The Importance of Creating Curiosity

A writer’s main goal is clear communication. Even if you have the most excellent point in the world, if you can’t communicate it clearly, no one will understand it.

Writers will intentionally leave some things bare, so that it can be clearly understood the first time, and strikes up a healthy desire to do further research. Belaboring a point doesn’t provoke deep interest with the average uninterested target.

Promotional writing is a good example of this. An advertisement is not supposed to be a long explanation of every facet and value of a product. The potential buyer doesn’t want to know everything about the product in the ‘information collection’ phase. One of the most enticing pieces of product advertisement for the consumer is the option to do his or her own research. An advertisement is simply the enticement to learn more, the invitation to be curious.

If you bore your audience with details, their curiosity has nothing to latch onto. Over-explanation is the death of wonder, and the birth of boredom. And a bored audience doesn’t buy your project (or support your kickstarter, or subscribe to your magazine), they look for something else that better entertains them (or interests them, or validates them, or just isn’t boring).

It isn’t always easy to write clearly and provide adequate information while still provoking interest and curiosity, but if writing weren’t a challenge, there would be no satisfaction in the victory of success.

Four Tricks for Better Script Writing

Script writing focuses on both hearing and seeing. While writing the script, you need to be hearing what it will sound like as the spoken word, and seeing how the script will interact with the actors for final production. To write a good script, your mind must to become a video reel with a quick pause and rewind button; playing the scenes as they come, stopping often to fix or replay.

Four tips to writing a good script:

• Know exactly what you’re trying to say. If you’re writing a script for a promotional video, know the content you’re trying to advertise before you begin. If you’re writing script for a fictional film, know where you want to end up—then you’ll be able to get there.
• Look at what other people are doing. If you’re trying to sell a certain flavor of juice box, look at other juice box ads; not to copy them, but to understand the lingo that works (or doesn’t work).
• Edit relentlessly. Read it out loud with your voice. Read it out loud in your head. Read it out loud with your best friend, or your spouse, or the old lady sitting next to you on the bus. The more you hear it, the more you’ll hear what needs to go.
• Learn to write dialogue well. Script writing is dialogue heavy—knowing how to write dialogue well makes the flow of the script much smoother.

It’s a thrill to watch people saying words you put in their mouths; not deviously, of course.