First, Make Me Care

https://gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-care

“Venice built a mar­itime em­pire from a city that couldn’t feed it­self; so who fed it—and why didn’t its en­e­mies sim­ply starve it out?”

This sen­tence cre­ates a ques­tion you want an­swered, and you con­tinue read­ing. But most non­fic­tion in­tro­duc­tions don’t do that. They start with fatal back­ground (“Venice was founded after the fall of the Roman Em­pire…”), and the reader quits.

When writ­ing, first, make the reader care, one way or an­other. Be­cause if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will prob­a­bly not keep read­ing—no mat­ter how good the rest of it is!

A good blog or essay will hook the reader from the start. It can be the title, or the sum­mary, or in­tro­duc­tion, but it needs to con­vince them that their time will be well-spent.

Just de­scrib­ing some­thing cool will work, but you can also pro­voke the reader’s cu­rios­ity. And you can do that by draw­ing their at­ten­tion to a gap in their knowl­edge: de­scrib­ing a prob­lem they don’t know how to solve, or point­ing out an anom­aly. When you have cre­ated an itch, by pro­vok­ing a re­sponse like “huh, I never thought about that”, you can then bring the reader along in an ex­plo­ration of the topic, where you try to un­der­stand it to­gether, in the orig­i­nal Mon­taigne⁠ sense of “essay”. (This “cre­ate a need and re­solve it” scaf­fold­ing is a main­stay of the ⁠“clas­sic style”⁠.)

Let’s con­sider an ex­am­ple: how would one write about one of the most in­ter­est­ing em­pires in his­tory, the mar­itime em­pire of _Venice_⁠?

We could ask an LLM like DeepSeek-v3 to write a bor­ing essay in­tro­duc­tion to the Venet­ian em­pire:

A Con­cise An­a­lyt­i­cal Overview of Foun­da­tional De­vel­op­ments in the Early His­tory of the Venet­ian Polity’s Lo­gis­tics

It is con­sid­ered method­olog­i­cally pru­dent to elu­ci­date the op­er­a­tional prin­ci­ples of a me­dieval mer­can­tile econ­omy by ex­am­in­ing a spe­cific his­tor­i­cal in­stance thereof, namely the early de­vel­op­ment of the Re­pub­lic of Venice⁠, a pre­em­i­nent Ital­ian mar­itime re­pub­lic. (Wikipedia)

This ac­count com­mences, as is con­ven­tion­ally req­ui­site for nar­ra­tives sit­u­ated in the Eu­ro­pean Mid­dle Ages⁠, with the De­cline of the West­ern Roman Em­pire⁠. This de­cline is more ac­cu­rately char­ac­ter­ized as a pro­tracted process rather than a sin­gu­lar event, en­com­pass­ing an ap­prox­i­mate two-century time­frame dur­ing which Roman im­pe­r­ial au­thor­ity un­der­went sub­stan­tial diminu­tion. (Wikipedia) Con­cur­rently, the pe­riod was marked by de­mo­graphic re­lo­ca­tions, often termed the Mi­gra­tion Pe­riod⁠, in­volv­ing var­i­ous Ger­manic and other groups. (Wikipedia) Among these was the in­cur­sion of the Hun­nic leader At­tila⁠, whose ac­tiv­i­ties con­tributed to re­gional in­sta­bil­ity. (Wikipedia)

In this con­text of height­ened socio-political flu­id­ity, cer­tain dis­placed pop­u­la­tions sought ad­van­ta­geous topo­graphic con­di­tions for set­tle­ment. Ac­cord­ing to one widely cir­cu­lated ac­count, in­hab­i­tants from set­tle­ments such as Aquileia⁠ re­lo­cated to a coastal wet­land en­vi­ron­ment in the upper Adri­atic Sea⁠. This en­vi­ron­ment, a la­goon⁠, is de­fined as “a shal­low body of water sep­a­rated from a larger sea by a bar­rier.” (Merriam-Webster) The is­lands within this la­goon were noted for their al­lu­vial com­po­si­tion and his­tor­i­cal lack of ex­ten­sive per­ma­nent habi­ta­tion, fac­tors pre­sum­ably re­lated to hy­dro­ge­o­log­i­cal chal­lenges. (Wikipedia) Ini­tial set­tle­ments on these is­lands were small-scale and pri­mar­ily ori­en­tated to­wards lagoon-based sub­sis­tence ac­tiv­i­ties.

Sub­se­quent to these ori­gins, and fol­low­ing a lengthy in­ter­val of ap­prox­i­mately 8 cen­turies, this po­lit­i­cal en­tity at­tained a po­si­tion of no­table naval and com­mer­cial in­flu­ence within the Mediter­ranean basin. (Wikipedia) Its im­pe­r­ial tra­jec­tory dif­fered from con­ven­tional poli­ties vis-a-vis macro­eco­nomic com­po­si­tion, re­ly­ing lit­tle on agri­cul­ture rather than trade, chal­leng­ing some agronomic-centric ac­counts of nation-state de­vel­op­ment but shed­ding light on other mar­itime power states and geopol­i­tics…

This ma­te­r­ial is ac­cu­rate and im­por­tant con­text; it is cer­tainly true that the Roman Em­pire didn’t fall so much as de­cline slowly, that the stan­dard ac­counts of Venice credit the pro­tec­tion of the la­goon, etc. It is also head­ing in an in­ter­est­ing di­rec­tion, Venet­ian de­pen­dence on im­ports (and rel­e­vant to con­tem­po­rary de­bates over free trade and na­tional se­cu­rity).

The prob­lem is that it has given me no rea­son to care about pos­sess­ing a short un­der­stand­ing of where early Venice came from. “There are lots of cities out there—so what?” No mat­ter what ma­te­r­ial the au­thor might cover after this his­tor­i­cal back­ground in­tro­duc­tion, only the most ded­i­cated read­ers will make it that far.

This is not a prob­lem which can be fixed by copy­edit­ing or spack­ling on bet­ter ci­ta­tions. We could eas­ily have a 2026 LLM de­liver high-quality edit­ing ad­vice to fix this up ex­ten­sively, but it would still be mediocre. It is a struc­tural prob­lem.

To fix this, we have to step back and ask, what is in­ter­est­ing about this topic, in a phrase?

What makes Venice such a re­mark­able em­pire? Is it ran­dom bits of tech­nol­ogy like fancy glass or early print­ing presses? Is it funny memes about the Doge or con­vo­luted elec­toral processes?

No, when we get down to it, what makes Venice so fas­ci­nat­ing is how it was a city afloat, a small city with no land which one could walk through in an hour, and yet it was also a world-spanning sea em­pire.

If we want to hook the reader, pro­voke their cu­rios­ity about this anom­aly. Boil it down to a sin­gle sen­tence: “Venice is in­ter­est­ing be­cause it was an em­pire with no farms.” And there we have our title: “Em­pires With­out Farms”. An ap­par­ent para­dox, which in­trigues the reader, and starts them think­ing about what em­pires they know of but had never thought about their lack of agri­cul­ture, and whether that is true, and if it is, how could it have been true, what did they eat and why didn’t they lose wars if they didn’t grow all their own food…?

To be clickbait-y, we might write some­thing like this:

Warn­ing: Made-Up De­tails

The below is just a quick fic­tional ex­am­ple to il­lus­trate how one could start writ­ing a Venet­ian em­pire essay (I drafted it off the cuff, with zero fact-checking, and mak­ing up every­thing based on hazy rec­ol­lec­tion & guess­ing).

Em­pires With­out Farms: The Case of Venice

Venice ruled half the Mediter­ranean. And yet… it had no farms. How do you have an em­pire with­out farms?

First: what was Venice?

Venice was a city of refugees on stilts, per­pet­u­ally sink­ing into the mud. Venice was the ter­ror of the world. Venice was the fatal net­work of spies⁠ every­where. Venice was the en­crypted se­crets⁠ in a mer­chant’s re­port on ex­change rates (in double-entry⁠), re­port­ing a city’s theft of trade se­crets. Venice was the fleet burn­ing down the city named in that re­port. Venice was the fac­tory⁠—per­haps the first fac­tory—which built those hun­dreds of ships burn­ing down that city. Venice was the se­cret spy­glass those ships steered by. Venice was the cross­roads of the world, where the Je­suit⁠ bent on con­vert­ing the dis­tant pa­gans of Peking might ⁠de­bate the lat­est ce­les­tial me­chan­ics⁠ while Casanova⁠es­caped⁠ the in­fa­mous lead cells⁠ of the In­qui­si­tion⁠. Venice was a moun­tain of gold afloat an ocean of blood, an end­less cycle of mas­quer­ade balls⁠ and cour­te­sans and Doge⁠elec­tions⁠ and learned dis­pu­ta­tions⁠ and In­qui­si­tions. Venice was… not farms.

A Venet­ian ate well: Life could be short and cruel, and the Black Death⁠ could take any in his prime—eat while ye may!

And what might our Venet­ian noble eat, after sign­ing a death war­rant for a mer­chant fool­ish enough to try to vi­o­late a state mo­nop­oly? He might dine on fish from the Adri­atic, after a course of mut­ton from the main­land, washed down with rude red wine from Sicily fla­vored with cur­rants from Cyprus, as he snacked on salted cod from Ul­tima Thule, dressed in his red silks from China.

And yet, where did all those come from? Why did that trib­ute ar­rive, year after year, from every quar­ter of the globe?

…

A reader is now in­ter­ested: how does a marshy lagoon-city come to con­trol all these colonies for so long, with the small crude ships they had? To what ex­tent did it con­trol them, and how many ‘farms’ did Venice have, or need to have? What were the draw­backs com­pared to a ‘nor­mal’ em­pire? Can we com­pare it to the Mon­gols or Huns, who rode their horses on a sea of grass, or to the Athen­ian or British or Amer­i­can em­pires? And so on and so forth.

And hav­ing made a promise to the reader, we of course then keep it by ex­plain­ing how Venice did it; and we can start fill­ing in the de­tails more rig­or­ously and adding ap­pro­pri­ate caveats. (If you raise cu­rios­ity and don’t pay it off, you train read­ers not to trust you.)

But if the reader has been bored, be­cause they know every­thing about Venice they are in­ter­ested in know­ing (as far as they know), they would never make it down here.

So, if you have done some­thing cool, or you have stud­ied some­thing for a long time, or you have thought some­thing in­ter­est­ing, and you are writ­ing it up, and you are at a loss how to get started, try to ex­tract out the key phrase. What do you find your­self rant­ing about to peo­ple re­peat­edly? What does the Wikipedia entry miss that frus­trates you? How would the world be dif­fer­ent if this were not true? If you were telling a friend in a rush why you were ex­cited to write this down, what would you say? Just say that! Just… start with the in­ter­est­ing part first.

When writ­ing, your first job is this:

First, make me care.