One 2-minute (often unconventional) podcast marketing idea every weekday to help serious podcasters punch above their weight and create a ridiculously profitable show as a small but mighty solopreneur, creator, or marketing team.
✊ Hook Stacking V: Lessons From LOTR on Holding Audience Attention
854 WORDS | READ TIME: 3.2 MIN Hi friends, Onward we march with the next installment of our ongoing Hook Stacking series which now appears sure to stretch into its fourth week... Cest la vie 🤷♂️ For what its worth, I'm enjoying exploring this topic and learning a lot in the process, and I hope you are too. If you've missed the previous installments, you can catch up on them all here. When it comes to holding the attention of an audience, novelists and screenwriters are the masters. A typical movie needs to hold the audience’s attention for 2-3 (generally uninterrupted) hours. A typical novel needs to hold it for 8-10—and achieve the feat without the aid of visual or sonic supplementation, over multiple days or weeks. What’s more, they (and we) are not trying to hold attention in a vacuum. In fact, the world is actively trying to siphon, steal, and redirect our audiences’ attention every waking second of the day, from tens of thousands of different angles. And yet… We regularly sit rapt through long movies. And when the right book comes along, tear through it in one, near-breathless sitting. This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a series of intentional creative decisions about how to present the content in a way that keeps us engaged. And while the medium and format might differ, there's a specific tactic long-form writers use to hold attention that we as podcasters can apply to our episodes as well. I call it Zagging. Let’s look at The Lord of the Rings to see the principle in action.
At any one point in the larger Lord of the Rings story, there are numerous subplots, each made up of a distinct cast of characters. In The Two Towers, a few of these subplots include:
On their own, each of these storylines takes up considerable screen time. And even though the stories themselves are (obviously) fantastic, we as an audience would get bored watching any one of them play out continuously. And so, the editors (and Tolkien in the source material) regularly zag between stories and characters, resetting the timer on our attention clocks in the process. In fact, with 38 scenes dispersed across the film’s 179-minute runtime, that's one attention-re-engaging zag every 4.7 minutes on average. In other words, the editors behind the movie scarcely give us a chance to nod off or get distracted. So how do we apply this concept to podcasting? Much like a story, each topic you explore on your podcast has multiple throughlines, themes, and angles of inquiry. And while we often default to following one continuous line where each question, idea, and topic flows from and builds on the previous ones, it’s not the only way to construct an episode. Mind you, in the hands of a well-prepared master interviewer, the continuous build approach can work. But it’s not easy to pull off. The result of this approach is often dud sections of an episode that end up dragging... but can't be cut due to the context they're setting for the next section of the episode. When it comes to holding attention, a better approach is to zag. To follow one line of questioning before jumping over to something related to the core theme of the episode… but not necessarily following from the previous idea. This works particularly well in interview shows, by using what I think of it as Angular Questioning. David Perell, host of How I Write is a master at this. What I appreciate in particular about David’s style is how he always zags to another topic or angle before the previous one has petered out. This keeps the momentum building throughout the episode, as well as creating tension, keeping both the audience and the guest engaged and on the edge of their seat. Particularly in a made-for-multitasking medium like podcasting, introducing Zags into your episodes makes it easy for listeners whose attention has been briefly interrupted to reengage without feeling like they’ve lost their place entirely. They also provide a convenient way for you as the host to reset the interview when you hit a dead end with either the guest’s energy & engagement, or a specific line of questioning. The key to Zagging effectively is threefold:
This style of interviewing can take some practice to get right, but the benefits are clear: High-energy episodes with multiple hooks throughout every episode to re-engage listeners and keep the momentum driving forward. Which is exactly the type of episodes you need to create if you want to grow.
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Scrappy Podcasting
Jeremy Enns
One 2-minute (often unconventional) podcast marketing idea every weekday to help serious podcasters punch above their weight and create a ridiculously profitable show as a small but mighty solopreneur, creator, or marketing team.
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