When I first embarked on the long journey of writing my book on “Depth Sport Psychology,” I reached out to Bob Carney, an old friend and a senior editor at Golf Digest to ask for tips. He said a very simple thing that stuck to my mind like Krazy Glue.

“Make sure you never lose the reader,” he said. “Every paragraph and each sentence within each paragraph must have a captivating enthralling feel to it, so the reader keeps on going, looking for the payoff at the end. It can’t be too complex because that leaves the reader confused and even angry enough to close the book and never pick it up again. And that’s not good. It all must build and build into a crescendo at the end of each chapter. Just keep that flow going throughout the book.”

This terrifyingly sage advice has never left my mind. But I compare that advice to a coach saying to a high jumper, “All you have to do to win the gold medal is to jump up and over that bar you see over there.” So then the high jumper might ask the coach,  “OK, but tell me exactly how high is that bar. It sure looks pretty high.” To which the coach might say, “Oh, it’s about 8 feet and 3 inches.” Oh, OK.

In this age of You Tube and Twitter and TikTok, holding the reader’s attention seems somewhat problematic to me, maybe very problematic.

Now there are plenty of writers to emulate. Tom Wolfe, the man in the white suits, made the Deep South’s love of stock car racing incredibly intriguing. David Foster Wallace made his essay on the Illinois State Fair seem riveting, gripping, hilarious and ominous, all within a 10,000-word long form essay for Harper’s Magazine. That piece was so inspiring that I published a shaggy dog story for Eclectica Magazine which referenced his description of a girl’s baton twirling contest at the fair.

But since I don’t have the talent of a Tom Wolfe or a David Foster Wallace, I am in deep trouble when it comes to holding the reader’s attention. In fact, I was so boring as a kid that my father once shouted out me to “keep my mouth closed until I have something interesting to say!” When I asked him how I would know if what I said was interesting, he  roared, “I’ll tell you if it’s interesting or not!”

So for sure I’m in a quandary about how to hold the reader’s interest as I write the book. And to worsen an already bad situation, the book is being published by Routledge and it’s designed to be a text for “undergraduate and graduate students studying sport psychology” as well as “the educated sports enthusiast.”

I have studied certain literary texts in an effort to learn the “tricks of the trade” so to speak. Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is a great feminist classic about the oppression of women, but what makes it so wonderful is the combination of the painful truth she writes about and how she describes the buildup of the insults and the rejections she endured at Cambridge University in a scenic way. It was almost like you are there with her.

Part of the “tricks” that Thomas Wolfe, DFW and Virginia Woolf use is to describe naturalistic settings and characters which keep the reader going. But then they always offer up really profound, incandescent truths right in the middle of it all which make the reader grateful to have spent a little time with genius. These writers pay off the reader by offering golden nuggets of truth that the reader can chew on and digest.

Like the most memorable line in the film “Forrest Gump” where Forrest was sitting on the bench waiting for the bus and said to the nurse, “Momma always said ‘life is like a box of chocolates’, ya never know what ya gonna get.” That line is so charming because it exudes love and optimism and wonderment, which is why the film is so beloved.

This is the great secret of the great writers. The reader is always on a search for meaning in life and picks up books or newspaper columns with the hope that they will find a morsel of truth or goodness or inspiration to hold onto.

I have less than three weeks until deadline when the editors at Routledge eagerly await the arrival of my interesting manuscript. If you are still with me at the end of this 950-word column I, at least, held your attention and I do hope that I delivered onto you a chewy, tender, tasty, sweet chocolatey morsel of truth. Only you can determine that I guess.

But a book must be about 60,000 words, which is a lot longer than this column, a whole lot longer. How does one hold the reader’s attention for an entire book?

To return to our high jump metaphor, this time the coach says to the high jumper. “OK, kid, all you have to do to win gold is to jump up and over that bar over there.” To which the high jumper might ask exactly how high the bar is and the coach would have to say, “Well, that’s where the trouble lies, my young friend. You see, the bar is set at 650 feet high.” To which the high jumper would have to sadly think, “Boy, if only I was born a grass hopper, a very interesting grasshopper.”