The novelist is distracted; he writes for someone and that someone is sure to be distracted.1
Saul Bellow wrote this line nearly 60 years ago and I can’t stop reading it. Distraction. Every day I see a new article about how we are distracted by the Internet, by TV on demand, by our constantly beckoning smartphones and smart devices. I’m guilty of this and I hazard a guess that you are too.
I work as a content strategist. Every day I think about how we can get our message across to our readers. How do we cut through the distractions? How do we convince the reader to put aside what they are doing and pay attention to our message? And, furthermore, how do we ensure that our message is worth putting aside distractions for?
Saul had some advice for writers:
But distraction is not necessarily inimical to the imagination. Novels are floated upon distraction. They begin in the midst of it.2
It’s not only novels that float upon distraction. It’s websites too. Often our readers discover our content through distraction, through roaming searches or a series of links. They may not know anything about your site or your content, how they got there, or how to get back.
Once they come, however, you must put an end to the distraction.
Distractions give force to a work of art by their resolution, and the novelist works more deeply with distractions than any other kind of artist. Many events fall upon us, assail us with claims on our time and our judgment; waves of disintegrative details wash over us and threaten to wear away all sense of order and proportion.3
It’s so easy to close the tab or click away. Your content must produce an order that pleases—and calms—your audience. It must be proportionate to their desires, and it should signal its order and proportion to the reader.
If you do this correctly, your readers may return to your site just as they would return to a well-written novel.
1 Saul Bellow, “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” in There is Simply Too Much to Think About: collected nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2015), 77.
2 Ibid., 79.
3 Ibid., 80.