School Ruins Writers
We are waiting for a connecting flight to Calgary, Alberta. Standing in the Montreal airport, in a book and convenience store like you can find in every modern airport. Everything is clean, well organized, and incredibly well lit. Against the background of the white floor, the white walls, and the fluorescent light, the colors of the candy on the cashier’s kiosk catch your eye. Lime green Sourpatch kids, blue Mike and Ike’s. Beyond the cashier’s kiosk, towards the back corner of the store the walls are lined with the bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction. On a table in front of the bestsellers, a bright red hardcover is proudly displayed — Flash Boys — the newest book by Michael Lewis.
Lewis is probably the most popular non-fiction author of the last 15 years. Before Flash Boys, there was The Big Short. Before the Big Short, there was The Blind Side. Before The Blind Side, there was Moneyball. When you write nonfiction and you’ve had three books turned into movies, you know something there is something special about these books.
Large, red, hardcover copies of Flash Boys face out in all directions. There have been news stories about Flash Boys leading up to its release. There was a controversy brewing about Michael Lewis’s take on the world of high-frequency trading.
I picked up a copy and turned it over to see if there was a description on the back. The publisher’s description was on the inside of the book jacket, but on the back were the comments from other authors and popular figures. Flash Boys had one of the best comments I’d ever seen, from Malcolm Gladwell:
“I read Michael Lewis for the same reason I watch Tiger Woods. I’ll never play like that. But it’s good to be reminded what genius looks like.”
When Malcolm Gladwell calls a writer a genius, they must be pretty damn good.
So what is it that makes Michael Lewis so damn good?
He tells great stories.
Good Writing = Good Stories
The first chapter of Moneyball, Lewis’s book on the Oakland A’s that later was turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt, starts with a story about Billy Beane the A’s Manager. The message communicated in the story can be easily summed up in two sentences: Billy Beane was fast as hell as a teenager. He ran a 6.4-second 60-yard dash on grass and was one of the best baseball prospects in the country.
Lewis doesn’t just tell you the facts, though, he tells you a story and creates a scene.
He tells you about the high school field the race happened at:
“San Diego’s Herbert Hoover High… Ted William’s alma mater.”
He tells you about the baseball scouts that were watching:
“Pat Gillick, the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, stands with a stopwatch in the palm of his hand. Clustered around Gillick are five or six more scouts, each with his own stopwatch.”
He tells you about the other baseball prospects that ran alongside Billy Beane that day:
“Darnell Coles. Cecil Espy. Erik Ericsson. Garry Harris. Billy Beane. One of the scouts turns to another and says: I’ll take the three black kids [Coles, Harris, Espy}. They’ll dust the white kids. And Espy will dust everyone, even Coles. Coles is a sprinter who has already signed a football scholarship to play wide receiver at UCLA. That’s how fast Espy is: the scouts are certain that even Coles can’t keep up with him.”
And he tells you about how the race went down:
“Gillick drops his hand. Five born athletes lift up and push off. They’re at full tilt after just a few steps. It’s all over inside of seven seconds. Billy Beane has made all the others look slow. Espy finished second, three full strides behind him.“
These are just a few highlights. Lewis uses 667 words, two and a half pages, to tell the reader how fast Billy Beane was. He creates a vivid scene that engages your imagination. You can picture the bright green grass of the field in San Diego. The overweight scouts chewing Skoal, standing around with stopwatches in their hands, watching five teenaged baseball prospects, three black kids, and two white kids, run 60 yards from the left foul line to center field.
Michael Lewis understands what writing is about in the real world. It is about communicating a message in a way that your audience will understand. For almost all audience’s that means telling an engaging story.
Lewis is wildly successful because he can craft stories that make the average reader excited to learn about high-frequency stock trading, or derivative mortgage finance, or offensive linemen, or baseball statistics.
After decades of writing most of us never learn this lesson.
I learned how to write in an academic setting. Like almost everyone, the place where I did most of my writing for the first 21 years of my life was in school.
In school, we learned the same tool — writing — but we learned how to use it in an entirely different way.
What is academic writing about?
The difference between academic writing and real world writing is the difference between communicating and signaling.
In the real world, the only reason you write is that you are trying to communicate something to an audience. Whether you are writing a note to yourself in the future, or a book about Baseball statistics for the general public. Success is not based on the words you’ve used, or how many paragraphs you have, but simply on whether the audience got the message.
In the real world, we learn that good writing is mostly about good storytelling. In school, we learn that good writing is about grammar, sentence structure, proper citation style, and pleasing a professor.
In the academic world, you have an audience of one professor, or a couple teaching assistants. But for your writing to be considered successful, it doesn’t matter how clearly the professor or teacher understands your point. Your writing is judged according to an abstract set of standards.
This abstract rule book cares deeply about grammar, formatting, and citation style. It creates anxiety, confusion, and sucks the enjoyment out of the act of creating a piece of writing.
In college especially, the pressures on student create legions of young people who hate writing. For some classes, your grade can depend purely on two essays that you are writing. Two essays, worth 50% each make up your entire grade in the class.
Those essays will be judged according to very specific criteria set out by your professor. You have to use the correct citation style, one that is likely different than you have been using for other classes. You have to have the correct number of pages or words. You have to avoid grammatical mistakes like a plaque.
How do you become a better real world writer?
Becoming a good writer, like any skill, is about gaining relevant experience. It is iterative. You write something, find out if people like it, then adjust. It takes feedback. The more the better, the more regular the better.
In college, we are divorced from the iterative method of learning. You have one or two papers to write for your class, and those papers could count for as much as 50% of your grade each. There are incredibly high risks and low rewards for experimentation.
If Michael Lewis had been assigned a paper on Billy Beane’s High School fitness level, and come back with chapter one of Moneyball, he would have failed.
Good writing as a student follows all the rules, and signals to the expert (your teacher or professor) that you have gained sufficient knowledge from the class. That typically means leaving your dissenting views in your head.
Good academic writing is mostly about signaling. Professors use papers as tests. To let you demonstrate your knowledge. Given that you follow the correct grammatical and citation rules, using jargon and using complex language signals to the professor that you know the topic. It also signals to the non-expert, that you know more than they do.
Good writing in the real world involves making ideas as clear as possible. This means avoiding jargon or overly complicated language because it confuses people.
To actually become good at writing we have to unlearn most of the skills we learned from academic writing. We need to change our focus from abstract rules to concrete reality. The only thing that matters is the message your audience is getting.
That means grammatical rules are flexible. Break paragraphs apart and use run on sentences if your audience will understand it. Hell, don’t even use vowels if that is what your audience is about.
Then forget the idea that shorter is always better. Stating facts in the shortest form possible is worthless to you in the real world if you can’t capture attention. Use 667 words to tell a story about how fast Billy Beane is, if that is what will maintain the attention of your audience.
This is why storytelling is so crucial. Storytelling is the best way to capture and hold attention.
Michael Lewis takes a few critical but difficult to grasp insights and tell’s a story about them. He finds characters that are intriguing and takes you to moments of suspense. You get lost in a tale and come out learning about baseball statistics, or mortgage debt swaps, or international debt markets.
Academic writers damn the public for being dumb or indifferent. They publish paper after paper that no one ever reads and complain about the public’s lack of interest. Michael Lewis shows that any topic, no matter how obscure, can capture the public’s imagination so long as you actually learn how to write for the real world.
Originally published at ryanaferguson.com on July 11, 2016.
