoy riding this rollercoaster of feelings as a reader or creating its scaffolding as a writer is irrelevant; it’s part of what makes writing popular today.
Dressing your work nicely and using an emotional array of words is a good start. The most powerful thing you can do to fulfill your duty as the sweaty guy behind the curtain, however, is to reinvent the rules of storytelling.
Whether you look at the hero’s journey, three-act structure, or Aristotle’s Poetics, these principles don’t change, but they must be updated for modern times. Yet most of us don’t know these rules to begin with. I know I didn’t. I first studied them after three years of consistent writing, only to remember I’d learned much of them in school — but who pays attention there?
Once you rediscover them, however, you can condense these principles into the reading formats that fit into people’s lives today. How can you create a complete story arc in a 7-minute read? Where’s the drama in 3 minutes of non-fiction? What’s the 15-minute equivalent of Don Giovanni in two acts?
If you pay attention to these things, you’ll see how much potential we all have to improve. Sometimes, people who write 3-minute reads haven’t even started the story by the time the post ends, while others add an extra 1,000 words after they’ve finished theirs. If you can tell a story that’s both whole and can live inside modern limitations, you’re bound to break through.
I hope whatever art you create won’t have to wait decades for its sequel. It’s a shame for great stories to go untold. It’s also hard enough to keep up, even without extended breaks. And though we can never reach perfection, I think it’s still worth chasing through the years.
Like a character in a long-awaited sequel said:
“It’s impossible, but it’s also right in front of us all the time.”
— Kevin Flynn
The game has changed.
I say let’s play.