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For Academic Writers Only: Secrets of Writing for a General Audience
Most writers are aware of the 5 W’s – the “who, what, when, where and why” checklist for journalists. For scholars and scientists, allow me to propose a truncated version of same – why, who and what.
Why
If you are an expert in your field, be it medicine, cosmology, neuroscience, history, psychology, anthropology or any other specialized body of knowledge, and you have decided to write a book for a popular audience about your subject, you should first ask yourself why: Why do you want to do this?
The only really good reason for writing such a book is love. You love your subject, believe in its importance, and want to tell the world about it because of how it might improve our lives, because of its intrinsic beauty, or because it is a revolutionary new approach to…something, or maybe everything.
If, however, you want to write because you hope to join the ranks of bestselling authors like Bessel van der Kolk, Yuval Harari, and Stephen Hawking, stop right there, because you almost certainly won’t. (Prove me wrong and I’ll be delighted for you - and for me, too, if I’m your editor, because we editors love to bask in reflected glory.) If it’s because you hope the book will win a Pulitzer or land you on national television or the front page of the Times Book Review, the odds are not good. If its main purpose is to help you win tenure or get a promotion, that may matter to you, but not to potential readers.
Who
In writing your book, you must keep in mind who your readers will be. Too often academics, even when hoping to reach a general audience, write as if they’re still addressing their colleagues. Their prose is laden with rarefied jargon, overly technical explanations, or “woke” language familiar to only a small subsection of their potential readership and possibly antagonizing to the rest (“Latinx,” for example, being a surefire signal of some awful prose to come). Save such language (if you must) for the specialized journals that speak to your professional peers.
What
What to include in the book is the question you will spend all of your time answering as you write. The temptation will be to stuff everything you know into its pages. When you love your subject, it can be hard to find the “just right” Goldilocks balance between too much and too little, and the tendency is to err towards too much. (Hint: 300,000 words is probably too much.) Beyond the question of quantity, you must also consider how to balance your passion for your subject, in all of its beautiful, complex depths, with your hope to make readers love it, too.
Some general principles:
Get out of the weeds.
If your explanations are hard to follow because they are too complicated and detailed, readers will stop reading. The temptation is mighty, I know. Over a recent coffee with one of my authors, he decried a brilliant, Pulitzer-prize-winning best-selling writer for always “holding back” - not providing enough of the technical science to fully support his ideas - just when he was about to get to the “meat” of his explanation. But knowing how much to hold back is precisely what has made that writer’s books so successful.
Play tug of war with your editor – but not too hard!
When you go too deep with your explanations, your editor may try to pull you back from the brink. The tug of war won’t be deadly the way it was in the Squid Game, but, paradoxically, if you win the contest, your prose may be so deadly that you lose your readers.
Speaking as someone who has played this game with many writers, let me also counsel forgiveness when your editor rewrites something so inaccurately that it’s clear she had no idea what you meant. I’ve made a lot of mistakes like that, but not from sloppiness or laziness; rather it was because I was trying – desperately - to explain for readers what I myself didn’t fully understand. My colleague Peter Ginna, riffing on the description of doctors as “health care providers,” said he thinks of himself as an “ignorance provider” for his writers. Positioning himself as the stand-in for the general reader, he figures if he can’t understand something, readers won’t be able to, either.
In the end the book you write is yours, as is the decision about when to give in, when to resist. I’ve lost some of those tugs of war, and sometimes – not usually, but enough times to have learned some humility - I’ve learned that the author was right, after all.
Tell a good story.
If you can find compelling stories and vignettes to carry the weight of your explanations, your readers will forgive a lot. I was in one of those tugs of war with a writer whose attempt to explain a complicated concept was so impenetrable that in exasperation I just told him to skip the whole thing, which he refused to do. Finally he broke it down in a way I could understand. But even better, he profiled the researcher who had developed the concept, and she proved such an engaging personality, so passionate and persuasive about the importance of her work, that I was won over, as I think readers will be, too.
Read.
To learn the secrets of great storytelling, go to books by the masters. Journalists and popularizers like Bill Bryson, Elizabeth Kolbert, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Michael Pollan can take the complex ideas of various experts and explain them in an entertaining and accessible way. But there are also many scientists and scholars writing about their own ideas whose books are just as engaging – and as successful. Oliver Sacks, Dan Ariely, Hope Jahren, Temple Grandin, Daniel Kahneman, Jane Goodall, Atul Gawande, Lewis Thomas, and Robert Sapolsky belong to this elite group. Let them be your guides.