There's an art to keeping your audience interested - Ian McMillan

I’ve metaphorically left the room and gone outside and sat in the garden. What’s that noise I can hear? Is it birdsong? No, it’s the melodious but distant voice of the person who is telling me really interesting things and I really should be concentrating but somehow I can’t. I can hear the music but not the lyrics. I can hear a kind of Yada Yada Yada or the distant echo of some sound units that may once have been words.

A perfect representation of this listening/not listening state of mind used to occur in the old animations of the Peanuts cartoons where the schoolteacher would be telling the kids off and all they would be able to hear was the sound of a muted brass instrument.

If I’m guilty myself of just nodding at what I think are the right moments in the conversation because I’m not listening properly then I know that the opposite is also true and that people pretend they’re listening to me when I can tell that they’re really not.

So then, my advice to the storyteller and, by extension, to the writer of poetry of fiction or drama, is to drop an unexpected word in like a linguistic firework.

That’ll wake them up! For example, say you’re halfway through an epic rendition of a tale about missing a train because you were standing on the wrong platform but, rather than droning on about the steps you had to climb up, you say: “And then I had to run up three flights of swallows!” Of course steps aren’t swallows and of course “a flight of swallows” is a beautiful phrase but not if you’re talking about a flight of stairs. None of that matters of course because you’ve got their attention.

So this is universal advice to all writers: stick in an unusual word every now and then just to make sure you’ve got the reader’s umbrella, I mean the reader’s attention. The word doesn’t have to be out of context like that umbrella was; you could just think of a new way to describe something. Rather than a blanket of cloud, you could have a headscarf of cloud or an undercoat of cloud.

That’s what writers do, after all, they refresh the language. Or they should, leaving it fresh and bright for the next person. Right then, that’s me done. I’ll just go and put the tortoise on and make a cup of tea.