If you haven’t heard of Malcolm Gladwell or read anything he has written, I’ll borrow a quote from The News & Observer to help you relate with him, his work and the impact he leaves behind with his writing.
If there’s such a thing as a storytelling gene, Gladwell has some super-evolved DNA mutation.He might be the best storyteller on the planet.
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five nonfiction books and was recognised by Time Magazine in 2005 as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. All his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he continues to be a writer for the New York Times, where he has worked since 1996.
In his Masterclass, Gladwell covers almost everything there is for writers to know and learn. From the importance of having a catchy title for your story to how he identifies a story and develops it. The beauty of his class is that he gives details behind his thought process on every point that he talks about and illustrates them with perfect examples which adds the same value to you if you are beginning to write or you are someone who has been writing for a quite some time or simply an avid reader of his work.
There is something in it for everybody.
Lessons from his Masterclass that can have immense in understanding the craft of writing from a reader and writer’s point of view.
A Title is the ultimate attention grabber
“You have to spend as much time thinking about titles as you do about content.”
Malcolm talks about why he spends a great deal of time thinking about the title of his work. He says that the titles are the ads for your work. It is a split second that you have at your disposal to catch the reader’s attention, so make it count. Let’s take the example of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.
Malcolm highlights how the contradiction in this title itself grabs your attention. Having two contradictory words in a combination will make some part of you react. Thus, he concludes that one must aim for words with emotional weights in their titles to draw the reader towards you.
The Research
“Go down roads that don’t lead anywhere immediately.”
The first step towards finding a great story is to follow what makes you curious. He recommends that you take a trip into the intellectual rabbit holes to help you find topics that call to you. These rabbit holes could be long walks or spending time all by yourself.
Try and be at peace at that moment to help you think productively. The most important point to note is to be patient with your ideas. Try not to work on ideas that you only find useful today. Explore the ideas and set them aside for another day. Everything you think of does not need to be used up at that point of time.
The Ending of a story
“All good stories have one thing in common. They have an ending that transports you somewhere.”
When Malcolm says, all good stories must have an ending that transports you somewhere he is not referring to a happy or a sad ending. Or even one which is satisfying to the reader. He means that the reader should feel like she/he is in a different place than they were when they arrived.
An example of a story with a good ending that Malcolm shares were when he wrote an article on concussions in the NFL. While reporting this piece, he came in contact with the Senior Vice President of Health & Safety. Throughout the reporting, he noticed the Vice President was always addressed by his name and not “doctor”. Malcolm assumed that a person of his title would be a doctor. On doing some research, he found out that this person was not a doctor but an antitrust lawyer. An antitrust lawyer was addressing the health crisis in the NFL.
Structure the narrative like an imperfect puzzle
Malcolm talks about structuring your work like an imperfect puzzle and not like a perfect one. The reason for this rationale is that a story whose pieces fit together neatly will fail to captivate the reader. The best kinds of arguments are the ones that are imperfect because the perfect argument is too obvious.
He once experienced this notion with a criminologist he was talking with about juvenile delinquents in England who had run away in the 1970s. The study was focused on how personality affects decisions more than the external environment around people. Just as the criminologist was about to complete this study of why these kids run away, he got pulled into a different project. Malcolm never got the answer to that question, and it has kept him wondering until now about the outcome. He says he never forgot the piece because it is a puzzle he is still trying to solve.
Describing your characters
“If you just walked through my apartment without me there and just described what you saw, you would have an incredibly effective portrait of me.”
One of the most effective ways to describe a character in an essay is by describing the physical world the person inhabits. If you could choose to describe your sibling by the way your sibling looks or by what your sibling keeps in the bedroom, choose the bedroom.
He further adds the skill of describing your characters comes with practice. Work towards harnessing this skill the same way an athlete works towards getting better. Athletes spend more time practising than playing, and so should you if you want to describe characters better.
Hold the readers’ attention
“The best thing about telling someone a story is their reaction to it”.
As a writer, your job is to get people to keep moving with your story. To do that you must first maintain your own sense of interest in what you write. The more number of opportunities you provide for your readers to react within a story, the better is your chance to leaving an imprint in their memory of what they have read. The two tools that you can use to hold the attention is suspense and surprise. With the former, you are playing with the readers’ expectations of the time. They know information is coming, they don’t know when. With the latter, you tell your reader something, and they had no idea it was coming.
Structuring your language
When Malcolm’s writing was passed through a reader grade analysis, he was happy to know that he was writing at an eighth and ninth grade level. He believes that the principles of public speaking also apply to writing. The way your audience responds to you when you speak tells you everything you need to know about how they will respond to your story when it is written down. He adds, when your writing is read out loud, it takes a new dimension. You literally hear its musicality. You can hear when you need to pause, when a pause is awkward and when you need to speed up.
Use of jargon
To understand how you can use jargons to your advantage, you must first understand its purpose. The nature of jargon, its meanings and derivations can tell you so much about the world you are writing about. So do not be afraid to use jargons. To highlight the power of the jargon, Malcolm gives an example of an article he wrote for a company testing a new drug for melanoma.
In the world of drug testing, the Kaplan-Meier curve is one of the most important graphs for understanding the effectiveness of a new drug. As he had explained this jargon at the beginning of the article, he was able to use it to hold the readers’ attention in wonder right until the end where he gives the results of this curve. A jargon born out of two people’s names is what helped people transport themselves in another world. That he says is the power of Jargon.
Self reflect on your writing abilities
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is setting realistic goals and expectations. Maybe even set the bar lower than you’d expect from yourself to avoid the blow of rejection, criticism and failure.
He says that you must let go of perfectionism as you will never be perfect. Tell yourself that the first couple of drafts are going to be below par and not as you expected. Aim for ‘good enough’ for now and progress from there. Most importantly trust your process and keep writing. If you suffer a writer’s block, try and get past that and keep writing as not writing is not going to help you move forward.