« Selling yourself: "A pain in the ass" | Main | Diana McLain Smith: the author experience »

Creating rewards

Writing is a building process. You assemble a series of passages to bring readers to discover an idea. If you told the idea on the first page, no one would read the rest of the book. So you build on the material around the idea in order to create a bigger impact when the idea reveals itself. Then the reader has more foundation, their own image of the concepts, and more time to think about how they work and make the ideas work for them.

In Matthew Frederick's 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School he talks about "Denial and Reward:"

"Divert users onto an unexpected path to create additional intrigue or even momentary lostness; then reward them with other interesting experiences or other views of their target. This additional "work" will make the journey more interesting, the arrival more rewarding."

Think about this as you build your next book.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on May 7, 2008 8:19 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Selling yourself: "A pain in the ass".

The next post in this blog is Diana McLain Smith: the author experience .

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Powered by
Movable Type 3.33