A Study in Salience
This is the most important sentence you’ll read today. And if you’re reading this sentence, the one before it did its job, drawing your attention. Today, we’re going to talk about salience – something the soul craves, possibly more than survival.
Google gives a reasonably good definition of salience, but I will go so far as to say that without salience:
I wouldn’t be able to hold down even a regular job, never mind a high-stakes one.
I wouldn’t be able to finish a novel – reading it or writing it. I certainly couldn’t edit one.
I’d probably be an alcoholic marinating in existential dread instead of a functional adult.
At work, I gave a talk to my colleagues on the importance of salience when communicating to people with power – going beyond BLUF (bottom-line-up-front) to focus on what’s important to your audience, and writing with clarity, directness, and conciseness. But that’s the output of a cognitive process that takes years to build. What’s the input? How do you build within yourself an intuition for what’s important?
Take the bullets above. Communicating with just 3 bullet points is a tactic you’ll hear in every corporate seminar. But how do you know what goes in the bullet points? That’s the real challenge, one that gets even harder in the age of AI and information overload. Think it was hard to focus with social media? That was with just humans vying for your attention. Now, your inbox is probably filled with emails like this, that are clearly written by robots:
If you’re a writer, the situation gets worse. How do you stand out in the slush pile, or grab the attention of an agent? With AI, publishers are backing away butthurt, and agents are sharing why they reject 90% of queries, and what keeps them reading. Quote from the linked article:
Writers, the bar is high. If I show up to an acquisitions meeting with a project I personally love - and which I think has a fantastic concept - and fumble the one-line pitch, or ramble, or somehow miss the point, the whole room’s impression will be the concept is overcomplicated and difficult to convey and therefore that it won’t sell.
It’s not because the whole room is brutal and corporate and doesn’t care - it’s because it is VERY hard to undo a first impression. You can learn from that as a writer.
Your query letter is your first impression. No - the first paragraph of your query letter is your first impression.
Never mind the query letter. Nearly every writer (including me) focuses on what’s important to them to convey, not what’s salient for the reader to know. Yes, they need to know what happens, but more than that, they need to know why what happens matters.
When writing fiction, the following needs to be there on page 1 (really page 0.5 because the chapter starts halfway down):
Who is the protagonist and why should the reader care about them
What the protagonist wants and why it’s imperative that they get it
What stands in the way of them getting it
Nothing I’ve said so far is new, and yet people ramble when they speak, send long emails that go unread, and write fiction that fails to spark to life. Some friends and I were talking about how candidates frequently get rejected in job interviews for being “unstructured in their thinking.” That’s another way of saying, They lack the ability to know what’s salient and communicate it succinctly. When I read Kesia’s Substack post about why agents reject queries, I sensed the same frustration.
The issue isn’t just about writing a great query letter that follows the template – if you can’t figure out what’s salient and what’s not, chances are your book is as rambly as your query letter, and your plot as convoluted as the alleys of Fes.
How do we fix it? I came upon this article recently about how, to declutter your house, you need to declutter your thinking first. These lines hit me hard:
“When we image the brains of chronically disorganized adults, we don’t see laziness. We see a very specific pattern—decision loop paralysis. The brain begins to process a task, becomes overwhelmed evaluating too many options at once, and shuts down. The person walks away. The mess stays. And crucially, the loop gets a little stronger each time.”
I’m not a disorganized adult, but boy do I know some. I’ve struggled to understand them, to empathize with them, to help them in a way that isn’t “fixing” their lives for them, and – to my knowledge – always failed. They want to get ahead at work, but can’t remember what happened in last week’s meeting or speak without rambling. They are full of knowledge, rattling off endless details, but lack insight and incisiveness. They can’t hold down a job or manage a budget, but they’re buying comforting indulgences they can’t afford. Their houses are full of clutter, their phone is always dying, or they’re clutching onto some new self-help book as a life-raft. And they’re struggling to write.
It’s so easy to fall into judgement, instead of recognizing that the lives we lead are not conducive to clarity and focus. Trauma disorganizes the brain, makes you distrust your decisions. Kids are a neutron bomb to any plan. Those with ADHD struggle to hold onto a thought long enough to execute on it (Why did I come into this room again? Why is this scene here?) And that’s not taking into account the constant assault on your attention from ads, games, social media and more.
So how do we break out of it? The answer in the linked article is CBT to retrain the brain, which isn’t simple or quick. It takes time and commitment to build focus, to increase attention-span, and to declutter your thoughts enough to let that flow into how you live your life.
It made me wonder when I started down this path, and how. Yes, I had a lot of privileges, including functional parents, but I also lived through a lot of chaos: two wars and three country moves before I was fifteen. And this was in the Before Days when you didn’t have phones and spreadsheets that helped you get organized.
Then I remembered the following passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (emphasis mine). Watson has just moved in with Holmes, and is trying to understand him by figuring out what he does and doesn’t know:
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
This, my friends, is a commitment to salience. What makes Holmes successful is not only his observational skills. Watson, too, observes, but does not know which of his observations make meaning. This is what Holmes provides, when he says, “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
If following the scarlet thread is what Holmes the character does, so too does the author. In German, Goethe uses the red thread (roter faden) to describe what connects the elements of a story:
The ropes in use in the royal navy, from the largest to the smallest, are so twisted that a red thread runs through them from end to end, which can not be extracted without undoing the whole; and by which the smallest pieces maybe be recognized as belonging to the crown. […] Just so is there drawn through Ottilie’s diary a thread of attachment and affection which connects it all together, and characterizes the whole.
Whether we’re writing an email or a novel, or trying to distill a massively complex issue into three bullet points, or creating space and time to write in the midst of a chaotic house / day, or revising our novel to be more focused, we need the skill to find and follow the red thread, and to hold onto it despite the other claims on our attention. We also need the intuition to recognize what is and isn’t important, especially at a time when generic AI writing is becoming indistinguishable from human prose.
For most of you, my dear readers, this post ends here, but if you’re interested in some very nerdy deconstruction on why A Study in Scarlet is actually an excellent lesson in salience, or why I said the soul craves it more than survival, I’ve started a new (paid) Substack where I intend to get unapologetically geeky. This post continues there behind a paywall — scroll down and click on the big red banner if you’d like more.
Going forward, longer posts focused on writing craft and salience will be posted there, not here. Why a separate blog? Many of you are here only for the weekly ramble on authorlife and wanderlust, which I’ll continue as is. I’ll be using the other blog to dive deeper into purely writerly concerns: craft tips, reading closely, text analysis, story structure and more. It’s at the minimum price tier that Substack will allow, but I’m making it paid because:
I actually care enough about the fracking of our attention as a social issue that I’ll likely spend a lot of time working on those (longer) posts.
If you’re paying for it, you’re more likely to read it and go through the exercise with me, not just leave the email unread.
Hey, I didn’t even need 3 bullet points.