Craft Your Content - But you can’t reverse the curse…

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Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

“We are all capable of foolishness, it's just that we have a different area of expertise.” ― Giannis Delimitsos

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A few months ago I was on a coaching call with a writer.

They were struggling to figure out a good thesis point to build their book around.

For years, they’d been sharing (with great success) short morsels of insights and information with their audience, but now they wanted to take it to the next level and share a whole lot of short morsels together in one tasty nonfiction best-seller.

The conversation went a little something like this:

“Well, what do your readers want to know?”

“They want to know everything! I was thinking of doing an ad test with a bunch of different subjects to see which converts best with my target audience.”

“You could always ask them.”

“Maybe I’ll put out 6 short blog content split tests to see which one ranks.”

“Or, you know, have a conversation with your audience.”

“Ach. I guess it’s too hard to figure out.”

😒😒😒

Now I’m alllll for the cool little analytics and marketing tricks and various other ways we have to get sneaky insights into the minds of our readers.

But we get so caught up in what WE know and how WE want to share it and what WE want to say, and we forget that we aren’t the only ones involved in publication.

Now I’m not saying to write totally for your audience, because that is shitty advice that is best left to hack-writers and vanity metric whores.

But I am saying that we are too often caught in a curse of knowledge.

​As Wikipedia breaks it down, the curse of knowledge is “a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that the other individuals have the background knowledge to understand.”

In less boring phrasing, it’s a mental block that happens when we think other people are going to know enough about the things we already know to understand what we’re writing and doing.

An interesting study from Stanford University in 1990 challenged students to tap out the melodies to popular songs, and guess how many of the songs listeners would be able to identify.

Try it at your next family dinner or Thursday night happy hour.

Most tappers overestimate how many songs their listeners will be able to guess, because the songs are so simple that anyone should be able to guess them!

The same thing happens when we are writing.

We get trapped up in our heads, caught in these mind traps and cognitive biases that tell us what we think and know is what everyone who reads our stuff thinks and knows.

If they are following our work, then they must be experts in the field, right?

Or at least have a basic understanding of the same terms and phrases and concepts?

That very well might be the case. But what if it isn’t?

What if your readers are coming to you to get that basic understanding of what we think and know…so that THEY can think and know the same things?

You could try any myriad of tech solutions and random tests to get a potential answer.

But those solutions and tests are pre-built with your curse of knowledge.

They’re based on what you’ve chosen and what you are testing and what you want to know.

What about what they want to know? How will we ever know?

Well, the first thing you could try is meeting folks where they are at, and having a simple conversation.

You’d be amazed how much people will tell you when you just ask them to share.

In Other Reading This Week …

Need more insights and inspiration for your writing and mindset?

• Do you struggle to get ideas out of your head and written into a first draft? This provisional trick from Clive Thompson might help you reframe that.
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• What if storytelling was as simple as figuring out 5 separate steps? We know it isn’t quite that easy, but this framework from comedian David Crabb is still good.
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• Have you been thinking about sending more emails to your readers? Not necessarily marketing, maybe just essays & thoughts. This breakdown from Stew Fortier at Foster shares the findings from 100s of writers about the best newsletter platforms for writers.​
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• Every self-published author's goal is to get their books into as many hands as possible. Author Erica Verrillo explains how you can get your self-published book into libraries.​
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• I hate copywriting. I would rather sit naked on a hot grill than ever have to write a lick of copy for CYC. Alas, there are times I must take up the digital pen and knock out a sales page. Here’s a nice 3-point formula to connect with your audience.​

Weekly Writing Tip …

A quick chance to learn from the masters.
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​“You can achieve anything, but not everything.” ― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

Untranslatable …

Exquisite words from other languages.

Fachidiot [faχʔiˌdi̯oːt] (n.) From German, the word almost literally means “subject idiot.” This is a person who is brilliant in their own area of specialty or expertise, but they are ignorant in areas outside this scope. It comes from a Proto-Germanic word *faką, which was used to describe an enclosed space or compartment. Related Words: brain on a stick, nerd, one-track mind, echo chamber, shortsighted (No synonyms as there truly isn’t an English equivalent I could find!)

This Week’s Writing Prompt …

We often do our thinking when we write.
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Have you ever had to write about something you had very little expertise in? How did you handle it? What was your process? Did you feel good about the outcome?

For the Upcoming Week …

Because we all need a good chuckle to start things off right!
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Who needs pink himalayan when I’ve got tear ducts right here‽

Till next time!

PS — You made it down here now love me! If you got this far, hit reply & let me know … what’s a topic you absolutely love and could write for hours about?