This column will change your life: how to think about writing

What I'm really thinking: writing
'An awful lot of people seem to think they know the secret to writing well.' Illustration: Chris Madden for the Guardian



Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? "When you write," Pinker says, "you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing."


This isn't a "rule for writers"; it's a perspective shift. It's also an answer to an old question: should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is "for an audience". But not to impress them. The idea is to help them discern something you know they'd be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place. Happily, this also makes writing easier. "We never feel any difficulty when we are pointing out something directly perceptible to somebody next to us," Turner and Thomas say. "We are built for this." Understood this way, writing isn't a performance, a confrontation or a matter of ramming information into someone else's brain. It's the writer and reader, side by side, scanning the landscape. The reader wants to see; your job is to do the pointing.

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