{"id":320,"date":"2014-11-03T11:50:12","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T11:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dave0.nfshost.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2014\/11\/03\/write-better-watch-penn-teller-saw-your-cognitive-load-in-half-writing\/"},"modified":"2018-06-20T19:12:05","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T23:12:05","slug":"write-better-watch-penn-teller-saw-your-cognitive-load-in-half-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2014\/11\/write-better-watch-penn-teller-saw-your-cognitive-load-in-half-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Write Better: Watch Penn & Teller Saw Your Cognitive Load in Half! #writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things I think about a lot when I’m writing–but have only written about a little and tangentially<\/a>–is cognitive load: The amount of data we expect readers to juggle and integrate. Readers only have so much cognitive bandwidth; writing that begins to overload this bandwidth is, at best, “challenging”–or, more frequently, simply frustrating and tiresome.<\/p>\n

Managing Someone Else’s Cognitive Load<\/h2>\n

One way (the primary way?) of managing cognitive load is to balance the new\/interesting\/challenging items\/structures you want readers to handle by giving them very easy-to-digest formulaic frameworks. E.g., Do you have a very complicated plot? Then either give them a very constrained set of characters (e.g., very few in number–like in Primer<\/i>–or highly caricatured, like in The Usual Suspects<\/i>). Numerous or very psychologically complex characters? Keep the story running in real-time (Hitchcock’s Rope<\/i>), or confined to a single location (Reservoir Dogs<\/i>), so readers don’t have to track both shifting alliances and shifting time\/place. Very elevated language, or a challenging invented argot (Clockwork Orange<\/i>, looking at you)? Keep the plot straightforward and the structure rigid (Clockwork<\/i> is, at its heart, a very simple morality play broken into three equal-weighted acts, and tracing a downright medieval character trajectory).[*]<\/p>\n

And so on. There’s a million combinations, but it starts with realizing that your reader’s attention is finite and precious, and you need to make hard choices in directing and managing that attention.<\/p>\n

The 45\/45\/10 Formula<\/h2>\n

My fall-back formula for managing cognitive load in a story is to break it into 45\/45\/10 by word count:<\/p>\n