Big Idea Company | Big Ideas for Marketing Success

by Ryan Faist

Big Idea Company

I haven’t wanted to do this… but you’ve pushed me too far. I’m talking to a certain group of writers who have somehow advanced their troops to the frontline of American media. Well, I’m here to tell you that this is as far as you go.  

For you innocent civilians reading this, I will explain. My enemy is any writer who inflates their prose with sensationalism. That means hype. Sensationalism is when a writer takes a banal experience, like walking down the street or brushing your teeth, and turns it into some kind of melodramatic or extraordinary experience. It’s what my father would refer to as B.S.

To make sure you understand why I’m about to pick a fight, I’m going to get a little technical. First off, you have to realize why my enemies want to sensationalize their writing. It has to do with creating conflict, or tension. You see, in any piece of prose there are two types of conflict: macro-tension and micro-tension. Macro-tension is the major conflict in the article or story. In a murder mystery, it’s the “whodunit?” Micro-tension is a series of minor conflicts that help advance the story, but aren’t necessarily related to the major conflict. For example, in a murder mystery, micro-tension may be when the protagonist runs out of gas on the highway or when the phone rings and nobody’s there. We want to know what happens, so we keep watching… or reading. That’s micro-tension.

Sensationalism, on the other hand, is a lazy technique that bad writers use to keep you reading when there is no organic tension. For example, instead of running out of gas on the highway, a writer using sensationalism might describe how the highway brought back painful memories of riding to the pumpkin patch with his mother when the hero was a child. It’s creating tension where there is none, and it’s the lowest form of writing.  

I’m not just talking about fiction. Every piece of prose has to have some kind of conflict. I don’t care if you’re writing an article about a new treatment for wrinkles or a press release about an old man who sings the alphabet in Spanish pig-Latin. If you want people to read it, you’ll find the natural trouble – notice I said find and natural.

Too many writers have developed the awful habit of inventing the trouble. That’s sensationalism. Instead of discovering the tragic root of the old man’s peculiar singing habit, the lazy writer might try to invent tension by comparing him with a famous tenor like Mario Lanza, and then alluding to his tragedy of never becoming famous himself. Unless the old man is actually as good as Lanza, and had even a remote chance of becoming a successful tenor (which is doubtful), then the entire comparison was sensationalism: phony tension, a sorry attempt to make the writing interesting. It happens. You’d be surprised at the lengths my enemies will go in order to sensationalize their writing because they’re unable to find the true tension in the story. It’s becoming more and more common every day.

Here’s the point to remember: micro-tension is good, sensationalism is bad. My enemies don’t know the difference. They don’t know that readers can always tell when you’re faking it. If they could just learn to distinguish micro-tension from sensationalism, their writing would instantly comes across as more genuine, and therefore more appealing.  

But they never will. They’ll keep writing their B.S. until someone stops them. So allow me.

Those of you guilty of this literary travesty know who you are. But your fun and games are over. Consider this post both a declaration of war and a first offense. So round up your army and meet me at the frontline. We shall see whose pen is mightiest.