November 10th 2018

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​Lists, listicles, whatever you want to call them, seem to be all the rage these days. Whether it is the short attention span or time devoted to the reading of today’s readers or Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that media is becoming the message, with online discourse dictating how and what we read, makes no difference. The fact remains that lists and listicles dominate, and writers have to cope with that as something that will also dictate their writing.
So, if you want to put it in musical terms, whether you prefer rock and you would favour The Killers and their “My Lists” or country, and Toby Keith’s song of the same name, as a writer you would still have to deal with a fact that listicles will be something you’d be requested to write more often than not.
Now, you might be of the opinion that it turns your writing into consumer-ready shopping lists, that it puts constraints on your imagination and style and curtails any free-form writing. But then, who says that you have to limit yourself to writing lists. It is just a fact that they can support your ‘other’ writing, that it in most cases cannot do.
Still, there remains a question whether there is something else to be gained in writing lists besides the financial backing all writers need. As could be expected, there certainly is, besides the fact that any writing is better than no writing at all.
You can approach writing listicles as if you are writing pieces of ‘flash non-fiction’ grouped together. That would mean that you have to be quite succinct, both in your thinking and writing process, concentrating your thought process to come up with as much essence in as least number of words and sentences as possible.
In many ways, that purifies both your thinking processes and your writing of anything you might do without. Applied to your ‘ordinary’ writing it will most probably make it clearer and easier to read and understand. And that is not only for your readers' sake — it will clearly show you whether your ideas have been translated into writing the way they should be.

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