picture out of focusTo hold your audience’s attention, keep your writing focused, writes guest blogger Joanne Lozar Glenn in today’s post.

Focus: One Key to Writing Text that Readers Want to Read

Think of the last fuzzy photograph you took. Did you keep it? Or did you throw it away? I’m betting you threw it away, probably because the fuzziness made it hard to know what the photo was really about.

There’s a metaphor here. Readers don’t get into fuzzy writing either.
Bonnie Hearn Focus your Writing
Bonnie Hearn’s written a classic on this topic: Focus Your Writing. Her key message: Decide if you want your piece to entertain, explain, instruct, or inform. Then you can shape the parts to meet the overall goal.

Though Hearn was talking about journalism, her advice also makes sense for life stories. How do you apply it?

Here’s a technique some successful writers use:  they write a sentence about what they want the story to do—for example, to let people experience how it felt to be nineteen in a foreign country, by myself, not knowing the language, with $20 in my pocket—then they tape this sentence to their computer screen (or to the draft when they’re ready to revise). Everything that goes in the piece must further their purpose. If it doesn’t, then they delete it (or save it for another story).

It may seem harsh (as William Faulkner put it, you “kill your darlings,”) but I’ve seen his advice make a huge difference in creating work that others want to read. How about you? What works when you’re trying to stay on topic? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Filed under: Seniors • Writing

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