Whatever You're Writing, Make It A Vector

If you want a reader to read to the end, they’ve got to have somewhere to go.

In every middle schooler’s life there comes the momentous day when you learn that speed and velocity are not the same thing. I mean, they’re roughly the same thing: speed is how fast something goes, distance covered divided by time. A velocity is also that, but with the addition of a direction. 75 centimeters a minutes is a speed, 75 centimeters a minute due north is a velocity. 

That was the same day we learned the distinction between distance and displacement. Distance is easy, that’s how far something travels—15.8 yards, for examples. But displacement, like velocity is to speed, is distance with extra rules—displacement is how far you end up from the spot where you started. Walk 15.8 yards to the west and then ten yards to the east, and your total distance may be 25.8 yards, but your displacement is only 5.8 yards. 

It seemed especially hurtful when our teacher told us that, if we were running a mile in gym class and ended right where we started, our total displacement would be zero. It was a revelation that only seemed to amplify the crime against decency that the run-a-mile test already was, the insult added to injury. 

After running a mile, you want to feel like you ran a mile—and, while you did, having a displacement of zero feels pretty awful. Congratulations, all that effort amounted to nothing!

Kaput: Said the historians doing the Writing with Andrew excavation

Hey now—but, of course, I’m not Physics with Andrew, I’m Writing with Andrew, so you might be wondering what this interdisciplinary opener is all about. It’s not just a dangerous game of chicken with viewer retention during the first 30 seconds of the video—it’s also something I think about a lot when I’m reviewing other writers’ work. 

See, not only does it feel bad to run four laps and end up with a displacement of zero—it also feels bad to read a whole story or poem or research paper that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, that just kind of exists without having a clear sense of direction. So, where vectors have magnitude and direction—they go somewhere—they can be a handy way to think about what our readers want from our work. They want direction, and they want displacement, a sense that they ended up somewhere different from where they started. 

And yet, it’s really common to see writing that doesn’t offer that experience. I remember being in college and feeling like I should watch TED Talks because it seemed like a thing that smart people did and I wanted to be a smart person. But, as I watched more and more of them, I got increasingly frustrated with them: they all had interesting titles, but they generally seemed not to actually say anything useful. 

So I had a thought the other day. It was an interesting thought. And, as I thought it—I was pulling weeds in my garden, by the way, while my cat and daughters were napping inside—I thought, I should share this thought. So I started a blog and started sharing my thought. At its peak, my thought had been shared with 15 million readers. It even got to the point that I was more interested in the readers than in the thought. And this might be hard to believe, but I decided to shut down the blog, spend more time in the garden with my daughters and cat, which I could do because my thought had made me a millionaire by then. And you might be wondering, what can I do with that thought? What’s the takeaway for me? And that is exactly the right question to ask. Thank you.

My caricature of a TED Talk is a piece that takes us, ultimately, nowhere, and that makes it a really unsatisfying thing to listen to. Once I had decided that TED Talks weren’t going to actually take me anywhere, I gave up on them and, consequently, on being smart. 

But it’s not just parodies of TED Talks that are worthless. What happens when the hero in your fantasy epic goes on a grand journey and then comes home and resumes the life they lived before they left? What happens when your write a poem that only describes a hyacinth bouquet? What happens if you write a research paper that only repeats what your sources say? 

Let’s imagine a piece of writing happening on a plane. Since this is physics, we’ll also pretend there is no friction or gravity and that your story is a point particle. As my high school physics teacher once said, we teach things that aren’t true because you’re not capable of handling things that are true. 

Here’s your fantasy epic—look at all these twists and turns in the story, all the exciting surprises and stunning reversals of fortune. Then your hero defeats the evil wizard and returns home. 

Or here’s a research paper that covers a lot of sources but really only does that. By the end, we know exactly as much as we would have known if we had read those sources. 

If you were to draw a vector from the starting and ending point, how far would you have moved from your starting point? And it what direction. 

Obviously, nowhere. There isn’t a vector. Displacement is zero, velocity is zero, reader satisfaction is zero. 

But look at something like Kay Ryan’s poem “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard,” which starts out making you think that life should be easier—but then it hops and steps from one object to another that should be worn down in the house of someone who has passed: the speaker wants to see ruts worn in the floor, doorknobs worn down to nothing, some trace that the person they loved left behind. When the poem reasserts that things shouldn’t be so hard, it’s a declaration with a wholly transformed meaning. We did not end where we started.

And we can draw a vector from our starting and ending points—magnitude and direction. It’s a short poem, but it takes us somewhere—we live through the series of images and gain an insight we didn’t have before. 

Or take a rhetorical analysis paper that doesn’t just tell us that a presidential speech has logos but also shows how politicians can use logos to mislead the public. This paper doesn’t just tell us what’s there, it also draws a new conclusions—it takes us somewhere different from where it started. It’s a vector. 

And I think this is important for a couple of reasons. One, it’s a solid reminder that a piece of writing that doesn’t go anywhere, that ends up exactly where it started out, is going to be a disappointing piece of writing. And, two, pick your genre, and you’re bound to find all kinds of people proposing all kinds of frameworks and structures and templates for writing a successful play or poem or literature review. And those can be helpful tools, but they can make you feel like your job is much harder, or at least much more complex, than it really is. Sure, you can do the hero’s journey or the Save the cat or whatever else—but simplify your life and your process by just remembering that your writing has to go somewhere. The exact path matters less than the fact that it takes the reader somewhere new. 

And there’s all kinds of ways to do it, usually depending on what you’re writing. 

So, for example, readers of fiction often want to see not only that the conflict driving the plot gets resolved but also that the main characters have changed somehow in the process. So the plot and characters are vectors—they should end up somewhere different from where they started out. 

Spend time around poetry people, and you’ll often hear them talk about a poem’s “emotional arc,” which we could translate to vector. Readers of poetry want the poem to take them to a new emotional state. 

And I’ve heard essayists talk about arcs, too, though in a broader sense. What’s the arc of the piece? Sure, you could just tell us a story from your childhood, but you could also take us somewhere new by reflecting on that experience and drawing new insights out of that commentary. Don’t just tell us what happened, transform the experience as you write about it—show us why it matters. Then we’re not just sharing stories but also thinking about how we could draw meaning from our own experiences—we’re zipping along a vector. 

Whatever you’re writing, it has to have direction—it has to go somewhere. But you also want it to go somewhere satisfying, and that’s where we can talk about that vector’s magnitude. Yes, your writing has to go somewhere, but how far does it have to go? 

Kaput: The farther away from me, the better, I think.

That’s one way to think about it, bud, but I think it’s more helpful to think about the magnitude of your vector scaling with the scope of your project. 

And length is a quick and easy place to start. If I’m going to get on a bus for eight hours, I’d better end up farther away than the next block over. Similarly, if I’m going to read a three-hundred page novel, the main character had better change more than just now they wear more colorful socks on weekends. 

Shorter, more focused pieces generally work better with smaller vectors. The amount of time that long or complex pieces require of readers should probably repay the reader’s investment with a bigger sense of displacement. 

But the truer answer is that you’ll want to scale your vector with the stakes of the piece. What kind of problem is the piece trying to solve? 

Write an argument paper that promises it’s going to solve the whole economy, and readers are going to be disappointed if your vector only takes them as far as solving part of the economy. 

Write a piece of flash fiction about someone learning to tie a bow tie and it’s going be pretty disorienting of it ends with them suddenly on Mars leading a protest against the MarsCorp’s destruction of the Great Martian Rainforest.

Kaput: Ugh, that’s the exact kind of thing MarsCorp would do. I would have try really hard to remember the last time KaputCo destroyed a forest…

That’s certainly a way to phrase that, isn’t it? Anyway, the point is that you can set up your reader’s expectations for the magnitude of displacement that they’re going to experience. Open with a sweeping prologue about the conflict that has raged for generations, and they’re probably going to expect an equally impressive journey from start to finish. Do the literary fiction thing where you zoom in on a young man and his disapproving father, and they might be totally satisfied with the father finally saying “Good job,” that’s a teeny tiny vector, but it can be fully meaningful in the right context. 

And we could go through a hundred more examples, but the short answer is that the right choice always depends on the project, the context, and your goals for it all. Luckily, we’ve got videos that can help you to consider the central driving force of your project and the overall structure, which will be linked in the end screen. Writing can feel like an impossibly complex task sometimes, but keeping a few elemental things in mind can help to simplify things and enable you to make real progress with the confidence that your piece will work out. 

And, hopefully, that’s vector enough for you to feel like you’ve gotten your

Kaput: I’ve got it!

Wait, where…?

Kaput: It’s Mars, bud, get over it. I want to show you something, but it’s going to be a long hike.

Well, you warped us here, couldn’t you just…

Kaput: Don’t get greedy. Of course I could, but watching you hike in will be much more fun for me.

Oh, for you… Well, it looks like there’s a long dusty road ahead for us, so, I’ll just thank you for joining us today, and I guess we’ll be reporting to you live from somewhere on Mars next week. 

Kaput: Toodles!