How to make your writing more interesting

How to make your writing more interestingHow to make your writing more interestingThe title itself almost made me throw up.Being a good researczu sich, though, I clicked through anyway, hoping to be wrong. I was disappointed.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreYepthere is the suggestion my life was crap.Yepthere is the advice about getting up earlier.Yepthere are the mild adjectives and simple sentences.Yepthere is the implication the author is wildly successful.Yepthere is the ask for an schmelzglas addressYepthere is the vomit.The relentless swill of recycled wisdom in the self-help genre, while worthy of ire itself, is not the topic of this post. After all, self-help in itself is fine. Asking for email addresses is fine. Giving advice is fine.Writing with all the poise and grace of a third-grader, though, is not fine.No matter your topic, be it the urgency of the pension crisis, the excretion of the 7-toed tree frog, or yes, even getting up early in the morning in order to live YOUR BEST LIFE(), there are ways to write which do not compel puny, Y List Celebrities like me to throw their breakfast cereal at the wall.So here we go1 MetaphorA metaphor is when you describe a thing which cannot do or be the thing you are actually claiming it is doing or being. (Calm down, English majors. Thats essentially what it is).The sunrosevs.The sun was golden lava pouring over theground.Of course, the sun wasnt REALLY golden lava, unless your fiction story is off to a horrific start. But itbinnenseemedlike that, though, didnt it? It looked like that. As a matter of fact, your brain thought it actually was.Researchers from Emory Universitydiscovered metaphor spreads beyond the language processing center and into the other sensory areas of the brain.Youve been looking for Jedi mind tricks your whole life. Turns out all you had to do was use metaphor.Instead of bashing bad wr iters, lets cheer on a good one.Dan MooresMy Mom is a Movie Starputs on a clinicMy mom is the epitome of cool. Her eyes could cut ice. She bounces on her toes, all muscle and kinetic potential. In her hand she holds a baton that has been lit on fire at both ends. She holds it as casually as others might grip a tennis racket. The New England night yawns out behindher.Can a night yawn? No. Can a eyeball cut ice? No. It doesnt matter. Wefeelwhat Dan is saying.Make sure you go read that whole post.Then have a good cry.Then lets get into2 PacingPacing is when you slowly lead the reader up a long and winding tunnel. You slip and strain to pull them over boulders, hop across gaps, and squeeze through the tiniest crevices. You show them the marks you followed to reach your destination before finally emerging on the very top of a snowy mountain.Then, you push them off the cliff to their death.Think about when you are in a car. When you go 80 miles an hour for more than 60 seconds, you dont e ven feel it anymore. But when you accelerate from 10 to 100, or 100 to 10, you feelit. Some smart author who I forgot and cant findnow.Pacing is the bedrock of good writing. Take a look at your sentences and paragraphs. Are they the saatkorn length? Do you lull your reader to sleep with long, flowing sentences which seem to never end?Stop it.Then start again later.By the way, youll notice my pacing often includes a line break because Im super dramatic like that. Good pacing works in paragraphs too. Take a look at this example from a book Im reading right nowTy BurrsGods Like UsCary Grant, the studio ordnungsprinzips Perfect Man, privately raged against the Academy for not giving him an Oscar and experimented extensively with LSD. Read between the lines of the existing biographies and the mythic love affair of Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy turns into a problematic tale of alcoholism, enablement, and emotional cruelty. Im pretty sure Tom Hanks picks hisnose.Long sentence. Long senten ce. Short sentence. Easy, right? For bonus points, Ty Burr uses emotional pacing as well.Longserioussentence. Longserioussentence. Shortfunnysentence.Or take this out of context piece fromSunil RajaramansEverybodys Rich But You. What could have been a bland, self-helpy niche article about contentment as an entrepreneur turns into a fascinating read for all.You know what? Who needs an exit? You dont need more money. Money is only going to add stress to your life. Its not like these people are going to be any happier. What would you do with more money? You are so lean already. You get out of the car. You spend $10 on a cup of cat-shit coffee. Your Lyft cost$17.Capital EfficientFor comparison, here is one terrible and boring way to make the same point as above.If you are looking to make more money, perhaps you should start with more expensive daily purchases*. The New York Times did a study that said much coffee costs an average of $6 over a few days** Cut out coffee to save money and feel morerich***.*Telling people what they SHOULD do scares them**Please stop putting studies in your posts because Mr. Benjamin P. Hardy does it***If this were any more on the nose, we wouldnt even be able to see the rest of your face****.****I know that doesnt make much sense but I think you get it now.3 PersonalityWriting like yourself is when you tell yourownstories, share your own insights, and connect yourownpieces of yourownpuzzle with your own experiences and yourownadvice. Read yourownbooks and watch your own movies and do yourownwork and tell us what you learned.(Was that subtle enough?)Check outDervla McTiernansHow I Knew It Was Time to Quit My JobBattle mode. Old habits. I kept my job at the Commission and wrote at night. My husband stayed in his job, too, though he wanted something different. We kept writing down tasks and ticking them off. Every now and again, we would take a breath and look at each other and try to remember if life had always been like this. Hadnt we been fun, once? Hadnt we laughedmore?We had forgotten how to do anything but work, as if work were the solution to every problem.Do you see what just happened? You read someone elses story and learned something about your own life. Wow Turns out you are pretty smart I guess you dont need to be hand-held through self-improvement after all.Surely there are a million and one ways to go about writing better, but these three are my favoritesmetaphor, pacing, and writing like yourself.Happy writingDont Let your Book LaunchFlopGet my Solo Book Launch Checklist, as well as the swipe files for every single email I sent to help me make $5,000 in the first week of my book launchDownload the goods here for the price of an email address.This article first appeared on Medium.